When the costs of war came home...

...During World War II The Breeze was owned by C.N. (Clyde) “Breezy” Brust and his wife, Marie. The paper was solidly behind the war, with stories about rationing and war bonds, a weekly service news column – “With the U.S.A. Colors” – that had small items about who had been home on leave, or who was where and what they were doing, and even ads, such as one for the Kuner-Empson farm implement company that had the headline: “You can kill Nazis with a plow” and talked about farming’s importance in the war effort.

Then, just as 1943 began, on the front page of the Jan. 28 issue, in the upper left corner, was a headline: “Milliken’s First War Casualty Reported is Private Ralph C. Stroh.”

“The cruel hand of war struck near home,” the short, half-dozen graph story started, “when it was announced by the War Department Monday that Private Ralph Stroh, son of Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Stroh living north of Milliken, had been killed ‘in defense of country’ on November 26th.”

And, almost heartbreakingly, on the other side of the front page, another headline: “Brother of Mrs. Jack Gilbreath was killed in Southwest Pacific.”

Walter Weglin, 25, (from the neighboring town of) Greeley, the brother of Marie Gilbreath of Johnstown, was killed in action Dec. 2 and his parents were notified Tuesday, the story said.

Within 24 hours the community found out two young men had died. Weglin and Stroh had been inducted at the same time, trained together in Australia, and served in New Guinea “and were close buddies” the stories said.

Walter’s mom was home alone when she received the news, her husband working more than an hour away in Denver, “and Mary was taken immediately to Greeley by her husband and expects to remain with her mother indefinitely.”

The day after the paper came out, Ralph Stroh was buried at the United Brethren Church. In the next week’s issue of The Breeze the funeral was recounted under a headline: "Memorial Service here largely attended by sorrowing friends.”

The church was filled to capacity “by bereaved relatives and friends of the young man,” the story reported. “In honor of the young soldier, the flag was at half-mast in Milliken and the schools there dismissed for the afternoon.”

The story also reported the comments of George Z. Mellen who spoke at the service, though it makes no mention of his connection to either the Stroh family or the community. Perhaps it was so deep nobody needed to be told.

Under the subhead “Heroism” he was quoted saying, “The most tragic aspect of war has come to us. Two of our own boys, known and loved by all, have made the supreme sacrifice.

“The people of Johnstown and Milliken are justly proud of them and pay high tribute to their heroism,” Mellen said. “Our profound sympathies are extended to their immediate families, and we feel a deep obligation to them, acknowledging an indebtedness that can never be paid. We can only strive to be worthy of their sacrifice.”

In 2011, on Memorial Day, the town of Milliken dedicated a memorial to the 'sons of Milliken' who had died in wars over the years. The reporter who wrote the story talked with Ralph Stroh’s sister, Frances (Stroh) Farnsworth.

Farnsworth, then 89, described her brother as “a beautiful man with a head of unruly hair, big brown eyes and a tender spirit. ‘I just don’t know what to say about him, because in my idolized eyes he was perfect,’” she said.

She called him “her best friend” and talked about his extreme intelligence and delightful sense of humor. He had a short but successful career as a boxer before volunteering and going into the Army in January of 1942 at age 26.

“It was a surprise to us,” Farnsworth said. “Of course, the whole war was a surprise to us. Farm boys were the salt of the earth and we were told they wouldn’t be drafted because of that … But of course Ralph volunteered.”

News of his death came over the telephone as then 20-year-old Frances and her mother sat in their kitchen planning her upcoming wedding.

“It was just an ordinary day until the phone rang and life was never the same anymore,” she said.

Asked the classic ‘what if’ question, Ralph Stroh’s sister said if her brother had made it back from the war, “I think he would have stayed on the farm. And he probably would have gotten married, too, and had a hundred children.”

And there have been others. At the same ceremony, Virginia (Belo) Martinez shared her memories and grief about her brother, John, who joined the U.S. Navy and died in October of that same year – the third death the communities had to endure – when his crew failed to take off from an aircraft carrier, plunging into the Pacific Ocean. His body was never found.

“I don’t remember much about him,” Virginia, who was 8 when her brother died, said, “because I was so young. But I do remember him teaching me how to tie my shoes. And he would always brush my hair before school.”

And there was John Robert “Fini” Velasquez, of Johnstown, who was killed in the spring of 1968 in Vietnam. He was the first, and only casualty from the community in that war.

His sister, Gloria, grew up to be a professor of modern languages and literature teacher in California and a well-known poet. In 2008, I wrote a story when she was trying to start a scholarship at the local high school in her brother’s name.

“He remains forever just a kid,” I wrote in the lede. “Frozen in the amber of grief over a life lost too soon. After nearly four decades, eyes now framed with wrinkles have to squint when they look back to recall when he was alive, but even today, tears still come when they do.

“But perhaps, his memory will help send another minority young man or woman off to college, rather than to war.”

Gloria’s brother dropped out of school in the seventh grade. He enlisted in the Marines when he was 17. His mother had to sign the papers to let him.

In part, Velásquez believes, her brother chose to join the Marines because he felt the door to education was closed to him as a minority, and the military was a way out of the fields and the farm labor he had grown up doing.

“In a novel I’m working on, I’m trying to capture the frustration he felt,” she said. “He didn’t feel valued in school and sort of felt pushed out and into the working world. At that time, what they now call the ‘push-out rate’ for Chicano males was extremely high.”

Her brother, 11 months older than her, was a smart young man, Velásquez said.

“He was so young,” she said. “He was proud that he was serving his country, but I think it was that he had dropped out of school, there weren’t any jobs, and he felt the doors weren’t open to him for that chance at an education. Look at the long history of the Chicanos in the military and I think many of them were frustrated like that and falsely believed they’d have better opportunities if they joined.”

Jesse P. Molinar Sr. of Johnstown is Johnny’s uncle. His sister is Johnny’s mom. Nobody called him John, or Johnny though, he said. People called him “Fini.”

“His dad used to always say ‘Que finito es mi hijito,’ (“How very fine my baby is”), and it sort of stuck,” Molinar said. “It started out as finito, and then just got shortened to Fini.”

About a dozen years older than his nephew, Molinar remembers pushing him around in a carriage when he was a baby – and partying with him when they were young men.

