The Backroom: Life among the ink-stained savages

There is a definite caste system to a newspaper.

You have advertising, all dollars and deals, and editorial, the news side, nerds with pens and pads and principles and the personalities of peacocks.

News is always screeching about how it must be kept pure of the filthy money of advertising, which in reality cashes its paychecks. I have known of papers where members of the advertising staff were actually forbidden by policy from entering the newsroom nerdom.

But if there is one thing news and advertising can agree upon, it’s they both feel superior to the men and women in the backroom: The printers, the people who prepare the papers for delivery, and those who actually either get it to the subscriber or newsstand.

News and advertising are populated for the most part by people with degrees. The backroom is manual labor, where a high school diploma, or even a command of English, is often not among the job requirements.

The college kids and the townies.

One of the first things I tell new reporters who come to work for me is to never look down their noses at the people in the backroom. In fact, I suggest, make friends with them.

“All your pretty words aren’t going to matter if that person delivering the paper doesn’t get up in the morning and get it to the subscribers and the newsstands,” I tell them. “If you treat the people in the backroom with respect, they will move heaven and earth for you. Treat them like you’re better than them, and they’ll stand there and watch the presses roll with a major fuck-up of yours on the front page and just smile.”

In reality I think my affection … or maybe more accurately connection … for and to the backroom … comes from my literal roots in the business.

I grew up working class. There were no respectable Republican cloth coats in my mom’s closet. My dad carried mail, and on Sundays, when he wasn’t carrying mail, he delivered the Sunday newspaper, The Star-Journal Chieftain, taking bundles to the convenience stores and other places where people picked up copies, and filling the numerous vending racks around the city.

Every Sunday morning at 3:30 a.m. a truck from the Star-Journal, usually drive by one of my dad’s old stock car racing buddies Scottie Oldedaker, would stop next to my dad’s pick-up parked on the street and toss papers into the back.

I’d awaken to the sound and lay in bed listening to the muted metallic echoing whump… whump… whump…  whump… as the bundles hit the bed of the truck, and then hear my dad’s smoker-hack cough and his footsteps walking around the house. Then I’d hear the front door close, his truck start, and then silence as I wondered where he was going and what he’d see in the middle of the night when I was leashed by childhood to my bed.

I’d fall back asleep, only to be awakened in the morning to him coming back home. My mom would make him a bologna and egg sandwich and I would sit on his lap in his Lazy-Boy and he’d read me the comics from the Sunday Journal-Chieftain, the ink still so fresh you could smell it as it left little pastel streaks on the paper towel when he wiped the egg grease from his hands.

Like the rumble of the presses starting to roll, that sound … newsprint bundles being tossed and stacked … still makes my heart beat a little faster even today.

As I got older, sometimes as a special treat during school vacations, I would get to go with my dad “on the route.” In the dark hours and early morning while most of the town slept I would see people and things that nobody in my class at Olga Hellbeck had a story to compare with come Monday morning at school.

Just before dawn, in downtown Pueblo, we’d stop at Reese’s Diner on Main. My dad would get a cup of coffee and I’d get a glass of milk and a chocolate glazed doughnut and we’d sit at the counter with the homeless people, hookers and last-call bar diehards sopping up the sloshing liquor in their stomachs with pancakes and sausage and hashbrowns.

Later, when I got older, and in trouble, my dad would make me go with him on the route. I know now in retrospect that the aim was not to get some slave labor, or even exact some punishment. For all I know, but now can imagine, he may very well have treasured those hours alone in the middle of the night once a week. I know now, and I think I even knew back then, that the idea was to get some time alone with me. Some time to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me.

Time when my dad would talk to me like he would never think to talk with me with other people around. Just the two of us alone in the cab of his pickup for hours, as the conversation rose and fell like the up- and downshifts of his manual transmission, with the golden opportunity to break off a subject that became too embarrassing because we needed to fill a rack or go into a store.

