The Gulf Intracoastal Waterway winds through Brazoria County, carrying a stream of barges along the Texas coast. In this shot from 1980, two barges cruise side-by-side near the mouth of the San Bernard River. Sweeny is about 20 miles upriver. (Photo by Dave Berry)

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?” – John Wooden

Her name was Bessie and she was our correspondent from Sweeny.

She filled the deep inside columns of our paper with small-town news – gossip from the coffee shop, conversations overheard at the Lions Club meeting, notes from the church bulletin, announcements from the school superintendent, tidbits from last week’s honor’s banquet… chicken dinner news we called it.

If you have visited Sweeny, you are a rare traveler. Today, the message on the Chamber of Commerce website candidly proclaims: “If you’ve driven through town you were certainly lost. If you’ve been here before, you had a good reason.”

Well off the beaten path, the tiny village in western Brazoria County is fairly unknown to most Texans, unless you are from there. When I visited in the mid-1970s, Sweeny was even less established. I remember stopping for a cone at the Dairy Mart and dropping in at the little grocery to use the phone. Today, the city’s population has topped 3,600 -Houston urban sprawl, I suppose. The Dairy Mart is still going strong, but it now competes with Sonic, Subway and a couple of pizza parlors.

Sweeny has its history, dating back to the Austin Colonies, and its charm – tree-lined streets, the lazy flow of the nearby San Bernard River and grassy parks shaded by massive live oak trees dripping with Spanish moss. Locals continue to celebrate “Sweeny Pride Day,” as they have for the past 48 years.

The town even boasts its own “tomb of the unknown,” a grave honoring an unidentified soldier who died in 1918 following World War I. History says a soldier aboard a troop train became sick and disoriented and stepped off onto the platform at Sweeny for some fresh air. After the train pulled out, residents found the man wandering the streets, obviously very ill. A doctor was unable to save him, and he died in Rosie’s Hotel. No one knew his name or where he came from. He was a mystery.

His grave, in the shadow of a large pecan tree in the Sweeny Cemetery, is marked with a stone inscribed, “America’s Unknown Son: An angel to the parents of every missing son, a monument to the wife of every missing husband, a hero to the children of every missing father, a prayer for peace in every American heart.”

For 98 years, amateur local historians sought, in vain, to find his name and track down his family, but the mystery remains unsolved today.

I wish I had known that story in my early days of journalism.

I was the managing editor of the Brazosport Facts on the Texas Gulf Coast, and the purpose of my visit to Sweeny was to meet Bessie, one of our correspondents – those half dozen or so correspondents from small towns such as West Columbia, Jones Creek, Danbury and Sweeny who kept us informed on local comings and goings. We called them “stringers” and paid them by the inch, but not a lot. They kept track of what was published by clipping each story or column and pasting them into one long string. We measured their string of copy and paid them accordingly.

What we got often needed a lot of editing, but we didn’t have enough staff members to cover each of the little towns in our market, and we relied on these correspondents to help capture that local news. Bessie’s “News from Sweeny” came to me in the mail once a week – threads of information, scraps of conversations, comments from the congregations.

Every week without fail, Bessie would tap out her small-town news on an old manual typewriter and ship it off to me in the mail so that we could turn it around for the Sunday paper.

She relayed announcements about the Little League, Kiwanis fish fries, Chamber of Commerce shrimp boils and volunteer fire department pancake suppers. She reported on the new teacher at the elementary school, announced new ministers at the Baptist Church and relayed the results of the Jaycees-Firemen Charity Game.

One memorable day, the envelope held only a note.

“No news today from Sweeny,” it said.

“Everyone is cleaning up after the tornado.”

Dave Berry is the former editor of the Tyler Morning Telegraph. His Focal Point column runs Wednesday’s in theMy Generation section.