Jim Hamilton was brought up on a small dairy farm in southern Dallas County near Elkland, Missouri. In 1970-71 he was editor of the Southwest Missouri State College Standard, and from 1971 to 1974 he served his country as a U.S. Air Force journalist and base newspaper editor. After earning a BA in writing at Southwest Missouri State University in 1974, he worked as a news editor at the Bolivar Herald-Free Press. In 1977 he returned to SMSU for a master's degree and then began a 24-year stint as editor and publisher of the Buffalo Reflex. For more than forty years, Hamilton produced weekly editorial columns, and a collection of these was published as The River of Used To Be in 1994. Hamilton was inducted into the Regional Media Hall of Fame in 2016.