There’s a cold wind blowing 2024 across into neverland, and Tom Bredehoft feels like a tumbleweed.

Several months after the lifelong newsman saved one Eastern Colorado newspaper, another weekly for which he’s toiled as chief editor, reporter, photographer and janitor unexpectedly buckled under. 

There was not enough money to keep The Flagler News going. But The Record is rebounding. 

“I saved one paper but then I lost the one that I truly love,” Bredehoft told The Denver Gazette Friday. “It hurts.”

After 113 years, The Flagler News’ send-off publication Thursday wished everyone in the small town just off of Interstate 70 in eastern Colorado a Happy New Year. The announcement of its demise made page 1-A.  

The front-page story was a love letter to the paper he’s run for three decades and named his daughter after. 

“My father died 11 years ago,” he said. “I wrote his obituary and this final story was just as hard.”

It took the Flagler native a week to find the words.

“The Flagler News to cease publication” read the headline, placed humbly underneath a story about the approval of a mill-levy and a line-up photo of high schoolers chosen for the National Honor Society. It is the kind of picture parents snip out and display on the refrigerator. 

“It was too much to overcome” 

Bredehoft decided to fold The Flagler News during a meeting last week with the owner of Stop & Shop Supermarket, who delivered the painful news that it could no longer afford to advertise. 

“I pretty much told him: ‘Tony you know where I’m at. I’ve got to close it’,” said the 62-year-old who named his daughter after E.H. Knowlton, the original publisher and owner of the paper. 

The grocery store brought in a quarter of the rural paper’s income. That final blow came on the heels of another top advertiser, a realtor, who sold her business and pulled her ads. 

“It was too much to overcome,” said Bredehoft, who said that the paper has 650 subscribers, as many as the entire population of the town. 

So the $30-per-year rag which covered the trials and tribulations of the Flagler High School Panthers, weddings, divorces, funerals, City Council decisions, and the occasional high-speed chase on I-70 will merge with The Burlington Record.

Space for Flagler news and photos will be limited. 

Bredehoft’s conscience is still grappling with the fact that he won’t have room for stories about the local 4H club and the pastor’s weekly column. 

For 16 years, Brederhoft was both town mayor and top news guy.

“If we messed up, I told it,” he said. 

His replacement, current Flagler Mayor Randy Fagerlund expressed sorrow at the loss of truly local news.

“It’s a point of history we’ve lost,” he said. “The paper has been around Flagler forever.” 

Fagerlund’s father, Wayne — who started a Wagner’s Bird Seed regional plant in Flagler — once was honored as the paper’s Man of the Year.

The Fagerlund family keeps that issue of The Flagler News in a frame, which will remain on their wall long after Bredehoft has moved on with The Burlington Record. 

Besides yearly accolades, among the notable news stories recorded by the paper in the last century-plus was the 1952 air show disaster. Twenty people died including the pilot when a low-flowing plane crashed into the crowd. Town folk remember one murder — a man who killed his wife while she sat at a picnic table. 

The Flagler News was on the scene 365 days a year. 

There were happier news stories, like state 6-man football championships, family reunions, and who could forget the great land giveaway? In 2017, Flagler offered free pasture to anyone who could start a business on it. 

The newsman admits covering the boring, the persnickety and the sublime in a town of 640 required a thin balancing act between hurt feelings and the public’s right to know. He’s made friends and he’s made enemies. 

“You can’t sugarcoat everything to avoid hurt feelings. You have to tell it the way it is. That’s what we do is we let people know.”