“He lived a fast life. He lived the way he wanted to live, and he liked to party,” Molinar said. “Maybe he knew something; that he didn’t have a lot of time. When he came home on leave before he left for Vietnam, we went to Juarez together.” Molinar pauses for a moment.

“We had a pretty good time,” he continues with a laugh, leaving it at that.

“I think he joined the Marines because back then things were pretty slow, and if a kid didn’t finish school, that, the military, was a route to take.”

On that trip to Juarez, Molinar recalls, “Fini told me ‘You know uncle, I got a feeling that I won’t make it back.’” I told him not to worry about it.

“My sister and her family were living over by the drug store. My brother-in-law always had the greatest magazines to read, so they’d leave the door open, or I’d use my key to get in to read when they weren’t home. I was sitting there one day when outside a car door slammed and I looked out the window. There were two Marine sergeants and I thought, ‘Oh my god.’ They said Fini was hurt pretty bad. I asked if he was going to make it, and one shook his head no.

“I had to tell my sister,” he said.

Velásquez, who had just recently been promoted to Lance Corporal, was with his mortar unit April 30, 1968, when a shell exploded during firing. He was burned over more than 90 percent of his body and lingered for nearly a week before he died on May 6.

“You know, I remember something else about that time he came home on leave before going to Vietnam,” Molinar said. “We went to Gilcrest to drink some beers, and we saw a kid Fini knew. Man, he was a big kid, six-foot-two, and I don’t know how much he weighed. They called him Bullwinkle.

“The kid was getting ready to graduate from high school, and he was saying he was going to join the Marines just like Fini had. Fini tried to talk him out of it.

“You know, I heard later that he did join the Marines, and he was killed in Vietnam.”

Memories of her brother haunt the pages of Velásquez’s writing.

One poem, “Black Shoes,” was the one she chose to read in 2005 when she was selected as San Luis Obispo’s eighth Poet Laureate. It’s the one that’s been printed widely, bringing the memory of her brother to an international audience. It’s the one about the box that came home with his personal effects after he was killed:

Just another pair of black shoes,

Vietnam shoes,

Fini’s shoes

stained with blood,

the stench of war,

mom’s piercing cries,

dad’s alcoholic eyes,

Louie’s broken heart

and my wounded soul

as I stare day after day

at those old, black shoes

sitting in my closet,

waiting,

hoping for your return.

Gloria Velásquez said in the story that she knows her brother will only return in her heartbroken dreams. By starting the scholarship in his memory, she said, maybe someone else’s son and brother might have the chance she feels he never got, and maybe not have to bargain their life for the chance to get ahead.

Behind every great editor....

I went to a funeral at Johnstown United Methodist Church Tuesday afternoon. It was a death in the family.

It was the memorial service for Joyce Williams, who along with her husband, Paul, owned The Breeze from the mid-1950s to the late ‘70s. Joyce died March 26 in Wray. She was 89.

I say it was a death in the family because anyone who has worked at The Breeze: pounded on a keyboard writing a story, behind a camera shooting a picture, selling an ad, laying out a page, is part of something bigger and greater than themselves. Together we have all brought the news … good and bad … to the communities of Johnstown and Milliken now for more than 112 years.

During part of Joyce’s service they had a picture of the front page of The Breeze up on the projection screen. A copy of an issue produced by Lesli and me. What I thought looking at it wasn’t so much pride, however, as gratitude.

Gratitude that Paul and Joyce came in to the paper each week and put out an issue, so that I had a newspaper to come to in the early 1990s. Every Thursday since 1904, a copy of The Breeze has hit the streets. That is a legacy that none of us who have worked here take lightly. The story I’ve been telling since Joyce’s death, which I told again on Tuesday, is one she told in 2004, when all the living publishers of the paper sat down for an interview as part of the centennial celebration issue.

As Joyce told the story, she and Paul were traveling during a snowstorm. Joyce was driving. The car started to skid, and it was obvious that it was going into the ditch.

“I just remember trying to steer it so if someone got hurt it would be me and not Paul,” Joyce said. “Because Paul could put the paper out without me. But I couldn’t put it out without Paul.”

Tuesday, after the service, Joyce’s son-in-law, Paul Neubauer, came over to where I was sitting at the reception and, as Paul Harvey used to say, told me “the rest of the story.”

Apparently, after going into the ditch out by Limon, Joyce called Paul and their daughter, Kathy, who were living in Woodland Park at the time.

“She said we needed to come out to Limon and get them,” Paul said. “I kind of pointed out to her that there was a blizzard going on, but Joyce told me we needed to come get them … because they had to put out the paper.”

So Paul borrowed a Jeep and they went and got them, and the paper came out.

Believe it or not, for all the love and adulation and vast riches that one gets running a small town newspaper, there are those Wednesday mornings when the alarm goes off and deadline day dawns when you’re not so sure you really want to put out a paper, or why you should. But yet you do. I have seen people do it sick. I have seen people do it grieving.

Joyce was one of a legacy of “newspaper wives” who have been at The Breeze. Over the years it has published, the paper has for the most part been owned and operated by husbands and wives who put the paper out together. But if you look back at the individual histories, it is usually the husband who gets most of the ink. Most of the credit.

Reality is, and I guess to be fair I should say I am only speaking from my own personal experience here, reality is that the Breeze Wives not only worked at the paper, they also took care of the kids, did the shopping, cooked the meals and everything else that kept a house a home. What’s the old saying about Ginger Rogers? She did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels.

There’s a book from 1940 called “Country Editor.” It was written by Henry Beetle Hough, who ran the The Vineyard Gazette in Edgartown, Massachusetts, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, for more than six decades. In the business it’s somewhat of a textbook on running a small weekly newspaper. It’s a beautiful book. I’ve read it, plenty of times, when I needed a little ink-stained spiritual recharge.

What I’ve also read are histories of the paper that point out that the credit also should rightfully go to Hough’s wife, Elizabeth Bowie Hough, who was the co-owner, co-publisher and co-editor. Some articles even point out that after Henry got all famous with his book writing and stuff, it was his wife who really did the day-to-day at the Gazette.

It was hard to be sad at Tuesday’s service. I know Joyce is again with Paul. As you read this week’s issue, yet another Thursday that the Breeze has published, think of them, as I will, and thank them for their part in writing the history of these communities.

Rest in peace, Joyce.

-30-

Local sisters recall 1955 plane bombing

Before there was James Eagan Holmes, there was John Gilbert Graham.

