A final headline for veteran newsman C.A. Moore of Bates County, Mo.

A true newspaperman can tell when a story is about to end.

“Don’t you think we need to talk?” C.A. Moore said to his wife just weeks ago from his hospital bed.

At age 83, thin and diminutive at less than 51/2 feet tall, Clark A. Moore on this day was still as alert as a quotation mark, even if his shoulders had started to curve as much with age. For nearly 70 years, he’d known no other job than newspapering, tossing Bates County’s dailies as a boy.

After high school, he became a typesetter, a photographer, a writer. When, 30 years ago, the late publisher Jim Peters decided to start a newspaper alongside his successful all-advertising penny shopper, he went to his friend C.A. and handed him the keys and editorial control.

For three decades, with his camera draped always around his neck, C.A. was the sole and omnipresent reporter, the sole editor, the sole photographer and even a page designer of The News-Xpress of Butler. Sixteen pages or more of copy is published every week, and nearly every comma had clacked from C.A.’s keyboard.

In effect, The News-Xpress and C.A. Moore are one.

“What do you want to talk about?” his wife, Ann, 82, asked. They married as kids — him 19, her 18. At Butler High School, he would play piano and sing songs loud enough for her to hear on the other side of the classroom wall.

“What will happen if I don’t survive?” C.A said, because he knew the prognosis.

Pain in his left hip had sent him to a radiologist. The radiologist found an abdominal aneurysm, a blood vessel on the verge of erupting. Even if doctors could contain it, which they did, C.A.’s chances of surviving the surgery and weeks of recovery were no better than 50 percent.

So, as they laughed and cried, C.A. penned his own obituary and funeral plans.

“Nothing long and nothing flowery,” Ann recalled, because that wasn’t C.A.’s style. Humor was. At the end of the plans, he added a note.

“I know that the two of you and others will put all of this together,” he wrote to the funeral director and a co-worker. “Unfortunately, I’ll probably sleep through the whole thing.”

C.A. Moore died Sunday.

He began every morning and ended every night of his working life — which was pretty much every day of his adult life — in the same manner. He would drive around Butler’s square, the wide brick streets where stores and his newspaper office surround the tall oaks that shadow the historic Bates County Courthouse.

Thursday at 2 p.m., at C.A.’s request, he will, for one last time, take a spin around the square as his funeral procession winds from Butler Presbyterian Church to his burial at Oak Hill Cemetery. Hundreds of mourners are expected to attend in a town of about 4,200. C.A.’s favorite big-band music will sound over the square’s loudspeakers.

“I pretty much expect the county to be unofficially closed on Thursday afternoon,” said Greg Mullinax, 33, funeral director and president of the town’s chamber of commerce.

As beloved as Butler and Bates County were to C.A., so he was to this community.

“He’s part of Butler history, I think,” said Don LeNeve, 78, owner of LeNeve’s TV & Appliance.

So dedicated was C.A. to gathering the news here, some 60 miles south of Kansas City, that when it came to choosing a date for the funeral, there was no question in his wife’s mind when it could and could not take place.

“‘We know we can’t have the funeral on Wednesday,’” Paula Schowengerdt, 66, the paper company’s manager, said that Ann Moore told her. “That’s press day.”

Meaning that’s the day, and often the night, when C.A. Moore set the front page photo (the “snapper,” he liked to call it) and story, the biggest news of the week, and put the paper to bed so it could be printed and ready for Friday’s mail.

Like every longtime reporter, he had his crazy stories. Legendary is one from 1988, when C.A. was interviewing Leonard “Buck” Hough, then the self-proclaimed “Walking Tall Sheriff of Bates County.”

A call came in. A crime.

“Hop in!” Hough barked. Off they raced, C.A. crouched on the floorboards of the squad car, on a chase through Butler, with Hough firing his revolver from the window. When he ran out of bullets, he handed the gun to C.A.

“Reload!” he told the reporter.

Camera always ready, C.A. snapped a photograph of the arrest. It shows Hough and a deputy standing, guns drawn, over a cowering person.

C.A. kept that photo tacked on the wall of his office, an old-fashioned, wood-paneled affair that speaks of a newshound’s life and loves.

