The helper: Stafford retires from Sumter Item after 25 years in customer service

It started with a pink flamingo.

Kathy Stafford bought the desk trinket at a fundraiser for cats with special needs. It had a summertime theme, adorned with a hat and shorts and even flip flops. She passed them out around the office and kept one in hers.

Years later, Stafford would be putting the 30 or so of them into a box. The solar-powered ones that dance back and forth. The bobbleheads and the gifts from carriers. They'd go in with her plants and paintings and nearly 30 years of memories.

Stafford retired from The Sumter Item on Tuesday after a successful career that spanned customer service, circulation, pagination, advertising and management.

A lot has changed since May 26, 1997, both in the world and at the paper. Working at a newspaper gives staff the chance to watch the world turn with an inside look at headlines. Stafford remembers sketching out pages for special sections she helped sell during a time when designers were still putting finished pages on film to be printed.

Those sketches brought her "artistic craftiness" out, she said, and helped her fall in love with working at a newspaper and being a part of its production. It turned her job into a career.

"To me, it's rewarding that I can look at a newspaper and say I helped to make this. I did that," Stafford said.

She remembers when The Item printed its last afternoon paper in 2002 and how delivering the paper the next morning gave staff more time for production. She remembers taking over pagination, where she decides the number and order of pages that will be in each edition, which pages will print in color, where each ad goes.

All the while, she was always helping with customer service. Eventually, she came to manage the department.

"The hardest part is distribution. Sure, we have some irate customers here and there, but for the most part, it's not that unsettling. But not being able to find people who want to work long hours at night for not much pay, that just kind of spills over into customer service," Stafford said.

Her office was set back from the front desk, but not too far where she couldn't hear what was going on. When someone would get "really, really angry," she'd come out and help quell the situation.

"That's where my patience comes in," she said. "We are the faces of the paper."

The pandemic brought out anger in people at a higher rate, it seemed: customers who were upset about carrier shortages with a general lack of empathy or awareness for the human-operated production of local news.

Like the time Stafford recalls when a man threatened to jump the plexiglass "and beat us" over a wet newspaper.

"It was raining, but not when the paper was delivered," Stafford said. "I requested for him to leave or we'd call law enforcement."

Or the man who came in a couple times and made them uneasy because he kept going on about being the messiah. Or the general decline in print advertising that customers often failed to connect the dots with a smaller paper, with the need to support the paper like any other local business.

During stressful encounters like those, Stafford knew she could find refuge in her office. Plants, paintings, photos and trinkets covered the shelves, walls and desk.

"Sometimes the stress level is so extreme that I need to go to a happy place to focus," she said.

Despite the challenges, she said she will look back on her time at The Item fondly. She heeded the calls to adapt and help bring the paper into the digital age, to offer her assistance with anything that was needed, to try new things and learn new tools. All while maintaining a positive attitude that encouraged coworkers to look for solutions and collaborate.

"I made a lot of friends here. We ended up with a great working atmosphere," she said. "They're family, that's just the way I feel. They call me Momma Hen here for a reason. I'm very conscientious of what everybody's needs are. I like looking out for people's personal wellbeing."

As she embarks on this new stage in her life, Stafford said she is looking forward to sleeping in past 6 a.m. At least until 6:30 a.m. She has house projects to tackle, and she has been accepted to Central Carolina Technical College to take courses in medical coding. She will spend time with her granddaughter. She'll continue bowling. That's a given.

There might not be as many dancing trinkets in that office anymore, but Stafford's legacy will be remembered in her patience, kindness and ability to make something bright out of one dancing, beach-ready flamingo.