ALCOHOL WAS A FACTOR: Weekly Newspapering in Rural Alaska

Haines Explodes.

The newsroom phone rang.

It was an advertiser, and he wasn’t happy.

In fact, he was livid.

The man had grown up in Haines. And for the past year, he’d placed a tiny three-inch ad costing $39 a week to promote his rough-cut lumber business in the Chilkat Valley News.

But now he wanted to cancel that ad, end the relationship. And he wanted the newspaper’s owner, Tom Morphet, to go to hell. And right quick.

“Tom Morphet is ruining this town,” he shouted. “Well, you know what? They can have their little goddamned village. They’re making me flee my own hometown.”

Others called to cancel their subscriptions.

At least I didn’t have to deal with the fabled Lying Woman, who’s been known to barge into the newsroom with all kinds of lies — that she’s owned every bar in town; that kind of stuff.

On this week, people were gunning for Morphet.

He’s my boss. He hired me to come to southeastern Alaska for six weeks to take his place writing stories that cover every heartbeat of this town.

Morphet needed the second-string because in October he’d decided to run for a seat on the local town council. He won, but his enemies, and many so-called friends, immediately began making claims of conflict of interest.

In Haines, it seems, a tourist-based company can sit on a town advisory board that helps decide how much money is spent on tourism; a group of fishermen can take the lead on advising how much should be spend on a new harbor; and the owners of heli-skiing companies can sit on advisory panels deciding if the areas their helicopters can fly should be broadened.

I get this.

In an isolated Alaskan community of just 2,500 residents, there simply aren’t enough people to go around; fill every volunteer group and government advisory body with fresh faces who don’t have some sort of personal play in the game.

But the town’s newspaperman, residents all said; had to stay above the fray.

He couldn’t both report the news and be the news.

And Morphet got this, too. The situation made him admit something he’d known for a long time, that it was finally time for him to sell the paper where he’d worked for 30 years.

So Morphet stepped aside and concentrated on politics and left the journalism to a series of outsiders and a fledgling staff reporter right out of J-school.

As the weeks stretched on following my early November arrival, Tom marched into the newsroom from his exile-office down the hall and directed stories he wanted done. I saw no conflict of interest. It was Morphet being Morphet; still caring about the town, making decisions on news coverage that had won the paper numerous awards.

He never crossed the line.

But last week, his job got complicated. Part of this is Morphet’s personality. Call him his own worst enemy. He speaks his mind, and worries later about picking up the pieces.

On a Wednesday night, in a four-hour meeting, he led the way to fire the borough manager for cause after six months on the job.

He read a three-page manifesto about all the reasons that the manager had failed to do his job.

That night, Tom’s will prevailed; the manager was fired by a 4–2 vote.

The ink was barely dry on the decision when the backlash started. The mayor publicly called tom and those who voted against the manager “axe-hurlers.”

Then the audience took its turn.

And here’s where small-town politics gets fun, where the lines blur and as a reporter you feel like a medical examiner collecting the political bodies.

A vanquished politician named Diana Lapham, whom Morphet defeated for the assembly seat just three months before, stood at the microphone and let Tom have it.

She said he was despicable. She challenged Morphet to “man up.”

“And when you’re sitting there, take your damn hat off when you salute the flag.”

“And wipe that smile off your face. You are part of the problem in this town.”

Then another of Morphet’s arch enemies, a veteran fisherman named Don turner, stood up and said he didn’t know what it was about Haines that made it so ugly. Maybe it was the water, he said.

Then he upped the ante: He announced that the very next morning he was going to start a petition to remove Tom from office.

The following day, I began reporting for the next week’s paper, my last here.

My main story was the fallout from the manager’s hiring, which included reporting on the recall of my own boss — from his position as borough assemblyman.

I started making calls, assuring people that “No, Tom would not edit this story and twist around your words.”

I called Don Turner many times. He dodged me. His wife would not give me his cell phone. His son, also a fisherman, was about to but then paused and asked who I was.

When I said I worked for the newspaper, he changed his mind. He said his father would kill him.

And then he hung up.

Finally, Turner called back. He refused to give me any information on his own recall campaign, realizing perhaps that he was shooting himself in the foot.

“I’m not giving Tom Morphet any information to put in his newspaper.”

And then he hung up.

A few days later, I called the former manager for comment.

He’s a nice guy and he talked with me. He said he was going to sue the borough for wrongful termination.

Then he called back and gave me the name of his lawyer, who also talked to me, even though he’d only taken the case hours earlier and was no doubt shooting from the hip.

But I still was not making any ground on the recall.

So I called Diana Lapham, who over the weekend had been filling Facebook with anti-Tom propaganda. At first, she refused to talk to me.

I worked for Tom; I was obviously in the enemy camp.

I tried to prevail on her that I was a short-timer in Haines. I had my own journalist standards and would not let Tom twist her comments or sway the story, even though I knew he would never try.

She relented.

She told me the recall was going forward, and that the net might sweep up more than Tom, but other members on the assembly.

She said she was not leading the effort; she wanted her old seat back and that being too public about the whole matter might be unseemly.

“I’ve got my issues, but I want to stay above the fray on this one,” she said.

I called another assembly member — an artist — who had voted against the manager and asked for a reaction about perhaps being the subject of a recall.

He declined comment.

I went to Morphet for comment.

Then I started getting calls from other assembly members wanting to know the scoop on the manager. The acting manager, who was loyal to the one the town had just deposed, would not tell them about any lawsuit, maybe because she didn’t know.

So they called me.

I fessed with what I knew. I could have just told them to go out and buy a damned newspaper in a few days.

But I didn’t.

The one person I did want to talk to was the mayor, who had also sided with the manager.

But she dodged me, refusing to return my calls. I stopped by her office, which is a half block from the newspaper, but she was always in a meeting.

I emailed her. No reply

My time was running out.

Luckily, this being a weekly with only two reporters, I had other stories to do and I dove into them with relish.

I wrote about the controversy over the Snow Dragon that had appeared in every Haines holiday parade for years, until this one — because the woman who made it said she didn’t want it used this year since she wouldn’t be in town to supervise.

So a bunch of artists got together at the last minute and made a new Snow Dragon.

I wrote a story about the election of the new volunteer fire chief; about the latest Hollywood petition for ideas for a new Reality-TV show, which most people here dismissed as the latest attempt to romanticize Alaskan rural life.

And I wrote about the options for the refurbishment for the town’s decaying cargo dock.

We ran out of space, so I didn’t do the story about Luigi, the orphaned 150-pound chocolate Labrador who after running around Haines for weeks, finally found a home.

But there was joy in the drudgery.

I sat at my desk listening to Leigh Horner, who does the “Duly Noted” gossip column for the newspaper. She’s a bright funny woman who gets small town life.

She was interviewing a Haines teenager who had gone to Florida and Disneyland.

“So where did you stay?”

“No, I meant the city, not the hotel.”

“Did you see anyone from Haines?

“No?”

“Did you like Disneyland? Really? It was a magic place?”

“Oh, how close did you get to the launch site?”

“That’s pretty close!”

“OK, let me type this up. I’ll call you back if I have any questions.”

When I heard this delightful conversation (well, half of it), I realized there are joys to running a small town paper, that it didn’t have to be conflict and ugliness.

Which, reminds me; I’m still waiting for the mayor to call.