ALCOHL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

Don’t Get Blinded By The Pumpkin

Well, the paper’s out, after another long week of beating the mean streets of Haines, Alaska.
The people are pretty much harmless; it’s the ice-slicked roads that are the killers.

I had three front page stories; I don’t think I ever quite pulled that off in any of the other newspapers I have worked for. But since there’s only one other reporter here, a 22-year-old recent J-school graduate, I do believe the odds are in my favor.

My biggest scoop, I guess, was my report that the baby Jesus in the community’s holiday manger scene is actually a girl. A little baby girl-doll is all organizers could find after two male figures were swiped in recent years.

Robbed from the cradle, you could say.

Little thing; she still looks rather Christ-like all swaddled up in her fairy-blue blanket and head scarf. But baby Jesus isn’t the only crime victim in this manger. In past years, thieves have pilfered a miniature camel and an angel, I think. A donkey was purloined as well, and later found with its ears chewed off, so some people thought it was a dog that done it.

Others point to the more usual suspects: They say it’s kids or drunks staggering home from the bar, a view I also hold.

And, oh yeah, a donkey’s head went missing one year. They had to scramble to find one — on Amazon, and paid a pretty price, I hear. Now the figures are bolted down; a nice holiday touch, if you ask me.

In all, I wrote ten stories this week. (Yes, that much “news” does go down in a town of 2,200 souls isolated from the rest of humankind by cold tundra waters and the devil’s weather.)

Along with the manger investigation, I wrote a piece on how state budget cuts will affect the town’s summer tourism market, and covered these other events: the opening of local cross-country skiing trails; Black Friday shopping in a place with a handful of merchants; politicians meeting over the town’s whopping $12 million budget for the next fiscal year, and whether Haines needs insurance to cover any accident suffered by the reality-TV crews scrambling around these hills; shows like Gold Rush and others I can’t remember.

I did a piece on how weather closed borough offices on afternoon and how icy roads caused a four-vehicle fiasco on one always-slippery hill. And I did a story about the town’s annual Thanksgiving dinner for local shut-ins — and scrambled to take a slew of pictures, including one of the four-member high school wrestling team for an ad.

I did two other stories; about a local holiday bazaar and controversy in the volunteer fire department, but there wasn’t enough space, so those gems will have to wait for next week.

The paper’s lead story was my piece about the local preschool winning a $150,000 grant to move its classrooms from a century-old rundown old home into the local senior center.

Did I hear you just suppress a yawn?

I have this philosophy that there are no boring stories; only boring reporters.

I loved this preschool story. I interviewed the teacher what it was like when the wind blew through the foundation cracks and how the little tykes couldn’t drink the water from the rest pipes. Teachers had to bring in drinking water each day.

But here was my favorite part: just imaging a center where the elderly and preschoolers share space. The teacher planned to have buddy groups where the seniors read to the kids and, of course, the seniors will have front-row seats at all the school’s productions.

What a concept: why don’t other communities do this?

I will close with this — community news seems corny and dull, but it matters — especially if a higher lesson is always kept in mind.

Not long ago, I read an essay written by a Wall Street Journal reporter about her greatest lesson in journalism. She told a tale about her first job for a small weekly newspaper in Maine. A photographer at the paper came up from New York City and always groused about the low-hanging fruit he was forced to pick each day for farmers and people who didn’t finish high school.

One day the reporter and photographer were sent to the state fair for a story about the farmer who had raised the biggest pumpkin. The photographer groused all the way to take the picture, while taking the picture, and all the way back to the office.

He groused so much that when he left the job a few years later, they featured that pumpkin shot on his going-away phony front page that all papers do for beloved staffers.

Well, years later, after he had retired, the photographer was rummaging around in his attic and come across a career memento that brought tears to his eyes.

It was the picture of the pumpkin.

For the first time, he saw what a gorgeous portrait it was; the farmer, his face creased with lines of work and worry, holding something he had created by himself, with his bare hands.

There was such pride in his face. And that was just priceless.

For the Wall Street Journal reporter, the journalistic moral of the story was this.

Never get blinded by the pumpkin.

While I was writing this, alone in the weekly newspaper office, days away from the next deadline, I took a call from Heather Linde, an author who has published three books about life in Haines.

Heather wrote two obituaries of old-times who died this week, which I have faithfully reported in an earlier post.

Heather says being a writer in a small Alaska town, or any small town really, is a tough job. So much happens when nothing really happens at all.

She calls it story-catching.

I agree. But I won’t be here forever, just a few more short weeks.

Meanwhile, I intend to focus on the pumpkin.