Secrets and stories, that’s what I learned on those mornings on the route with my dad. And all of it woven in and around a pickup full of newspapers. Even the reaction of the clerks in the convenience stores and the people, some literally waiting for the newspaper, fed on that feeling. As I walked in the door I knew something they didn’t, and because of me, they were going to find it out. And because of that they were if only momentarily all focused on my existence.

Newspapers made me special and worthy of notice.

And then, when I got my license, my dad turned the route over to me and my friend Mike.

Can you imagine a better job for two 16-year-olds than to be able to ride around town in the middle of the night, not only with the right, but the responsibility to do so, just to make sure the news was delivered? All that time I don’t think we ever got pulled over, or even talked to for that matter by a single cop. We were just a part of the night-scene pulp paper delivery woodwork.

At the time, in my mind because he was a pussy, but now, again in retrospect, perhaps from carbon monoxide poisoning from the old exhaust system on the truck and running the heater in a closed cab, Mike would invariably get nauseous during the route.

I would find myself at dawn in an empty grocery store parking lot, reading how my secret high school crush Connie Bond had done the day before in the gymnastics meet in the sports section of the Chieftain, while Mike, clad in his cotton jumpsuit during his Pete Townsend Woodstock phase, hunched and hurled next to the idling truck. I was such a sociopath that I wouldn’t even turn off the engine.

The pops that washed the vomit taste out of Mike’s mouth were bought from the jangling bag of quarters provided for the racks. The coffee and chocolate doughnuts and bags of chips were paid for by the Chieftain as part of our self-styled employee profit-sharing plan.

What I remember most about my days of delivering the Chieftain back then, however, is showing up at the newspaper at about 5 a.m. to get another truckload of papers to distribute on the east side of town.

We’d load up and then walk through the back shop where the papers were inserted and bundled for delivery. We’d go into the bathroom. Pressmen, who probably had a couple of job-printing runs for other papers and publications after printing the Chieftain, would just be showering and would be standing around in various states of ink-smeared sullenness and wet fatigue. Across the entire floor would be newspapers strewn, as if they used them like towels.

What always struck me was the calm after the storm environment of the now nearly empty newsroom that we would walk by along the hall headed back to the truck. The silence, broken by the monotonous low chatter of the police scanner, the vibe of the deadline push still shimmering off the metal desks and typewriters like a cooling heat. I still love the newsroom after deadline on Wednesday nights at The Breeze and do everything I can to assure that I am the last around, so I can sit and bask in the afterglow.

Later, at one of my first real newspaper jobs as a reporter, I was required to deliver the weekly edition myself. We would finish the paper’s layout at around noon on Wednesday afternoon and while we were at lunch it was printed and brought back to the offices, where we inserted the weekly ad flyers, and then, while the other reporters went back to work, I was expected to load my white 1969 Pontiac Bonneville with bundles of papers, which I took to the racks and businesses.

I remember at the time being mightily offended that myself, a professional, degree-carrying journalist, was expected to deliver the issue that I had just helped create. Embarrassed. What I realize now is that the other reporters, having just finished deadline, were now expected to go immediately back to work that afternoon on the next issue that sat somewhere in the murky mist a week-away under the watchful eye of the editor and owner, while I got to drive around town and listen to the radio, buying smokes from money in the racks.

I find it funny, that now, as the owner, one of my jobs still is making sure the weekly issue gets into the mail on Thursday mornings, and then I drive the route to the racks and vendors. Reality is, I haven’t found anyone that I trust enough to do it. You know those little tiny typeset things in the back of newspapers that are written in lawyer language? The entities and individuals who want those run pay the newspaper to print them. And to print them, your newspaper’s U.S. Postal Permit, our means of delivery to our subscribers, must be in good standing. And to be in good standing, you must have printed and successfully put in the mail by each Thursday an issue of the newspaper. If you don’t. If you miss a week. Then you have to print 52 issues before you can again run legals.

Maybe now you can see why I might be a bit edgy about entrusting the last, most important, link in the publishing chain to someone with only the investment of the 30 or 40 bucks I would pay them for a couple of hours work.

