ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Episode 4

THAT VOICE OF LOCAL NEWS

I’d heard the voice — and the rumors — before I met the man.
The talk about Tom Morphet was mostly good.

But for me, a free-floating, big-city feature writer who preferred doing profiles, magazine pieces and other long-form nonfiction, some of the gossip about this hard-driving newsman was concerning.
They called him a pure, nuts-and-bolts local journalist. Yep, ole Tom Morphet was as old-school as they come. He was addicted to hard news. And if it didn’t happen in the countless meetings held here every week, he’d go out and dig it up himself. In an era of parachute reporting, chasing wars and other disasters around the globe, with restless reporters remaining at papers for three-year maximum, Morphet has stayed put in a sub-arctic town of 2,500 people.

He has gotten to know the people and the issues.
And when things happen, Morphet knows precisely whom to call; that is, if they haven’t called him first.
It’s like an old marriage — Tom Morphet and Haines, Alaska — neither willing to leave the other, both determined to see things out. Sure, Morphet has taken breaks now and then, from both Haines and journalism — it was the only real way to keep his sanity.
But he always returned to both.
I did the math: Morphet has been doing local journalism for the Chilkat Valley News for three decades. He worked as a reporter for the first 25 and then bought the paper five years ago. That makes for 1,500 issues that carry his stamp-of-approval. Imagine the amount of news he has unearthed in a town that, if located in the Lower 48, would be flown past on the freeway by people never knowing — or caring, really — what even goes on there.
But Morphet cares. His institutional knowledge runs so deep that no matter how far back I researched the paper’s yellowed back-copies — well into the late 1980s and earlier; I found Tom Morphet’s byline.
He’s the newspaper’s third owner in 50 years of a proud set-in-its-way publication that remains one of a handful of independently-owned newspapers in Alaska.

The Chilkat Valley News was started in 1966 by Haines schoolteacher Ray Menaker and a student printer, Bill Hartman. Neither were journalists. The weekly’s first edition appeared on January 3rd without a name. Instead, the two asked readers to choose one from a list of 18 possibilities that included such humdingers as the Haines Independent Grapevine and Lynn Canal Drift, referring to North America’s deepest fjord that lurks in the distance outside town.
In time, the paper developed its own unique character.

It staked out its turf — both Haines and Klukwan, a Tlingit Alaskan Native village 23 miles to the west. If it didn’t happen there, it didn’t appear in the pages of the Chilkat Valley News. Menaker sold the paper in the 1980s to Bonnie Hedrick, another non-journalist — an ornithologist by training who tried her hand in the newsroom.
Basically, Menaker offered to sell the paper for $5,000, a loan he had made to the business. So Bonnie, who sold ads there, got together with the reporter at the paper and made the purchase.
A year later, the reporter skipped town, depressed by the winter weather. That left Bonnie holding the bag, with little experience.
Luckily, Morphet had hitchhiked in and decided to stay.
The pair teamed up for decades.
In 2012, Hedrick sold the weekly to the reporter who’d dug up most of its stories for the past quarter-century.
And in a touch that is truly Haines-like, Hedrick now works just downstairs from the newsroom as a county court clerk. She remains a loyal reader of the paper but does not miss the 80-hour weeks it took to put it out.
When Morphet took over, he did what he’d always done: hard news.
He hired Garcia, who hailed from faraway Chicago — decidedly outside Morphet’s sphere. (He interviewed her over Skype.)

Together, they delivered such hard-hitting news the local radio station had to hire a second reporter just to keep up with the scrappy weekly.
Morphet kept some Chilkat Valley News traditions.

Like the “Duly Noted” column, penned by locals in the know, which chronicles a side of Haines even Morphet can’t always plumb. One writer, Heather Lende, is a former Anchorage Daily News columnist and National Public Radio commentator who went on to write three books on Haines. She now contributes the newspaper’s often-whimsical and well-researched obituaries.
Over the years, Morphet kept charging.

The paper has won numerous awards from the Alaska Press Club, including Best Weekly Newspaper for two straight years, in 2013 and 2014.
As I say, the disdains wire stories that might fill some space, tell a tale outside city limits and make Morphet’s job a bit easier.
Nope; that’s too far away. He doesn’t even like the word local to appear anywhere in his paper. His stories are all about Haines. The way Morphet sees it, everyone’s a local; there’s no need to remind them.

Tom’s hyper-backyard focus has even become the stuff of jokes here.

