I wonder what it was like in 1963? Was it already a ghost town? Thanks for the photos. L.F. is sure off the beaten trail.
Jim from Findingbrokeback.com has come across two photos of what Lightning Flat looked like back in the day.
The town, he learned, was settled after the first World War and had a newspaper in the 1920s.
Here is the Newspaper office and the Dance Hall:
Makes me understand Ennis' fears even more. I mean, we're now almost a century further in time than 1922, but Ennis and Jack in the sixties were only 40 years apart from a local newspaper reporting stuff like the above (the real quotes, not my made up one). I doubt such reports were still common in the sixties, but neighbours in small communities probably still knew too many details like who visited, who married, and so on. Maybe even do today.
I suspect to the contrary that they were, in small-town newspapers in the U.S., anyway. My mother (d. 1995) for many years subscribed to the newspaper that was published in her own small home town. I used to skim through it when it arrived in the mail. I sort of lost track of the paper after I moved to Philadelphia (1986), but certainly well on through the 1970s at least, the West Schuylkill Herald, as the paper was called, had a "social column" that was all "news" of this nature--who visited whom, what former residents were back from out of state, all that sort of stuff. And of course even today, even the mighty New York Times still publishes wedding announcements. ;D
My local paper used to carry those. I can go back in the microfilm and see what my parents and their siblings were up to in the 1930s, primary visiting and socializing. They used to break it down by each little community and the black people had their own "colored news" section.