But no one can deliver the papers unless the drivers from the printing plant get them to us. They are the first human I interact with on Thursday mornings. I consciously make an effort to get to know them, and more importantly, that they get to know me. That they understand this is my paper, owned by my wife and me, not some corporation.

Those pictures on the wall above my desk … they are my daughters … their college education will be paid for by this paper. I tell them family stories. Share my week, ask about theirs, ask about their families. Give them a reason other than their paycheck to make sure that things go OK for Matt.

The driver is one of the last links in the chain to get the paper to our readers. I want to engender that sense of responsibility with them. That buy-in to what we’re trying to do each week, and have to do. You want that kind of loyalty when the roads are icy and it’d be easier to say you’ll come later. Or when the boss is being a dick and you’d just as soon take the whole load of newsprint to the recycling center and get some meth with what you can get for them, or dump them in the river, which for some odd reason has always been a fear of mine.

Wayne is the grumbling angel that wakes me from the ether each Thursday morning. A couple of drivers before him, I set up a deal where they would call my cell phone as they exited the interstate outside of town. This would give me about 15 minutes to wash my face, get dressed, grab a cup of coffee and more importantly … sleep as long as possible … before meeting them at the paper by 6 a.m.

Misty, the office cat back then, loved Wayne. As it happened, his own cat died just before he starting delivering the paper and the two bonded in his grief. I take it as a sign of his genuine good and trustworthiness that he dotes on and loves her so much. If I ever had to give Misty away, I would have given her to Wayne.

I trust Wayne to deliver the paper every week. I would certainly trust him with my cat.

Back when my daughters were little we had a cat… singular. We went away on vacation and when we came back the cat never showed up. Telling the girls the cat went to “live with the coyotes” in the farm field north of our house I took them to the pound to each a get a kitten. Misty was one of those kittens.

Over the years, dogs, three of them, the other kitten, now a cat, and another cat, were added to the mix. Misty was miserable. She’d spend her days hiding under the couch in the living room, then at night she’d try to sneak downstairs to the food and litter box.

Along the way, to show how she felt about the state of things, she’d piss on chairs, plants, shoes, you name it. I had been trying to talk Lesli into making her an office cat for months, but Lesli was worried she’d be lonely at nights and on the weekends when no one was in the office.

The night she pissed on Lesli’s head while she was asleep was the night Lesli decided we could maybe try Misty as an office cat.

She has blossomed. Former interns bring their parents to the newspaper as they’re passing through town not to meet Lesli and I, not even really to show them the paper, but to show them Misty.

Everyone loves Misty. But most of all, Wayne.

Every Wednesday night after deadline the last thing I say to Misty as I leave is, “Your boyfriend Wayne is coming in the morning.” While other days when I come into the office Misty takes her sweet time about coming out of the various nooks she sleeps in, ever Thursday morning, as she hears Wayne’s voice coming from the back of the building as he and I walk in, she comes and stands in front of the darkroom door from which he’ll enter.

Wayne played football on scholarship in college. “I was pretty good,” he says without any trace of ego, simply stating the facts, as he winces as he squats down to scratch Misty’s belly while I write the check for that week’s print bill.

Having noticed early in our relationship his limp, and having heard him allude to a knee injury that cut his career short, I had always assumed that he had hurt it on the gridiron field of glory. It wasn’t until about a year later that he told me he was riding on the back of a friend’s motorcycle, and his knees were angled out, and one caught the rear fender of a car that his friend rode too close to. And All Things Changed. He lost his scholarship and had to drop out of school.

Now, the road for him that started with dreams of the NFL has led him to the back parking lot behind our paper, where every Thursday morning we meet before dawn.

As I pull into the parking lot one morning I see Wayne sitting in the cab of his truck doing paperwork. As I park and get out of my Land Cruiser he clambers out with a wince as his leg hits the ground that has become almost as natural to him as breath or how to properly block on a sweep.

“It’s a new moon,” he says. “You have to close your eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish. It’s an old pagan ritual my mom used to teach me.”

So we both close our eyes, spin around three times, and make a wish.

Then Wayne tells me his idea.