Sixty years ago, Nov. 1, 1955, on a moonlit night with Thanksgiving just weeks away, Graham, 23, with his wife and young son along with him, took his mother, Daisie Eldora King, 53, to what was then known as Stapleton Airfield in Denver, Colorado, and kissed her goodbye as she boarded United Airlines Flight 629.

The Douglas DC-6B aircraft, nicknamed “Mainliner Denver,” had started the day at New York City’s La Guardia Airport and made a stop in Chicago before continuing on to Denver. From Denver it was to carry 39 passengers, including King, and five crew members on to Portland, Oregon, and then Seattle, Washington. King was ultimately traveling to Alaska to see her daughter and grandchildren

In King’s luggage, which Graham had brought with him when he met his mother to pick her up to take her to the airport, was a wrapped Christmas present from her son: 25 sticks of commercial dynamite, two blaster caps, a timer and a small battery.

Eleven minutes after the plane took off, at 7:03 p.m., over farm fields southwest of Johnstown near the intersection of Weld County Road 13 and Colorado Highway 66, the plane exploded.

Several miles away to the northeast, along Weld County Road 15, Janet (Leinweber) Liniger, then 15, and her 9-year-old sister, Joyce, were getting ready as Joyce said this week, “to go visiting neighbors, that’s what you did back then,” with their parents.

Janet remembers the windows rattling. 

Her father, who was sitting by the window, said he saw an explosion in the sky.

Thinking at first the explosion was the home of a neighbor the family jumped in their vehicle and headed out. In the night sky as they drove they could see two flares slowly drifting toward the earth.

The flares were the last airborne remnants of Flight 629, used by airplanes if they had an emergency to illuminate a possible landing spot. The debris of the plane and the bodies of the passengers had already crashed to the earth, where it and they lay in burning and twisted wreckage over six square miles of Weld County farmland.

Joyce and Janet and their parents were among the first of a group of nearby farm families who had either seen the explosion, or heard it, and who rushed to the scene. No police, no firefighters, were yet there. Joyce walked over the uneven ground, which was used for growing sugar beets, in the darkness with her mother. Janet looped her fingers through her father’s belt as they made their way across the field. 

All around them they could see fires burning, and Joyce recalls, in front of them a huge crater-like hole in the ground.

She also remembers seeing a man, in a uniform she says, still strapped in his seat.

Janet remembers her and her father coming upon a woman, her body on fire, and her father throwing dirt onto her trying to put out the flames.

“It was just surreal,” Janet said. “I remember the moon was bright, and looking up into the sky and seeing these clouds floating by, and there we are, stumbling around out there.”

“Mom turned us around and took me back to the car,” Joyce said.

As first responders began to show up on the scene they left, and both sisters laugh now at the recollection, almost as surreal as the scene that night; they went ahead and went visiting.

Neither remembers any of the conversation the adults may have had.

“I was 15. I did what I guess you’d expect a 15-year-old girl to do,” Janet said. “I called my friends.”

Joyce said she doesn’t remember much of what she did that night.

“But after that,” she said quietly, sitting Tuesday night at her sister’s kitchen table with her big sister looking on as only a big sister can, “every time I’d hear a plane I’d run outside and watch it and try to keep it in the sky. And for a long time, I drew pictures of planes with people lying on the ground.”

By the next morning the FBI already had agents from Washington, D.C. on their way to the site and to the National Guard Armory, which still stands along 8th Street in downtown Greeley, where the bodies had been taken as a makeshift morgue. Through its vast archive of fingerprints the FBI was able to begin to identify victims. Meanwhile, agents along with other law enforcement and personnel from United Air Lines and the Civil Aeronautics Board began the process of going through the wreckage.

Bringing in surveyors to establish a grid pattern in the fields, officials took painstaking notes as to where each piece of wreckage had been found and then had it trucked  to a hangar at Stapleton where it was laid out in the same configuration and then put back together.

It became quickly obvious that the plane had been brought down by an explosion, residue of which was found on pieces of wreckage that had made up one of the plane’s cargo holds. Ruling out from flight manifests the possibility that something explosive or flammable was being transported on the plane, the FBI began looking at the flight insurance policies that had been taken out prior to the plane’s departure – a common thing back in that time when airports literally had vending machines in the terminal.

Within days suspicion began to fall on John Gilbert Graham, who had taken out three policies on his mother, one for $37,500 with him as the beneficiary. Agents also learned that Graham stood to inherit a large amount of money upon his mother’s death.

Agents also learned that Graham had tried to collect on insurance following an explosion at a restaurant owned by his mother in Denver that he ran, as well as on a truck he claimed had stalled on railroad tracks. Several years prior, he had also been convicted of forgery and “bootlegging.”

As the investigation continued the authorities would also find perhaps a darker reason for the murder: When Graham was three years old his father had died and for a time the family faced severe financial hardships. So severe that Graham’s mother had been forced to place him in an “orphanage.” When his mother remarried, and those financial conditions improved, she had not sought to have him returned to her care.

After several interviews with agents, on Nov. 14, Graham confessed to the bombing and was charged with sabotage. Several days later, he was charged with the murder of his mother. While prosecutors chose to only charge Graham with the one killing, at the time the bombing of Flight 629 was the worst single incident of mass murder in the country’s history.

Graham would plead not guilty by reason of insanity and would later recant his confession. He was eventually ruled sane and his trial would be the first in the nation to be broadcast on television.

On May 5, 1956, after being out of the courtroom for deliberation for 69 minutes, the jury found Graham guilty of murder in the first degree and recommended the penalty of death.

Graham was executed in the gas chamber at the Colorado State Penitentiary on Jan. 11, 1957. Before his execution, he said to reporters about the bombing, “as far as feeling remorse for these people, I don’t. I can’t help it. Everybody pays their way and takes their chances. That’s just the way it goes.”

Andrew J. Field would write in his book “Mainliner Denver the Bombing of Flight 629,” which was published on the 50th anniversary of the event, “The execution had taken eleven minutes – the same length of time Flight 629 was in the air before the bomb exploded.” 

Janet Liniger said she remembers staying up and listening to news reports of the execution on the radio. She also remembers it was shortly after the execution that she had a dream one night. 

“You know how they always talk about how whether we dream in black and white or Technicolor?” she said. “I remember this one was in color. I don’t remember much of it, but what I do remember was this red sky.”

