It started as a simple, routine call in the news business.

A customer left a voicemail sometime before 8 a.m. on a Friday morning.

In a harried voice, this man expressed his frustration: “Didn’t get a paper today. This is my home address: (redacted). Evansdale, Iowa, 50707.”

Evansdale, Iowa? A quick search shows that to be about a nine-hour drive from our production facility in Findlay, Ohio.

Puzzled? I was a little bit. Until I turned to Rob Jenney, our group circulation director.

“Oh yeah, that’s got to be Waterloo, Iowa,” he confidently spoke.

“Waterloo?”

Does Rob have a parlor trick of memorizing Iowa geography?

“Their name is also The Courier,” he said, with a smile.

Ahhh …

Yes, the local paper in that part of the Hawkeye State is the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier. The masthead reads “The Courier” in a quite-similar font to our version of The Courier.

Turns out, we’ve gotten a handful of calls from the Waterloo area over the years.

“Same in Conroe, Texas,” Rob said.

The paper there is called The Courier of Montgomery County.

There’s the Courier-Press in Evansville, Indiana. The Courier-Times in New Castle, Indiana. The Courier-News in Elgin, Illinois, and The Courier in Houma, Louisiana.

We’ve even gotten calls from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Rob says.

Maybe we shouldn’t be called “The” Courier any more? Maybe we’re being as belligerent as that Buckeye State university who maintains its absolutism by proudly adopting “The” in front of its name.

I digress.

Newspaper names are an interesting thing. Despite being a business 185 years old, The Courier hasn’t been The Courier forever.

Most newspapers derive their names from “ancestors” of many different publications that were common in cities generations ago. Cities often had very specialized publications that were geared toward ethnic, religious, or political groups.

There is a board in the lunch area of Findlay’s Courier that is an awesome sight to see. It has a timeline of the more than 20 publications that eventually melded into our current Courier.

That includes publications called The Hancock Farmer, The Home Companion, Findlay Wochenblatt, and the Findlay Daily Jeffersonian.

Eventually, there were just two papers in town, the Morning Republican and The Findlay Daily Courier, which merged into The Republican-Courier. That persisted until the current name began in 1976.

Sidetrack: Many iterations of Findlay newspapers are currently on display at the Hancock County Library this month as a nod to National Newspaper Month. I proudly helped choose and deliver to the library a double handful of framed editions that stretch back to the 1800s.

There’s a lot in a name, even if it isn’t 100% unique.

The next time someone calls our Tiffin office looking for the Daily Advertiser of Lafayette, Louisiana or to Sandusky looking for the Orange County (California) Register, I’ll smile. I’ll consider the many years of that newspaper and ours, eventually marveling at the history behind it all.

That is quite the industry indeed.

As for our gentleman in Iowa: Our Courier team is good, and two of our customer service representatives, clearly wanting a little more adventure in their day, volunteered to take that customer their missed paper. Even if it meant stopping at a nearby gas station and purchasing a different kind of Courier.

Maybe I should have taken them up on it, and encouraged them to visit the other Couriers in this vast country.

Perhaps then we could see who deserves to be called The Courier once and for all.

Jeremy Speer, an Alpena native, is the publisher of The Courier in Findlay, Ohio, the Sandusky (Ohio) Register, The Advertiser-Tribune in Tiffin, Ohio, the Norwalk (Ohio) Reflector, and Review Times in Fostoria, Ohio. He can be reached at jeremyspeer@thecourier.com.