“I’m going to need help with this,” he says. “Someone who can write. We should do a new version of War of the Worlds, but we make it terrorists this time. We need to write this, Matt. I don’t know how long I can keep pushing in that clutch.”

“If we tried to make that we’d end up in Guantanamo Bay,” I reply. “These are not the kinder and gentler times of our youth.”

I pull out my pack of Camels. “Hey Wayne,” I say, doing the traditional tap tap tap on the bottom of the pack against the palm of my hand. “What’s this sound? The mating call of the Great American White Trash Woodpecker. Heh heh.”

Wayne laughs.

If Wayne’s happy. I’m happy.

Wayne is just the next in a long line of drivers.

There was Deaf Jeff. It was a year before I learned to understand his slurred speech. Two before I remembered to look at him when I talked. But somehow we managed to develop a friendship that, even years after getting fired from the printing company for sexual harassment, he still drops by every now and then to say hi and show me the progress on the 1976 Pontiac CanAm muscle car he is restoring.

There was Scott With The Weird Eye; a real estate agent who had to take another job when the housing bubble burst. I talked a lot about the stock market with Scott on those Thursday mornings as we both saw the lives we thought we were going to be living disappear.

And there was one who went by “Buffalo”. A shaggy biker type, Buffalo obviously could smell the weed hanging in the air from me getting high just before he showed up at the office. He would stand around shuffling and pawing at the carpet after he helped me bring the papers in, with me impatiently waiting for him to leave so I could blaze another bowl before I went and did the route.

I became convinced that he was actually an undercover narc that was just posing as a delivery driver to bust me and never ever offered to get him high. 

And there are some who I don’t even remember their name. In one case I feel bad about that, because the guy literally risked his life to get the papers to me one week.

Back when we still had peel-off and paste-on mailing labels for subscribers’ addresses we had to get the labels to the printer on Wednesday night. Usually, a driver out on another delivery in the area would stop by and pick them up. The paper would be printed that night, the labels put on, and they’d be bundled for the various mail routes for delivery Thursday morning.

One Wednesday evening the driver who picked up the labels said our usual Thursday morning driver … let’s call him Lucky … might not be coming in the morning. They had just got word at the print plant that he had been in a car accident on his way to work.

But the next morning there he was, pulling up in the huge truck that carried the press runs of probably a half-dozen papers he’d stop at that morning.

It seemed Lucky was cruising along in his car on his way to work when some jerk in front of him slammed on his brakes and he plowed right into the back of them.

“Are you OK?” I asked.

“I had a bunch of CDs hit me in the back of the head that were lying on the back seat and I smacked my forehead on the windshield,” he said. “But I’m fine. I just got one of the guy’s from work come pick me up at the accident when they towed my car.”

I looked him closer in the growing light of the dawn. He had a huge hematoma on his forehead, all blue and green and purple.

“Dude,” I said, “You’ve probably got a head injury. You need to go to a doctor.”

“Nah,” Lucky said. “If I had they’d probably want to put me in the hospital or something and people die in hospitals. I ate a handful of Advil when I got to work. I’m fine.”

We unloaded the papers, and I got ready to go back inside the office.

“Hey, smoke a cigarette with me before I get back in the truck,” Lucky said. “Driving is weird. Especially when the headlights are coming at you.”

So I smoked a cigarette with him and sent him on his way. I felt a little bad about turning his loose on the roads … for his sake and for others … but I did have a paper to get out.

And then there was this Hobbit like hippie. All brushy black hair and Birkenstocks. One time, he and I unloaded literally a ton of newsprint for a total community distribution of a special issue – one of the weeks when everyone in both Johnstown and Milliken got a newspaper whether they wanted one or not – probably four times the number of papers we usually printed.

We unloaded them out of the truck, hauled them into the office, and then loaded half of the run into my Land Cruiser. We then took it to the Post Office. Unloaded it. Went back. Loaded the other half and took it to the post office. And unloaded it.

After dumb stuff like that, and two hernia surgeries, I decided it was time to start working smart not hard and convinced the bosses at the printing company to let the driver meet me at the Post Office, where we would just unload the whole mass once.