Joyce, who would eventually marry local farmer Ron Klein, who also witnessed the explosion as he was working at a nearby farm, remarks like a true farm wife that she thinks about that night 60 years ago every time she drives by the crash site, and often wonders how long it took for that field where the flaming debris landed to again become useable as farm land; how long it was before that place of winter death was again a place for new spring life.

Field would write in his book: “…The tragedy left an indelible impression on the land... Literally. The following spring, a farmer who planted alfalfa in a field where several of the victims had landed noticed that the seed would not take hold in the areas of earth that had been compressed by the falling bodies. The phenomenon caused the crop to grow in eerie outlines of the deceased … “

The sisters say they never talked much about that night, if at all. It was only after Ron read the Field book, Joyce said, that she even discussed that night when she was a little girl with her own children. Janet said she only recently herself talked about it with her kids.

“I guess we just put it away and just processed it,” Janet said with a sad smile, looking at her sister, who looked back and smiled herself as the two fell silent for a moment, perhaps in their minds leaving the comfort of the kitchen table and going back to that night when they were young and found themselves in that field. “I guess we’re still processing it.”

Johnstown resident Rick Tittle was instrumental in providing resource material and background information for this story, including the Andrew J. Field book and also a copy of the 1959 Warner Bros. film “The FBI Story” starring James Stewart which opens with a recreation of the bombing and the investigation. Information (as well as this photo) was also taken from the John Gilbert Graham page on the website www.murderpedia.org.

My date with George Bush (an excerpt from the "how the war played out in The Breeze" chapter)

...Naturally, given that it was his war, in 2004 I opposed the re-election of George Bush, who naturally made much of his campaign about how dangerous it would be to change warmongers in mid-stream, not to mention piss off political contributors like Haliburton, who were greasing their corporate profit machine with blood.

In another op/ed at around the same time I had taken on Marilyn Musgrave, the representative in the U.S. House representing our district. Musgrave had been carrying the homophobic legislative water for the party with the Federal Marriage Amendment. A guy in Johnstown was running against her in the Republican primary and had encouraged everyone to change their affiliation to GOP so they could vote against her. I did. And then I wrote about why I had done so, namely in response to her work for the amendment.

But the war, and all the anger, was wearing me down. In the spirit of trying to show we all were still Americans, I had written a comic piece the week Bush was at the convention saying that little had I known when I changed my affiliation that the Republican National Committee intended to pick a party member - completely at random - for a special honor: Like some politicized version of a "Tiger Beat" magazine contest, the winner would win a date with George Bush and Dick Cheney. I ran the piece under the headline: “To understand a man, walk in his shoes” 

NEW YORK - "Nice Chuck Taylors...."

The Secret Service agent couldn't have been more than 30. A fine specimen of young American manhood. If he wasn't standing in an elevator with me, admiring my high-top canvas basketball shoes, he could have been on the streets of Najaf or Fallujah.

"Thanks. My wife and daughters bought me three pairs for Father's Day," I said. "One of the other pairs is black with flames. My daughter, Harper, just bought a pink pair to go back to school in."

"Pink?" the agent said, interested and seeming to consider the fashion concept the same way he might appraise security risks in a crowded photo-op for the president. "I'll have to tell my wife. We've got a daughter that'd love that."

The elevator stopped and the doors opened to reveal a hotel hallway filled with more guys in black suits and sunglasses than a screening of "The Matrix." Nobody complimented my choice of footwear. But I was treated like a guest, nonetheless.

"Well, not technically a date," the RNC aide who called me to make the arrangements said when I tried to break the ice by making that joke. That was just sort of the Madison Avenue shorthand. And since I was a guy, that word would definitely not be used, given the pending Federal Marriage Amendment and all. Several agents led me down a hall. One recited the dos and don'ts of my upcoming visit. Basically it came down to do behave, and you don't get beat. Sounded fair to me, I said.

We arrived at a door and an agent knocked. Another agent opened the door and beckoned us in. The president, vice president and Attorney General John Ashcroft were sitting in chairs arranged around a television on which the convention was playing out.

Nobody was paying attention to the action in Madison Square Garden on the screen, however, because Ashcroft was showing Bush and Cheney a T-shirt. On it was an old, sepia-toned photograph of a quartet of Indian braves holding rifles and looking resolute. HOMELAND SECURITY was written above the photo in big, bold letters. Below, it said, "Fighting Terrorism since 1492."

"I got this from a vendor in Times Square," Ashcroft was saying. "I'm going to give it to Tom Ridge for his birthday."

Our arrival interrupted their conversation. Ashcroft quickly shoved the shirt underneath the cushion of his chair like a freshman hiding a bag of weed when someone suddenly came in their dorm room unexpectedly.

"This is Matt Lubich, Mr. President," one of the agents said. "He won the contest."

"Welcome," the commander-in-chief said, rising from his chair and walking across the room to shake hands. "Is this your first trip to New York?"

"No, I was here once before," I said. "But I was so overwhelmed I really didn't see much beyond Times Square. It's a lot easier to get around town with a police escort this time."

"Well, come on in," the president said. "Sit down. You know, I'm sure, Vice President Dick Cheney." The vice president didn't rise, or extend his hand, but squeezed out a tight grimace and said, "Nice to meet you."

"And of course, our attorney general, Mr. John Ashcroft," President Bush continued. Ashcroft rose and shook my hand. Quickly, the attorney general made some sort of excuse and he and the agents exited the room, leaving the two most powerful men in America, and possibly the skinniest, alone.

Ever heard of uncomfortable silences? The television droning on in the background was the only sound. I'm sure, somewhere in the city, a dog barked.

"So, Matt, what do you do for a living?" Dick Cheney asked.

"I edit and co-own a weekly newspaper in northern Colorado," I replied.

"One of the eunuchs at the orgy," Cheney said, a thin smile playing on his lips and a smirk passing between him and the president.

"Ah, Dick's just yanking your chain, Matt," President Bush said. "Sit down."

I took the chair that had been vacated by Ashcroft. The president sat back down. Again, the word uncomfortable silence comes to mind.

"So what are you guys doing in town?" I asked.

More silence. "That was sort of a joke," I said.

"Sort of," the president said. "Here's a better one. How many reporters does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

"I don't know," I said. "How many?"

"Two if they're from the New York Times," the president said. "One to screw it in and one to write a story about watching it, even though they were never in the room."