One Christmas, a resident comic did a Morphet roast. As one bit went, someone called the paper to report that Santa Claus had just arrived in Haines.

Morphet said no story.
The paper only reported on local Santas.
That Sunday evening, as I clomped up the stairs to the paper’s second-floor office, I caught the slightly high-pitched voice I’d heard on the telephone. Morphet was at his old desk, talking on the phone to some old-timer or tipster. He was laughing. The voice had a bemused quality, as if Tom and his confidante were the only two sane people left in a crazy world.
Look, look, it seemed to say; look what they’re doing now.
When I walked in, I found a man who was younger — and better-looking — than I’d imagined. At 55, he had gray hair and thin chiseled features. He wore a baby-blue scarf wrapped tightly around his neck, almost in a risqué statement, but no doubt a purely functional touch.
Still, the look could play in Sundance, for sure.
Then Morphet saw me.

He hung up the phone. The laughter stopped.

Like immediately.
He shifted gears, suddenly all business. He’d been gone all week and now here it was Sunday night. The paper would be put to bed in just three days.

Morphet needed news.
He was like a parent who’d returned from a late movie to find that the babysitter had let the kids stay up watching television past midnight. Now discipline had returned.
He’d summoned the weekly’s other reporter, 22-year-old Natalie Helms, a recent college graduate.

She sat at her desk, seemingly too timid to speak.
We both watched as Morphet paced the room, talking about stories I needed to get right on. I sat down and took notes, like a stenographer.
First, he handed me the Haines fiscal 2017 budget, which despite the town’s seemingly miniscule $12 million annual operating funds, thumped onto the desk like the Manhattan phonebook (when they used to have those kinds of things). No doubt, every pen and pencil had been analyzed, (twice, by two different committees) and accounted for.
“Here,” Morphet said. “Read this, for starters. Get to know it. There are stories there.”
He had two ideas he wanted done right off the bat.
One was a tax story. Both consisted of letting numbers do the talking.
There was the tourist office’s annual report on visitor numbers. How many people came by ferry and cruise ship? By car from the Yukon, he wanted to know.

Are the up or down from last year? Over the last five years?

Why?

Why not?

That was the easy one. It could be done in an hour, tops.
Then Morphet launched into a lecture on the ongoing story of Alaska for this year and for the past several years.
Budget cuts.
Oil was no longer king and the state was going broke. It was slashing services left and right and those cuts affected every last person in Alaska, from Ketchikan to Dutch Harbor.
For the next fiscal-year the state had cut the money it applied to promoting Alaska as a vacation destination in the Lower 48 was cut to just $1.5 million, plummeting from more than $20 million just a few short years ago.
In Haines, a local fisherman was griping that local tourism — the Mom and Pop curio shops that line Main Street, appealing to the summer cruise-ship visitors — was getting the lion’s share of proceeds from a local sales tax, while hard-working fishermen got zilch. The angler, a gruff man named J.R. Churchill, was making noises intended to move local government to cut that tourism allocation entirely.
So, Morphet said, local small-businesses could be hit by cuts from above (the state) and below (the local sales tax).
Get on it.
I tried to ask a question. Maybe I wanted to launch into a story I had once covered in this country or that one that had some relevance.

Morphet held up his hand, like a cop directing traffic.
“Let me finish.”
It wasn’t rude or arrogant. It was a simple gesture from a veteran local newspaper owner who knew what he wanted; someone who had been doing the job in this place for decades.
I shut up and listened.

But I had come to Haines with a few ideas of my own.
The way I saw it, I had outsider’s eyes. I’d already observed things that perhaps locals did not. I wanted to be like that comedian with a riff about, say, brushing your teeth in the morning.

Sure, you’ve done it a million times, but the comic reveals the tiny nuances you’ve always witnessed but never really saw. And that’s what made you made you laugh.
When Morphet finished, I suggested a few ideas.
What about a story about being an outsider in a small Alaskan town? Talk to people who arrived here recently and years ago; how long did it take them to be accepted?
No; people already know that.
What about the cultural clash between blue-collar fishermen and college educated types?
No.
How about a story about the fact that Haines seems to have more dogs than people? Everyone has a pooch by their side and are often identified by their dogs.
Nope.
I wanted to suggest a Santa’s-coming-to-town story, but I knew he’d nix that one too.
I closed my notebook and got busy on the tax story.
It was dark outside. A light snow had begun to fall.
In the inky blackness, the world was turning white.

TOMORROW: LOCAL YOKEL NEWS