And the backroom people understand what they are doing. They understand what a newspaper means to someone. They get the basic tenets of the craft of journalism, that you need to spell the names correctly.

It was early in our ownership of the paper when the local high school cross country team won the state championship. On our front page that week was a team picture.

I was standing watching the presses roll at the daily newspaper in Greeley where we were printing at the time. It’s amazing that you can look at a story, or a laid out page for hours during production deadline, but as soon as the process occurs that mixes ink with newsprint, and a newspaper is created, you’ll see mistakes you missed all day.

We were almost through the entire press run when I idly picked up a paper off the conveyor belt of the presses and glanced at it to see how the color registration of the picture was.

The name of one of the kids on the team was misspelled in the cutline below the photo.

My heart froze. I tapped Mike, the head pressman on the shoulder.

“This kid’s name is misspelled!” I yelled at him above the roaring rumble of the press. “This paper is going to be a forever testament to the year he was on the state cross country team in high school. He’s going to get it out and show it to his grandchildren, and his fucking name is misspelled.”

Without flinching Mike reached up and hit the stop button on the press. It is literally the only time in my career I have seen them ‘stop the presses.’

We went into the production room. A page designer matched the font of our cutline and typeset it and printed it out. We took the corrected name back to the people who shot the negatives of the pages. With an x-Acto knife they cut out the misspelled name and “stripped” in the corrected version and re-shot the page negative, which Mike then took back to the presses, where they loaded the plate and re-ran the entire run of the paper.

I heard that the publisher wasn’t happy the next day when he came to work and wanted to know why an entire run of the Breeze was in the dumpster out back. But he never said a word to me. Mike acknowledged, the next week when we were doing the run, that he had gotten chewed out, yeah, but it was OK. Don’t bother sticking up for us, he said, they’re just dicks with ties and they wouldn’t even listen. He was just glad that that kid would have that memento of his winning season, he said. Tell the team congratulations for us.

Recently I was sharing a ride back from Denver with the current publisher of the paper, and I related the story, thinking he might get a kick out of it.

He didn’t talk about how important things like that are. He didn’t agree that people cut out what we do for a living and put it in their scrapbook, or like a widow who once told me that late at night, when she missed her husband, how she’d take out the yellowed copy of the paper where a reporter wrote a story about her Rueben and re-read it.

“They should have charged you for another press run,” was all he said.

The Gospel According to Leon Burford

Leon felt the muscles in his arms spasm after tearing down the Snake Girl tent in less than an hour. A job that usually took three other men two hours and a half-pack of cigarettes, he could do alone in 53 minutes.

People might think he was just a big dumb carny, but Leon knew he was smart about the things that mattered. Who cared if he could factor an integer, or whether he even knew what an integer was? What he did know was that if you laid the poles to the tent in the back of the rig before you put the scrim in … well, how are you going to put up the scrim if you don’t already have the poles up? Were you just going to lay it on the ground till you got the poles up? Daddy paid Doc Rivera $2,500 to paint that scrim: The Snake Girl rising 15 feet high in all her freakdom. Everything had to go in exactly opposite of how it would be reassembled in 12 hours at the next stop.

Leon’s theory of learning was simple: “Sit down. Shut up. Watch and listen.” That’s how he learned how to swallow swords. His Daddy wouldn’t teach him, but he taught his big brother Michael. Prince Michael. Leon learned by sitting there, keeping his mouth shut, watching and listening. Then, after Daddy and Michael went inside he’d practice until he got it right or got tired of spitting up blood.

He climbed up into the cab of the semi that pulled the Museum of Wonders after packing up the Snake Girl. While the Ride Boys were still sullenly tearing down, crawling the skeleton of the Zipper like tattooed tranquilized monkeys, he was already done and ready to start the jump to the next town.

How can I describe Leon? If I told you about his voice you wouldn’t be able to see his smile, lit in the strobe of traffic coming the opposite direction on an interstate late at night in the vast someone else’s somewhere nowhere of Texas at 2 in the morning. If I told you about his smile, you wouldn’t be able to hear his voice, yelling above the sound of the semi as he runs through the gears at 3 a.m. on an empty main street in a town where tomorrow everyone will wake up to their same-old lives and he’ll have moved on and be nothing but a laughing ghost.

