Some stories not reported

During the 10 years it was my pleasure to hold the title of publisher of the Marshall News Messenger, I learned a lot about the power a community newspaper has … and, hopefully, how to use that power to create an atmosphere of positive change within the area the paper serves.

Emails and phone calls from old friends and acquaintances have flooded my brainpan with memory deposits.

I remember:

-- The time a man called and threatened to beat me up because we ran a photo of his dog being operated on down at John Allred’s Veterinary Place (or whatever one of those things where vets work are called). The story was part of a series spotlighting high school students who worked after school.

The man said his friends were making fun of him. “How’d they know it was your dog?” Well, the man said, “I told them.”

He was serious about the “beating me up” part and was stopped just short of the News Messenger door by Marshall police officers. He was carrying a baseball bat. “How’d you guys know I was coming down here?” he asked. I’m sure I grinned when I said, “I told them.”

-- A local businessman pulled his weekly ad over an editorial I computered. Two days after the paper came out without his ad, he showed up by office door with a piece of paper and asked me to sign it. It authorized me to never, ever, under any circumstances, allow him to drop his ad again.

Seems leaving the ad out of the Messenger had cost him more than $10,000 in sales that week.

I signed the paper and tried hard not to gloat.

-- A local political activist took umbrage at a column about something or other and cancelled her subscription. We had a policy then that anyone who quit the paper because of anything I had written had to talk to me before we initiated the cancellation request. The woman refused to talk to me.

I went home, put on my tux (yes, I owned one to wear to Marshall’s Debutante Ball once a year), put that day’s edition of the paper on a faux silver tray and deliver it to her house. She opened the door, sent me to Hell with a look, and said: “I’ll keep taking the paper. Now get off my porch.”

-- A late night phone call woke me up and the caller informed me that “Every day the News Messenger lies. Every single day!”

After fumbling words around a bit, the man said that the courthouse drawing on the front page
of the paper has “a Texas and American” flag flying over the dome. “There ain’t no flags up
there. You’re lying.”

Oh, they’re up there. Been up there for years, I said, before I hung up.

Oh, almost forgot: I asked him what he had been drinking. He said it was “None of your
$%^*& business.” I checked the police log the next day and apparently he didn’t get picked up
going up to check on the flags that weren’t there.

-- We had a sheriff back in the ‘80s that was, well, volatile. There was a report he had shot a tire on his wife’s car after a family disturbance. I didn’t feel comfortable sending our police reporter over to talk to him so I just asked him pointblank in the courthouse hallway (lots and lots of witnesses), if had, indeed, shot a tire on his wife’s car.

“That’s a #&%* lie,” he said, giving me a look that would freeze steel. “I shot two of them, the front ones.”

Politicians that tell the truth are few and far between.