My wife, Deborah, born and bred in a New England city of 100,000, rolls her eyes a little when I talk about those nights.

I worked the 4-to-midnight shift for the Associated Press in Kansas City in the 1980s, when the night shift was young, good with words and disrespectful of everything. There was no internet, no email and no texting, so we talked on the phone all the time.

The Associated Press is a cooperative of "member" news outlets who buy some version of "the wire." In return, they give the AP the news they generate.

Responsible for the eastern half of Kansas and the western half of Missouri, the Kansas City Associated Press bureau is in frequent contact with papers in towns of 5,000, of 1,500, with dailies covering counties where hardly anyone lives.

I called those papers looking for high school football scores, drownings, fires and features.

"You got the Sabetha score?" I'd ask an editor on a three-employee newspaper. "Great. Lemme have it. You got any other scores in the county?"

"We're low on features tonight," I'd say into the phone. "You got anything?"

"We have a guy who built a replica of the county courthouse out of toothpicks," the editor would say. "It took him three years, and he's donating it to the county historical society."

"Send it along," I'd say.

After a couple of years, I knew the first names of newspaper people for a couple hundred miles in any direction, along with radio news people, disc jockeys, high school coaches and sheriffs.

It was the newspaper people I loved most, editors who'd give me their home phone numbers, young reporters making no money, working their first journalism job in a town where the main street was six blocks long, and old reporters who'd been covering that county for decades, driving roads between growing corn or wheat or standing cattle.

"The last time the basketball team went undefeated was 19 years ago," they'd tell you, and you didn't have to check the year.

I moved on to work for newspapers, not small newspapers, but newspapers in cities, doing the same job the reporters on those small papers did but with more murders and no reason to write about the weather unless it slowed the morning commute. No one was raising wheat where I wrote.

I always regarded those small-town reporters as the spinal cord of American journalism, part of a big network of lights glowing in newspaper offices across the country, and I used to think of them when I walked out of a newspaper night shift in a much bigger town.

I'd light my pipe and stand for a moment on the front steps of the paper I worked for and I'd think about the paper in Moberly, Missouri, and the Ellsworth County Independent Reporter in Ellsworth Kansas, all the papers in the small places, all the papers in the square states. It made me feel warm and not alone.

This week, a posse of cops in Marion, Kansas, raided the offices of the Marion County Record, a paper in a town of around 1,900, in a big county where nearly 12,000 people live. Average attendance at a professional football game is more than 69,00 people. Joan Meyer, the 98-year-old co-owner of the Marion County Record, died two days following a police raid on her home. The raids were the result of nothing other than reporting.

On those rare occasions when a teacher has been stupid enough to ask me to speak to a journalism class, I've always asked them the same question:

"If you think reporters aren't important, why do dictators kill us?"

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion, and read features by Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Devil's Elbow: Dancing in the Ashes of America." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

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