That was Leon. A force of nature. There is water, wind, fire, and Leon.

Lesli and I had just moved back to Johnstown from Santa Fe. I was working as a reporter for The Breeze and writing freelance for an arts and entertainment magazine in Ft. Collins. I got the assignment to do a story about the Greeley Independence Stampede; a big rodeo and carnival in Greeley over the course of the week before July 4.

Since it was a music publication, I looked at the schedule of acts and saw "Up With People" were performing. That group of Cherry Cheeked Christians that were supposed to be a hip alternative for the kids to Heathen Heavy Metal.

So I made arrangements to cover their performance. I showed up and these kids just knew I was there to write some sort of smirking and mocking "I Partied with Up With People" piece. They smiled. They thanked me for doing a story on them. They answered my questions and ravaged me with politeness like a pack of wolves wearing turtlenecks and gingham dresses before sending me stumbling back out into the night.

In a daze like a moth that kept flying into a closed window trying to get out I made my way to the lights of the carnival midway and found The Museum of Wonders. The second the word "reporter" came out of my mouth people started getting hostile and nervous, but finally I talked my way into an interview with the guy that owned it ... Henry Valentine.

Henry was probably in his 70s and he took me on a tour of the museum, his "pickled punks" as he called them. All sorts of malformed animal fetuses in jars, along with dummies and pictures of famous freaks. All the time as we’re talking Henry’s voice, his grind, the carnival barker spiel that attracts people to the show, was playing over and over on the loudspeakers … Alive… Inside. We went outside and sat in lawn chairs in front of the museum on the midway with all the people walking by and he told me his story.

When Henry was 17, living in Ft. Collins, his girlfriend broke up with him and to salve his grief he went to the carnival that was in town. He left with it that night and never went back. With the exception of a couple weeks during World War II when he worked in an airplane factory in Texas, but got fired for wearing cowboy books, he had lived on the road with the carnival.

Henry’s first marriage was to Selena the Seal Girl. Likely a thalidomide baby, she had hands coming out of her shoulder like flippers. Henry speaks of her in the past tense and I start to draft a melancholy little story about how she died and how he’s still out on the road with her memory mixing with the smell of corn dogs and cotton candy. I asked him finally what happened to her.

“I divorced her,” he said. “She was a drunk. She’s living in Oklahoma somewhere.”

After that Henry met a woman who had been "camping" by the river with her kids. Every morning before she’d go to work she’d put them in life vests. He took her in, and her kids, and raised them as his own on the road.

The youngest, the baby, was Leon.

Henry worked with all the real freaks back when "the government would allow them to have some pride and work for a living rather than be warehoused in hospitals," he said. Grace the Mule-Faced Woman. Frank Lentini, the guy with three legs who used to tie a fishing line to his third one when he and Henry would go fishing during the day at some lake they'd find on the road.

So I go home that night and I tell Lesli. These people are fascinating. They are a culture all their own. Somebody should write about them. Not even breaking her gaze from her book she said, "Yeah, it's too bad you aren't like a reporter or something and could go on the road with them...."

I get in contact with Henry, which was hard enough since they had already moved on to the next town, but he agreed that if I'm standing outside the trucks when they leave the State Fair in Pueblo at the end of August I can ride with them to the next stop. The next "jump" to Abilene, Texas.

And, because I can talk freaks and old classic country music, and I’m taking an interest in his career as a showman as it winds down, Henry takes a liking to me and probably took Leon aside just before we left and said, "Try to make sure nobody cuts his throat, okay?"

And that's how I came to sleep in The Snake Girl tent trailer for the next 10 days, and meet my new friend and midway minder, Leon.

I'm sorry to disabuse you of your fantasy, but The Snake Girl isn't real.

She actually isn't just a single girl. She's one of two or three girls on the road with The Valentines, all of which who while working wear the same black wig that sits on Leon's kitchen table in his trailer like a dead Yorkie at night when you sit with him and the girls and smoke weed.