I had to admit that was funnier.

We sat there, silence enveloping the three of us like a fog. The president, looking bored, picked up the remote and changed the channel. Like most males who can't think of anything to say to each other we sat there watching ESPN Sports Center. On the television, they were showing tape of Dale Earnhardt Jr. winning Saturday night's race at Bristol.

"Nice to see Little E healing up and back on track," the president said.

"He doesn't have a chance," Cheney said, staring straight at the television. "Jeff Gordon's gonna win the championship."

"Hey," the president said, looking down at my feet that rested on the plush pile carpet of the hotel room. "Nice shoes."

Even in this divided nation of ours, it's nice to know that on some things, we can all still find a common ground.

The week after the piece ran, I had three separate people ask me how I liked my trip to New York....

#journalismasemotionalarchaeology

At The Breeze everyone keeps an empty copy paper box beneath their desk that we throw papers into that someone might find they need down the road. Naturally, on occasion, you need to dump the box. My standard procedure is to take a handful of the papers at the top (the most recent) and then just dump the rest.


The box beneath my desk was beyond full one Sunday morning when I came into the newsroom to do some work. Overflowing. Overwhelming. As I started to empty it, I decided on a whim to look specifically at the oldest piece of paper on the bottom.


A page proof from the Aug. 11, 2011, Breeze. The page where we started a collection of stories recalling and remembering my old Breeze boss Clyde Briggs, who had died a week earlier after an accident.


The idea was one of the graces that come amid grief. Former Breeze reporter Mike Wailes had called me in those shocked and shattered days following Clyde's death and suggested we gather some of the reporters who had worked for him, asking each to write a piece, which would be then run as one larger work entitled: “Working for Clyde.”


As I stared at the piece of paper I was staring back into the eyes of Clyde. For art for the story we had run a picture of him and two of his biker buddies sitting on the main street in Sturgis at the motorcycle rally holding up a copy of The Breeze. Throughout the years of owning the paper Lesli and I have asked people to take copies with them when they travel and send us a picture for a “Where Do You Read Your Breeze?” feature we do. 

Clyde was also wearing a Johnstown Breeze long-sleeve t-shirt we had given him when we had a batch made several years before the picture was taken: exactly 11 years to the day before his death.


I stared at the piece of paper and thought of everything that has happened, chronicled in part by the pieces of paper in that box, since then. Clyde’s death shook me to my foundation and set me into an emotional tailspin that nearly cost me my marriage. It broke my heart, and since the day I threw that proof into the box, I have been trying to mend it and myself. In many ways I have become a lot like Clyde, for good, and for ill.


We are the sum and total of the moments of our life. The razor thin pieces of paper that, piled one atop the other, often fill us to overflowing and create a weight that sometimes we cannot even lift until we cull through them small handful by small handful, and throw out the ones we no longer need.

Working For Clyde

A god among men…


By Michael Wailes/For The Johnstown Breeze

When I actually take the time to count my blessings, I’m always full of an almost overwhelming gratitude for the people who I’ve had not only the honor and pleasure to know and be known by, but also those who have had such an influence on my life.

This past week, we have all been shocked with the tragic and sudden loss of Clyde Briggs, former publisher/owner of The Johnstown Breeze. I know that what I am about to write couldn’t possibly give proper, or even adequate, credit to a man who gave so much of himself to this community in the short time that he was here, but I want to at least share the impact Clyde had on my life.

My earliest memories of Clyde were that he was a strange man. Strange in the sense that he didn’t look a lot like the other guys I was accustomed to seeing around Johnstown. He had a long, shaggy, mop of dark hair, wore dark glasses and “funny” clothes. As a seven-year-old boy, I found him to be very intimidating. I had never actually met a real live “hippie” and I guess I thought Clyde probably was one. Mind you, I was just a kid from the country with a second-grade education.

Apart from his unusual appearance, the other thing that stands out in my memory of Clyde was that he was everywhere – there wasn’t anything that was going on in the school or in the town that Clyde wasn’t present for, taking pictures and writing down names. Looking back now, it seems almost supernatural that he was so omnipresent in the community, but back then, it was so common to see him around every corner that it would have seemed strange if he hadn’t been there. It was that “being there” that would come to have a large impact on my life.

A few months back, I was thumbing through a scrapbook that my mother had compiled of my life during my school years. Scattered liberally among my report cards, letters from girlfriends and pictures of the handsome young man that I was, were photos and press clippings from The Breeze; documentation of my various athletic, artistic, scholastic, criminal and recreational endeavors. And among just about every one was a simple story or photo credit attributed to a single person:

Clyde Briggs.

As I sit here today and consider those scraps of paper from a truly by-gone era, I am amazed and humbled by the effort that a single person put forth to make me, nobody of any spectacular significance, something of a local celebrity time and again, even if that status only lasted for a brief day or two. But even more so, to think that he thought those things that I did were interesting or important enough to be placed into a historical record of sorts – something for generations to look back upon and see that I was included. That I mattered. That I was something. That, “On such-and-such day in such-and-such year, Michael D. Wailes was a god among men!”

The truth be known, my accomplishments were never that great. I was just an average kid in an average town, with slightly below-average grades. And that definition fit my friends as well; very few of us really shined at anything in particular. But on Thursday mornings, there was always a commotion as we would all gather around the school’s single copy of The Breeze to see our names and pictures in the black and white. It was on those Thursdays that Clyde transformed us from ordinary to extraordinary.

Shortly after I got started in the newspaper business, I knew that I wanted to run my own shop. I wanted to be the man “in charge,” the guy everyone knew and came to for the story. I wanted to be the big star. When I was handed the keys to the Berthoud Recorder and the Lyons Recorder (two publications that Clyde had owned as well briefly), I learned quickly that it wasn’t me who was going to be the star, but rather those in the communities that I was now in service of.


When my bosses would ridicule me for the stories I wrote, or the photos I took, or ask, “Who is ever going to care about that,” when I would feature the 3rd Grade Spelling Bee champion on the front page, I would always think of my younger days in Johnstown. Think about being that kid who spelled all the words right that day. How it would matter to him. His friends, his family, his grandma in West Virginia, and his uncle in the East Indies; they will care about it, that’s who.

At the time, I don’t believe I ever specifically credited Clyde for my attitude and approach to how I ran those papers, but there is no doubt that it was a direct result of the example that he had set in my own life.

