2304 articles matching "Hurricane Rita" were found

A day or two after Hurricane Rita surged ashore, when Enterprise staffers who stayed behind to cover the story were tired, bleery-eyed and smelly, fellow Managing Editor Ron Franscell and I had some downtime discussion about all that had happened.
"I wonder how long it will be before we go a day without mentioning Hurricane Rita in the newspaper?" I asked.
Neither one of us had the answer. Neither one of us had ever seen anything like this.
Rita made her first appearance Sept. 19, under the Page 3A headline "Visitors told to flee Florida Keys as Tropical Storm Rita nears."
That was 261 issues ago, and Rita has not failed to make an appearance in some form in any one of them. An archives search informed me that it had 2,304 articles matching "Hurricane Rita."
I got to thinking yesterday about whether our Rita streak had ended somewhere along the way. I started thinking about it when I told a job applicant yesterday, "You're going to hear Hurricane Rita a lot today. For some reason, we keep talking about it. And that's the way it is."
Sure enough, that's mostly what applicants hear when they come for an interview. It's fresh storytelling meat for us.
This morning, I launched an hours-long search through our archives to see if Rita, which came Sept. 23-24, had managed to elude an edition.
Nope.
On Sunday, for example, she appeared in six items. There were four mentions Saturday.
The mentions come in all kinds of ways, from news stories to advertisements, from letters to the editor to sports pieces. She's mentioned in a wide variety of stories, topics including fishing, bats, blood drives, the 100 Club, schools, dog thefts, unemployment and even the Little League.
A recent mention was Hattie M. McClain's obituary. The obituary mentioned that before Hurricane Rita's arrival, the 83-year-old and her husband of 63 years, Leo W. Rick, evacuated to Georgia, where he died Oct. 9.
Not even in death can we escape Rita these days.
Prominent in some Enterprise editions and barely mentioned in others, she was mentioned in only one story March 13. Rita did not make the news at all Feb. 20, but she did appear in an ad for trial lawyers under the heading: ATTENTION VICTIMS OF HURRICANE RITA.
However, the day before, Feb. 19, Rita ran amok, appearing in 44 news items, mainly in the annual Progress addition.
Rita pickings were mighty slim Jan. 16, but J. Afton's jewelry saved the day by mentioning giving away a free "Rita pendant" as part of the store's going-out-of-business sale.
The only other day without a news mention was Nov. 28, but there were plenty of mentions in advertisements in that issue, for eye physicians, stumpgrinders, tree-removal specialists and some guys who fix garage doors.
It's pretty impressive in this day and age, when hipster contrarianism ultimately creates a backlash against the predominant and popular, that the hurricane in our head remains stalled and continues to swirl.
I have a feeling Rita will be around a long time.