Usually, the girls sleep in the back of the Snake Girl trailer, on a riser at the front where Henry put a couch. An American Flag across the window serves as patriotic curtain to keep the people walking on the back of the midway from seeing you without your shirt on when you wake up in the morning. I think there might have also been a small table. It wasn't much, but it beat sleeping under one of the trucks that hauled The Zipper like some of the Ride Boys had to do.

There was a special place for THE Snake Girl who got to share Leon's trailer, his bed, and his no doubt prodigious sexual hunger. When I was on the road with them in Texas she was named Kayla.

Blond haired, buxom, with the beefy but sexy rocker chick look of a 17-year-old who had yet to have three kids and put on 25 pounds before she'd be smacking them around a Wal-Mart, Kayla had a nice hand-etched swastika tattoo on her shoulder.

The trick behind the Snake Girl is that it is the girl, sitting in an office chair, with a false box built around her so just her head sticks out. Around the head, on which she wears the ratty black nylon hair crown while on duty, is a rubber snake's body. There is a rope under the body around her throat:  move your head to the side, the snake's tail moves to the side. Move your head to the back, the snake's tail moves to the back.

Henry has one rule: you cannot fall asleep, which is sort of hard when you are sitting on a chair in a box with a huge rubber snake body around your neck and it's 115 degrees inside the tent in the middle of Abilene, Texas, in August. But what Henry says goes.

Leon is the ticket taker for the attraction and its bouncer. He sits out front of the tent in his ticket box and keeps an eye on the crowd; because you and I in polite society think it’s fun to taunt the Snake Girl and spit ice from our Coke on her down in the box.

I had breakfast on the midway, just Kayla and me, the morning after the first night she got spit on. Her eyes were flat like a shark's. She was never coming back to what you and I call society. After she ran out her string with the Valentine's, who knows why, who knows how, she left the carnival and when I asked Henry he said she "was working in a titty bar in Dallas."

I rode the first part of the trip to Abilene with Henry, but somewhere early that evening I asked Leon if I could ride with him. I think it was somewhere in Oklahoma, in the middle of the night, when Leon was telling me how he shot someone with a shotgun once, that I told him if he was thinking he might need to be killing me I could just get out right here.

“Nah, you seem okay,” he said. He explained to me that he used to road race motorcycles. As a privateer, with no factory backing, he and his buddies had taken a bike to Daytona for the annual Bike Week race. He not only finished, but ahead of many of the factory riders. A year or so ago, however, he had had a bad crash and sustained a head injury.

What would have likely killed a lesser man had simply mellowed him out, he said.

“Only two things make me mad anymore. People that mistreat their kids (Leon had a son back in Texas living with his mom) and people who steal from my daddy.” Every morning, Leon said, before anyone else was awake he would get up and prowl the midway for “ground scores” … the stuff that fell out of people’s pockets as they were jerked and tumbled like human dryer laundry on the rides. Sunglasses, lighters, combs, keys, pens and anything you could think of that people would have in their pockets. He was keeping it all in a box in his trailer for Little Henry, his son. Leon had an almost preternatural ability to spot the things you and I drop. At every gas station we stopped at he’d suddenly stoop low and pick up a piece of change from beneath the check-out counter.

We got into Abilene just before dawn. I climbed into back of the semi in the sleeper and didn’t wake up till early afternoon. Leon on the other hand was back up only a couple hours later to put up the Snake Girl. As I sat drinking coffee still trying to wake up he finished driving the last tent stakes, swinging a sledge hammer with one hand.

When I admired his strength he looked at me, almost hurt, as if I like everyone thought he was just a dumb muscle-bound mule. You only had to be strong for a moment, he explained, once you had the hammer in the air and in motion, it was a matter of focus.

It was a couple of hours before the carnival was to open when the sky filled with angry black clouds and down came a Biblical Rain that turned the fairground midway into a quagmire of mud .... When it stopped I ventured back out of the Snake Girl trailer and found Leon getting ready to open up.