My experience at the Recorder gave me a tremendous insight into the dedication and work ethic that Clyde had possessed, not to mention the sacrifices he surely must have made in his personal life to make sure that I was always photographed, or that my story was always told.

And while I will carry these memories, feelings, and gratitude with me for the rest of my life, it is awesome to know that I am just one of hundreds, if not thousands, whose lives were similarly impacted by the work that Clyde has done. My social media accounts are validation of that – I am absolutely amazed at the number of people who have shared identical memories and thankfulness for Clyde and the person he was in each of their lives. In fact I’m sure that anyone who is reading this now, who has lived in Johnstown anytime during the last 30 years, could easily replace any reference I’ve made of myself for themselves and it would still be relevant.

I originally wanted to close this by saying something to the effect of how I’ve lost a wonderful friend, but the truth is Johnstown has lost a wonderful friend. Clyde took a genuine interest in the goings on of our community; helping us to celebrate our wins with each other, and likewise helping us to overcome our losses.

Michael D. Wailes is a native Johnstownian. He is currently an Interactive Developer at Burns Marketing Communications in Johnstown.



Lessons from Clyde went way beyond journalism…

By Alan Gibson/For the Johnstown Breeze

It was a perfect match in the early 1980’s. I was a hometown boy and a CSU journalism student who loved sports and needed a job. He was the publisher of The Johnstown Breeze, and sports weren’t exactly his thing. So it began, my rewarding experience of three years working for – and with – Clyde Briggs.

My role was simple at first: go to games, talk to coaches and write the stories. Soon enough my duties expanded and I began to spend more time at the office around Clyde, Ardis and the kids. Yes, I became acquainted with photography, layout and design, advertising and subscriptions, but the Clyde Briggs that I knew displayed some admirable traits that I still remember over 30 years later.

First of all, it was never boring working for Clyde. He had a way of making everything … interesting … and fun, even if it was tedious or otherwise boring. I can’t remember him ever being in a foul mood, and I can’t remember Clyde ever getting into a shouting match with a customer who came into the office. Even if something didn’t go exactly the way it should, it was only a matter of time before he would unleash that unique, distinctive laugh to wipe the slate clean. As an employer, he made the office an adventure. If reality TV had existed back then, “The Breeze Office” would have surely been a hit, starring The Briggs Family, Paul and Joyce Williams and me. It made for a quite diverse cast.

We all knew Clyde for his passions and interests, and while I worked at The Breeze two of his passions were weightlifting and The Holy Bible. What a great combination Clyde combined to make himself both physically and spiritually fit. Of course, there was the photography passion that he intertwined with the bodybuilding, and I remember seeing those pictures of Clyde looking chiseled!

I also remember making trips to Clyde’s parents’ home in Denver, where Clyde would take on a rebuilding, moving or remodeling project. He showed sacrifice and commitment to his parents and their well-being. He took care of them because they took care of him. Clyde’s heart was big. He rarely hesitated to help those in need and often went out of his way, despite being inconvenienced. He showed this concern for everyone, whether they were family, friends, acquaintances or strangers.

These are the memories of Clyde that will remain with me. Most have nothing to do with the newspaper business but with people business. When it came time to interact with the young, old, or in-between, Clyde was a master at sensing what they needed. He was a man counted on to deliver the town’s news, but the way he delivered advice, assistance, humor, seriousness, love and compassion is the best news of all.

Alan Gibson teaches journalism at Roosevelt High School.



There is an empathy that must be learned…

By Bill McCarthy/For The Johnstown Breeze

Words always seem inadequate when you need them the most.

I’ll never find the appropriate words to express my gratitude to Clyde Briggs and his family. When I met Clyde and Ardis Briggs, they were the new owners of the Johnstown Breeze. In 1980, I was finally finishing college and looking for an internship where I could learn something about the real world of newspapering.

This was the era of Watergate. Everybody coming out of journalism school wanted to be an investigative reporter. But there are a lot of fundamentals to learn. And most journalists start at a small community weekly or daily newspaper.

Some of us love small-town life. Few take the leap of faith in a community’s future prosperity, however, and bet everything on building a newspaper in a small town.

Clyde and Ardis were such people, and they loved the Johnstown and Milliken community.

The tradition of a mom-and-pop owned and operated weekly newspaper is unfortunately unappreciated. The owners invest their life savings and life’s work into documenting the joys and sorrows of a local community they love. They try to keep local government honest and help the community thrive.

The community newspaper still provides that unifying forum, but people are less connected by their geography. Perhaps it is a symptom of the same affliction that prevents us from knowing our neighbors. That’s not an affliction that infected Clyde Briggs, though.

Clyde wanted to know everybody. He would help anybody at any time. I could not afford a wedding photographer; so he used his exceptional photo skills to take photos. I needed a babysitter I could trust; he volunteered his children.

Professionally, Clyde helped me see the importance of being involved in the community you work in and really thinking through the ramifications of anything that the newspaper reported. After all, you are bound to see the folks you write about in a small town.

But there is more to it than that, there is an empathy that must be learned. Along with a penchant for accuracy, Clyde had a fundamental sense of fairness based on understanding the community. William Allen White, the famous small-town editor from Emporia, Kan., once wrote, “If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own … how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.”

As much as he tried to fight it sometimes, Clyde had that gentler side, and it was very much a part of the Breeze. I am going to miss my old friend and mentor. But I will always carry with me the friendship, the memories and the lessons learned.

Bill McCarthy is the editor of The Cowboy State Free Press, a Wyoming nonprofit news service that brings a full and clear view of state government, elections, taxes and spending to citizens in a way that is understandable and accessible. To check it out, go to: www.cowboystatefreepress.org.


Hell’s Angels and Newsmen…

By Paul Shockley/For The Johnstown Breeze

If (Hell’s Angel) Sonny Barger and (Washington Post Executive Editor) Ben Bradlee could conceive, you had Clyde Briggs.

That’s the man who changed the course of my life. I can’t remember what I expected that morning in 1996 when I first walked inside that creaky, oddly appointed office on Parish Avenue to meet the man under whose leadership I would learn. It was an internship. Walking through the front door and hearing a bell chiming above, there was a wild dark-haired man in sunglasses, booming in laughter and chatting on the phone with someone. I can’t remember what they were talking about because my eyes were fixed on the man’s chaps. Chaps. Newsroom chaps. You know, because every good newsroom has chaps, sawed-off shotguns surely strapped to the underside of desks, Lord knows what else in the darkroom. I knew I was in the right place but I wasn’t sure if I had the right guy.