An old police scanner sits on his cluttered desk. Below is his camera bag. To the right, stacks of front pages are set at his draftsman’s table. Where other reporters might post photos of luminaries (C.A. has a few, of John F. Kennedy and others), he instead has pictures of Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges.

“Editors are Always Write,” says one bumper sticker push-pinned into the wall. Others speak of craft: “Make it Short, Keep it Snappy.” Another is a quote attributed to cartoonist Frank Miller Jr.: “The day you write to please everyone, you no longer are in journalism. You are in show business.”

Yet the story of C.A. Moore, say those who knew him best, is that he was never a muckraker or gotcha journalist out to ensnare or embarrass anyone.

“C.A. always loved the story that shed positive light on our community,” said the current Bates County sheriff, Chad Anderson, 39. “He was always fair.”

Before he died, he was toying with a playful headline about the beleaguered Butler Bears, the high school football team that last year went 10-2 but that this year so far possesses a sad record of one win and nine losses. Instead of focusing on losing, C.A. was playing up the one win: “Bears’ Moxie Pays Off At Sarcoxie.”

“That sounds like him,” said coach Kirk Hannah, 48. “You know, I’ve known him all my life. I went to school here. I played here. When I came back here to be the head coach, he’s always tried to find something good.”

Unless, that is, one brought embarrassment upon oneself — like public officials at a City Council meeting.

The council, by the way, once tried to figure out how many meetings C.A. had attended in his lifetime. Except for a time when he missed a handful of meetings as he twice battled and beat cancer, he had attended every one, twice a month for decades. They lost accurate count somewhere in the hundreds.

At one meeting, a council member and friend blurted out something off-putting, only to find it quoted in the next edition.

“He (C.A.) told him, ‘You said it in open session. Don’t cry on my shoulder,’” Ann Moore said.

Together, C.A. and Ann Moore had three children. Evin Moore, 56, directs the wood shop at the Kansas City Art Institute, and Julie Ann Dye, 46, of Garland, Texas, works in the printer’s ink industry. Their first son, Alan, was 14 when he died of a malignant brain tumor.

Evin and Julie said they were well aware that if they ever did anything wrong in town, their dad would report it.

“I would have heard about it the rest of my life,” Julie said.

Schowengerdt at the Xpress said there is still a prominent businessman in town who, for years, has refused to forgive C.A. Moore for putting his son’s name in the paper regarding a drug arrest.

“He believed you either print it all or you print none of it,” Ann Moore said.

C.A. Moore had a philosophy about those who feared becoming part of the small-town rumor mill based on what was in the paper.

“He said if you don’t print it, the rumors run wild. The best way to quell those rumors is to get the story straight and verified. Then print it. Then it goes away a lot of faster.”

Dedication does have its costs — like the fact that, because news doesn’t stop, C.A. never took his wife or the kids far away on anything approximating a vacation.

“I went on a several night trips with my sister, but he was always afraid he was going to miss something,” Ann Moore said.

At the Xpress, C.A. Moore used to joke with Schowengerdt that he couldn’t take the chance of going away.

“There might be a big train crash,” he would say, “and I don’t want to miss it.”

The crash never came. It didn’t matter. His son knew it was cliche, “ink in his veins,” but said it fit his dad.

Unlike many newspaper people who have a love/hate relationship with their jobs, “his was all love,” Ann said.

C.A. had a saying. “Stay tight,” he would tell others as he left the paper, camera with him. “Stay tight.” Be ready. News is always out there.

“I’ve been asked for years, ‘What are you going to do when something happens to C.A.?” Schowengerdt said. “My response has always been, ‘I don’t know. It will take three people to do his one job.’”

Schowengerdt and others are trying to figure out the future, their own and the paper’s. What they do know is that Friday’s front page story and the “snapper” above the fold will be about C.A.

The black banner headline, “In Memory of C.A. Moore,” will be capped by this: “30 / -30-”

The first number marks the age of the paper. The “-30-” is the notation long used by reporters and old typesetters to signal exactly when a story has come to its end.

This story was originally published November 12, 2014 at 6:58 PM with the headline "A final headline for veteran newsman C.A. Moore of Bates County, Mo.."