But Aubrey insisted there’d been enough crap in the 3rd to question why Lionel Percy was left in place when all the other district commanders were either given administrative jobs at headquarters or tempted into retirement.
Eric told me the argument went on for a half hour, ending with Aubrey screeching obscenities, Dale storming off to the men’s room, and Tinker wondering out loud why he’d accepted the transfer from our sister paper in Baton Rouge.
I’d have to say both Dale and Aubrey were right. A newspaper shouldn’t go on fishing expeditions. But when something already smells to high heaven? Well, that was a judgment call Tinker had to make and he gave Aubrey the green light she wanted.
Let me give you a little background on the Herald-Union, and how Alec Tinker landed here as managing editor.
The Hannawa Herald was founded in 1855 by Elton Elsworth Newkirk, a Connecticut-born abolitionist who helped bankroll the anti-slavery crusade of John Brown, who, before achieving infamy in Kansas and Harper’s Ferry, toiled for many years right here in Hannawa. The Hannawa Union did not appear until 1876, late in the corrupt second term of President Ulysses S. Grant. It was an unapologetically Republican paper that championed the region’s industrial growth. It reigned as the city’s biggest newspaper until the Great Depression, when its anti-New Deal rantings cost it half of its circulation.
In 1937, the Herald’s then-publisher, Bix Newkirk, bought the near-bankrupt Union for a song. By the time I came along in the Fifties, the Herald-Union was a vibrant, well-heeled afternoon paper, the fourth largest in the state. Then suburbia raised its ugly head and families by the thousands moved to the cornfields. By 1972, the paper’s circulation and advertising revenues had sagged so badly that the heretofore industrious Bix Newkirk suddenly developed an interest in sailboats. In 1974 he sold the Herald-Union to the Knudsen-Hartpence chain, headquartered eight hundred miles away in St. Paul, Minnesota. In addition to its flagship paper there in St. Paul, The Northern Star-Pride, it owns papers in Duluth, Tampa, Baton Rouge and a dozen or so smaller cities.
Knudsen-Hartpence brought in Bob Averill as editor-in-chief and changed us from an afternoon paper to a morning paper. Home delivery increased by a third and the suburban malls boosted advertising revenues. We’ve been languishing lately-nobody under forty reads newspapers and everybody in America is unfortunately under forty, or so it seems-but the corporate gurus in St. Paul have plans for changing that. They’ve sent us Tinker, a thirty-two-year-old wunderkind from our paper in Baton Rouge.
At the time of his appointment the company newsletter said Tinker would make reading the Herald-Union “Not only irresistible but imperative.” So far he’s done that by running shorter stories and larger photographs, though he has promised to initiate what he calls “a synergistic blend of in-your-face and in-your-mind journalism.” Talk about bullshit.
Tinker’s arrival at the Herald-Union was anything but good news to veteran reporters like Dale Marabout. Knudsen-Hartpence sent Tinker here to get the paper’s circulation up, which meant shaking the town up, which meant shaking the editorial staff up.
Dale is certain, and I’m sure he’s right, that Tinker’s marching orders were to fill as many of the paper’s major beats as possible with as many indefatigable kids as possible. So the arrival of Tinker was a godsend to Aubrey McGinty. She’d been trying to get the Herald-Union’s attention since her freshman year at Kent State. She’d repeatedly applied for stringer work-to cover boring suburban school board meetings and the like-but she never got a call. Nor was she ever chosen for a summer internship. During her senior years she lobbied every department editor except sports for a job after graduation. Her stories in the college paper were good enough to get her a couple of interviews, but not good enough to get her a job. And if I know Aubrey, all the time she was trying to get our attention, she was trying just as hard to get the attention of every big-city newspaper in the Midwest. Like most journalism grads, she ended up on a small paper in a small town, covering small stories, trying to survive on a pitifully small paycheck, plotting her escape.
The way young reporters escape small papers is through the stories they write. They clip them out and stick them in manila folders. As soon as they’ve got six months or a year under their belt, they start sending those clips to bigger papers. The better their clips, the bigger the paper they’ll land on. So they joyfully work their brains out at those small papers, praying that the good-clip gods let something horrible happen on their beats, like the murder of the local football coach, so they can cover the hell out of it.
Tinker liked Aubrey’s clips on the football coach murder. He liked how she didn’t accept the Rush City Police Department’s verdict. He liked how she pursued the rumors of the coach’s affair with the cheerleading advisor. He liked how her relentless pursuit led to the arrest of the cuckolded husband. Aubrey McGinty was just the kind of reporter he wanted covering the cops in Hannawa, Ohio.
From what I gather, Tinker and Aubrey started wooing each other a good year before she was actually hired. Aubrey sent him her clips and he took her to lunch. There were letters and phone calls and then finally a firm commitment that she’d be hired just as soon as there was an opening.
Dale did a wonderful job covering the Buddy Wing murder in November. Everyone in the newsroom praised him to high heaven. But Tinker had already made up his mind and when Wally Kearns announced in January he was taking advantage of the paper’s early retirement program to write that novel he’d been putting off, there was suddenly a copy editing slot on the metro desk for someone with an experienced eye. For Dale Marabout.
Aubrey, as you know, showed up the first week of March, full of vinegar.
Wednesday, March 22
On Wednesday I took Dale to lunch at Speckley’s.
I was expecting him to be pissed off by Tinker’s decision. Instead, he was concerned only about Aubrey’s safety. “Maddy,” he said, “the 3rd District has been corrupt for decades. I don’t know if Percy is part of any illegal stuff or not. And I bet Chief Polceznec doesn’t know either. But what both the chief and I do know is that Lionel Percy is a five-hundred-pound piranha. You don’t swim in his pond. Polceznec probably figures Percy will retire in a couple years and then he can put some Spic-and-Span guy in charge and turn things around.”
I tried to get Dale to eat his meat loaf sandwich before it got cold but he just kept playing with his potatoes. “Why didn’t you tell Tinker all this?” I asked. “It looks like you’re trying to protect your pals on the force again.”
Dale wasn’t happy with that. “Again?”
“You know what I mean.”
He stuck his fork in the top of his potatoes and folded his arms. “If I tell Tinker I’m afraid for Aubrey’s safety, that will only prove her point, won’t it? If only Aubrey wasn’t so damned gonzo about everything.”
Well, Dale was right about that. Aubrey was one very determined young woman. Most reporters are emotionally detached from the stories they cover. It doesn’t matter much if they’re covering a murder trial or a Red Cross blood drive. They go where they’re assigned, gather up the who-what-when-where-and-why, come back and write the damn story, go home and feed their cats. They get whooped up about a story from time to time, sure. But when they do, it’s the story that gets them excited, not the reality.