“Hi, I’m the boss,” were roughly the words Clyde greeted me with. Such was my introduction to a world of deadlines, X-Acto knives, light boards and work in the darkroom (which in my time involved nothing felonious or seedy). I remember seeing how much the paper meant to Clyde and Ardis, and later, Matt and Lesli, and how it was at the same time a pleasure, ass-pain and responsibility to the community and others.

That impressed me.

While I didn’t understand Clyde on certain things, I valued what he had to say on just about anything.

And while I wish he wasn’t the person he was in certain ways, I’m better for having known that person. Someone you don’t forget. Hell Angels and newsmen leave their mark.

Paul Shockley is the crime and courts reporter for The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel in Grand Junction, Colo.



How do you repay someone you owe your life…

By Matt Lubich/The Johnstown Breeze

In the new-life spring of 1991, I came to Johnstown with the stank of death hanging over me. My aunt had been murdered in Virginia three months earlier. Two months after that, my dad was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

Coming to Johnstown was a coming back of sorts. My wife Lesli and I met at UNC. We had moved to New Mexico, when Lesli was offered a job at the Weld County Health Department in Greeley. I interviewed with the Longmont Times-Call, and had a drift that I may at least have a chance for it (I didn’t). We were looking for something in the middle. Something commutable for both of us.

“I knew this girl who said she lived in this little farm town outside of Greeley called Johnstown,” I said.

So I did what I hate now. I called the local paper and asked if there were any rentals. Not offering to buy a paper. Just simply, “can you read me the classifieds?”

Luckily, I got Ardis on the phone and she looked at the several that were there and made suggestions.

I tell them to go buy an f-ing paper. I learned that from Clyde Briggs.

I learned a lot from Clyde. One, that I absolutely stink at anything mechanical. I remember once expressing wistfulness to buy some old classic ride, maybe a Mustang or Camaro, and he said someone like me, who couldn’t fix a car, shouldn’t have something like that because it would always need work.

I remember feeling physically hurt by the comment. But that was Clyde. He would mock me because I was too much of a pussy to light my furnace in the winter, but then he’d get up from his desk at the Breeze and go over to my house and do it.

I had to sit my two daughters down when they were young and explain that he so mercilessly teased them when they came into the office because it was his way of showing affection. And, well, it was fun.

That was Clyde. Flawed no doubt, but sometimes, oh so fun.

I own this paper today with my wife, and raise my children with it, and have the life I have, because of Ardis and Clyde. And since Voltaire said, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth,” I will say this now in ink slathered on a dead tree for everyone to read:

As we prepared to make the deal to buy the Breeze, Clyde panicked, which rhymes with manic, and if you honestly knew him, you know that rhymes with Clyde.
For his reasons, he was re-thinking the sale. Ardis firmly said they had made the deal and they were going through with it.

What a pure force that woman’s kindness and quiet strength and faith and Clyde’s rowdy boy enthusiasm and humor made together. It was beautiful when it worked, which was why it was so painful when it didn’t.

I’ve been trying to think if Clyde was more of an older brother to me, or a father figure. I think somewhere in the middle of both. Which figures, nobody or nothing was like Clyde, except Clyde.

What I owe Clyde is the basic, primal love of this business that he filled the air of this newsroom, and me, with. The roller coaster, crass, and down-right-creepy world of watching and talking to people and telling their stories for a living. In your citizen world it’s called stalking. We call it journalism.

Reporters want to feel safe at their newspaper. They want to feel like they can try new things, push things, create a little mischief by banging on a keyboard, make things a little better by asking a question. Clyde gave me that environment as a reporter, and as an editor and owner I try to give it to the people who work for me.

And no one who lived through that dark spring of 1994 can live through this past week without flashbacks to Clyde and Ardis’ son, Luke, being killed at 16 in a car accident in New Mexico.

Coming out of the Briggs home last Thursday night, after Clyde had died, I wrote in my notebook: “So sad, to be so sad, again in that house.”


It feels odd to be back in this place of grief … talking to the same teens you tried to comfort about Luke, who are now grown men, some of whom have gone to war and who have children. This past week the grief of 17 years ago has filtered and mingled with the pain of today, like incense floating up into the newsroom ceiling as I sit and type this.

And it was troubling me. What was the message? Do bad things just keep happening sometimes for no good reason? And if so, why to this good and kind family?


Then I got my answer. Who knows, maybe it was just Clyde and Luke showing off. Look at what we can do now…

Walking to the office Saturday night, brooding on all this, I heard the sound of skateboard wheels grinding along Charlotte in the darkness. Just like nearly two decades ago when Luke and his gang would roll down the same hill. In a moment, two teen-age boys glided slowly out of the shadows, muttering their plans low enough that the old guy walking couldn’t hear them, then turning left onto the diagonal behind the old town hall, and down toward the new sign welcoming people to the community that soon will have floodlights illuminating it.

Life goes on. That was the message. It went on after my aunt, it went on after my dad, after Luke, and now after Clyde, and someday, after me.

We fill the hole with memories, and we go on … gliding into the darkness toward the light.

Matt Lubich is the executive editor and co-owner, with his wife Lesli Bangert, of The Johnstown Breeze. He has worked at the paper since 1991.

Like funeral pyre smoke on the wind as a prayer...

One month from tonight will be the 24th anniversary of the murder of my Aunt Michele. It would be reeling from this event, and the subsequent news two months later that my dad was dying of lung cancer, that I would find myself coming to Johnstown and The Breeze in the spring of 1991.

For years the approaching anniversary would set me brooding. About her and about him and all that lay ahead. Over the past two-plus decades some years have been worse than others, though tonight I'm not sure whether the years when it crossed my mind and weighed upon my heart less were "the better ones" as I have said before. Tonight, I find myself feeling a little ashamed about that.

I became a writer in part from and by the encouragement of my Aunt Michele. I will pick up a book on journalism, or writing, or just good writing period, and as I open it startle as I again see her handwriting in the inscription on the inside of the cover. Always the same message: It's not such a dumb-ass dream to think you can and could be a writer. Go for it. For that I owe her part of the credit that I am writing this tonight, and that I am writing this book.

