The numbers that were flung around on the front page of Wednesday’s paper concerning campaign spending by area candidates should not have astounded us, but they did.

We take full responsibility. This newspaper is more than a century old, and try as we might to keep up, there are just some things that we are not ready for. Reading that a candidate for the Hickory Creek Town Council has spent $6,092 on his campaign, including $5,100 to a public relations firm, is one of them.

Again, this is not to criticize Charles Read, the Hickory Creek businessman who has rolled up those numbers and currently leads all area candidates (the city of Denton excepted) in spending. Mr. Read is simply paying the market price to run a political campaign in the modern world.

Indeed, Read’s expenditure is chickenfeed when compared to that of candidates in Denton proper. Mark Burroughs has spent more than $45,000 in his campaign for mayor, and his opponent, incumbent Mayor Perry McNeill, has spent more than $16,000.

We hesitate to admit it, but we can remember the day when congressional campaigns — successful ones — were run on $45,000, most of it spent for scurrilous newspaper advertisements, gasoline, giveaway trinkets and a mysterious category euphemistically known as “walking-around money.”

That last referred to money given to local political bosses to buy votes. The newspaper ads were huge, circus-poster things, filled with American flags and acres of tiny type detailing the candidate’s many virtues and his opponent’s many vices. One classic political tale has Florida Sen. George Smathers accusing his opponent, Claude Pepper, of having a sister who was “a practicing thespian.” Smathers always denied it, but it’s too good a yarn not to include when one is reminiscing. The gasoline money fueled candidates’ cars as they drove to every barbecue, brush-arbor meeting, dinner-on-the-ground and beauty contest in the state, where voters poured out by the hundreds to see the candidates as they sweated down their seersucker suits while unloading speeches from atop a flat-bed trailer.

The most affluent candidates usually had a hillbilly band in tow to draw a crowd with yodeling, git-fiddling and a jig or two. The best band in our memory was Virgil Fletcher and His Country Cousins, an aggregation that toured all over Central Arkansas in the ’50s and ’60s on behalf of Fletcher himself, a gifted guitar picker and a hilariously inept state senator.

Fletcher’s only political claim to fame was a quote he uttered in the midst of a fierce Senate debate during which that body’s sergeant-at-arms shattered his ceremonial mace while pounding it on the floor in an unsuccessful attempt to bring the senators to something resembling order.

The splintering of the mace, an impressive 10-foot staff topped by a gilded eagle, did indeed result in a momentary silence, which Virgil filled by shouting:

“Mr. President! Mr. President! The sergeant-at-arms has broke his knocker!”

That’s the gospel truth. We were there, and we wrote it down.

Fletcher probably never spent more than $200 to get re-elected to the state Senate — those band members were indeed his cousins, and got rewarded with cushy jobs in the Capitol once Virgil was safely reinstalled in office.

We don’t know what he’d think about spending $6,092 to get elected to the Hickory Creek Town Council, but we suspect he might say it’s about $6,000 too much.