So, nearly a quarter-of-a-century after everything seemed to be falling apart, only to rebuild to the man and place where I find myself tonight, here's a little bit from the book, from a chapter about covering murders and how her's helped shape that for me as a journalist: Sent up on the cyber-ether like funeral pyre smoke on the wind as a prayer that she might read it.

....Just out of college I got a job with a small weekly in Fort Lupton, a roughneck oil town in northern Colorado. The first Monday I showed up at work I ended up covering a story about a Hispanic teenager who had been shot over the weekend.

The kid had allegedly been up to no good late on a Saturday night and someone had taken a shot at him, maybe to just scare his ass, but they hit and killed him.

“We found him lying in the alley, tiny little hole in his down coat about the size of my pinky,” the police chief said, sitting in his office and holding his hand up in the air like he was Emily Post showing me how to drink a cup of tea. Without saying it I got the definite sense from him that in his opinion what you had here was basically a gang-banger who got a bitter taste of street (or alley) justice, and a lot of taxpayer resources weren’t going to get wasted hunting down whoever did it.

The wages of sin.

If I recall, I didn’t even call the kid’s family to get a comment about his death. Just sucked up and regurgitated the chief’s on-the-record “cop speak” about how they were investigating, but finding few leads, blah … blah … blah.

I think I learned some of my most important lessons about covering these types of stories when I found myself on the other side of the police tape … as a member of the family of someone who was murdered.

My Aunt Michele lived in Virginia Beach, Virginia. My mom’s little sister, she was big and blond and larger than life. An actress and dancer as a young girl she had put all that away when she found herself a single parent after her husband left her with a young child, and she was just beginning to get back into musical theater in her 40s after her son had been raised and was on his own.

She made her living as a legal secretary. She worked for a group of lawyers late at night in the empty office complex after everyone had gone home. This gave her a chance to go to auditions and rehearsals and dance classes during the day and evening.

At the time of her murder I was living with Lesli in New Mexico, newly married, not even in journalism. Unable to get on with a paper when we had moved down there I had taken a job as the assistant director of public relations at a rich-kid liberal arts college. One afternoon I came back to my office and there was a message to call my dad in Colorado. Middle of the day. Unusual. I called and he had “that voice.”

This is the guy who talked to me once for 15 minutes before he said, “Well, I guess I took your mom to the hospital today…”

I was convinced it was my mom. Heart attack. Would have never imagined he’d say, “Your Aunt Michele was murdered.”

Strangled, stuck in the trunk of her car that was found still sitting in the parking lot of the office complex where she worked the morning after she was last seen about 10:30 the night before leaving a restaurant and saying she was heading back to work.

That evening was the beginning of a night of a thousand sorrows. The first stumbling steps of a march of pain, confusion and grief that would eventually lead to my dad diagnosed with terminal cancer and dead himself in less than six months. Even though I wasn’t in the business at the time, when I heard the news I immediately went into reporter-mode. Maybe out of self-preservation. That ability to look at anything as long as it’s just a story.

Lesli and I went home, numb and in shock. I called Virginia and talked to my grandmother, who between sobs told me that the police wouldn’t tell her anything. Not even whether or not her daughter had been raped.

I realized that I knew a reporter at the Virginia Beach paper. He had worked at the daily in Greeley covering education and our paths had crossed on a number of stories when I was working for the college paper. I called. He wasn’t there, but after what I assume was a quick call to him to attest to my bona fides, the reporter who was covering the story called me back.

He started telling me the details: what the cops were saying, what he had in the story for the morning’s edition that was getting printed literally as we spoke. Just a matter of the facts. All the sudden he paused, realizing he was talking to a relative.

“Uh, sorry dude…” he said. I told him I understood. And I did. This was just a story to him.

I was able that night to find out that she hadn't been raped. Cold comfort to my grandmother, whose daughter lay in a morgue in Norfolk, and who they still hadn’t let her see, but some comfort nonetheless.

The next day was a blur of phone calls and planning. I remember Lesli looking at me at one point and saying, “this is like a cop show on TV. This doesn’t happen to regular people.” What we had found out was that yes it does. That evening, we made the 7-hour drive to Colorado to my parent’s house.

I remember driving through the darkness toward God knew what. I’ll never listen to the first Indigo Girls album without thinking of those hours spent in the cab of that pickup with just Lesli, that tape playing over and over, and I’ll never be able to re-pay her for being with me as I made that drive.

Secure yourself to heaven….

Hold on tight, the night has come.

Fasten up your earthly burdens,

You have just begun….

When I got to Pueblo and saw my mom is when I broke down. This became real. This was not a story. This was my mother and her heart was broken and that broke mine.

In the morning I was on a plane to Virginia with my mom and dad. The next week is so burned into my memory that it doesn’t seem like 24 years ago sometimes, but more like 24 minutes.

Michele was murdered right at the time when the Iraq War, the first one, was going on. I used to go back to the Holiday Inn hotel room and watch the war live on TV as a respite from the reality I was living in.

When one thinks of the beach they think of sun and sand and summer. During the winter it can be angry place, and it was the perfect locale for such a painful and confusing time. The ocean which I usually only saw in June or July or August on family vacations was grey and churning in February, with waves crashing on the beach and cold, biting sleet that stung your face as it blew in from off-shore as I would sit at night on the balcony of my ocean-front hotel room and sob and scream into the wind.....

....what I learned through all of this was that these stories are about people. Everyone is someone’s aunt, someone’s sister. Someone’s brother. Someone’s child. That realization hit me as I sat in a car at a stoplight on the way to the funeral in Virginia Beach and glanced over at the newspaper vending rack on the corner, only to see the photograph of my aunt that I had just seen as I walked down the stairs of her house staring back at me from the front page of the paper.

I think about that kid in Ft. Lupton, now lain moldering in his grave for nearly three decades. Would he have gotten his life together and gone on to have kids like I did? A wife? A business of his own? Or would he have ended up in prison? Would he have killed someone himself?

I haven’t been above using this hard and heartbroken won knowledge to get an interview. I tell people about my aunt, in part to let them know that I understand, that I’ve been there, but also in part to break that barrier between them and me ... the grieved and the messenger. Most of the time, honestly, I’m not sure if it’s to comfort them, or get the story.

Most times, I think, it’s a bit of both....