"Do you think anybody will even come?" I asked, thinking how opening night would be a bust after all the costs of gas and food to make the jump from Colorado.

"Just watch," he said.

And they began to come. By 9 p.m. the midway was filled. People dragging strollers, the wheels long too caked and clogged with mud to roll, while with the other hand cursing parents pulled screaming and crying children who would slip and fall, only to be jerked back up with a pop of their shoulder. They all marched, like mud covered zombies, around and around the midway as the speakers on the Zipper blasted Guns and Roses and ZZ Top.

"I would never bring my child out in something like this," Leon said sitting in the ticket booth looking disgusted.

“Life’s a dare,” Leon said to me one afternoon while we were sitting in his trailer. “You either decide you’re gonna take it, or you back down. I’d much rather get my assed kick than back down from someone. No shame in getting beat if you at least tried. Can’t ain’t never got nothing done.

“When I was 16 Daddy let me do the bed of nails act,” he said. “The whole key is that the nails are close enough together that when you lay down on them the weight is displaced, so none of them stick through you. You take the pain all at once like that, you can survive it. Man, you take each and little hurt individually, they’re gonna go right through you eventually.

“I was doing the bed of nails and part of the show was Daddy called someone up to stand on my chest. He always picked the biggest guy he could find in the crowd. The idea was you have them get up slow. Well one night this fat fuck came up, and before daddy could stop him, he just jumps up on top of me real quick.”

Did it hurt? I asked?

“Of course it hurt,” Leon said, looking at me like I was retarded. “But I didn’t let on it hurt. I just held it in. Then after the show ended I had the guy who runs the Ferris wheel take me up to the top and stop it. I smoked a joint and I cried, then I came back down and went back to work.”

One day on the midway I let it slip to Leon that I was out here on a freelance gig. That nobody was paying me to do this. That my hope was I could write something someone would want to buy.

“Goddamn,” he said, with genuine admiration in his eyes for maybe the first time. “I thought you were just some reporter out here on assignment with an expense account. Good for you.”

In many ways, with his shaved head and perpetual good spirit Leon was a lot like a Buddhist teacher to me. After breakfast on a rainy morning in Greeley, decades and kids and a whole lifetime after that summer in Abilene and those 10 days of meditation in the Snake Girl trailer, I sat in the empty and quiet Mirror newsroom alone and watched Leon's funeral service on streaming video from the church in Texas. It was probably best summed up by one of the guys who spoke, who didn't even bother to take off his greaser shades when he went up to the podium.

"I have a million stories about Leon," he said, "and I can't tell one of them in here."

So here we go, one final story about Leon...

We were sitting on the midway in Abilene, a late afternoon, the promise of another night of neon and noise lying ahead of us. Sitting in front of the Snake Girl tent. Leon was telling me about how he bit a guy's finger off one night in a fight.

It sort of put a damper on the party they were at, he said, and his girlfriend was pissed because they had to leave ... As Leon was telling the story a woman, pushing a stroller with a small child in it, passed by. As she did the kid dropped their stuffed animal and the woman didn't notice and continued along her way.

In mid-sentence Leon leapt out of the Snake Girl ticket booth and sprinted across the midway. He picked up the soft toy and caught up with the woman and gave it back to the kid, bending down and handing it to them and smiling.

Coming back to the booth he just went right back to telling me about biting the guy's finger off at the party.

That was Leon. The kindest, funniest, most joyful soul I have likely ever met, who was the last person you ever wanted to be crossways with. The night he was stabbed in Abilene, only about a week after I left, two guys and a girl were trying to sneak into the back of the Snake Girl tent without paying. Only two things made Leon mad anymore: people being mean to kids and someone who tried to steal from his Daddy.

I have no doubt that Leon wasn't politically correct about telling the two guys and the girl that they needed to pay, but I know he gave them the chance to do it. The chance to avoid the fight. But they wanted to fight. They stabbed him through the heart. All he did was beat the hell out of all three of them and then go back to the Snake Girl booth and keep taking tickets till he stroked out.

Leon was never the same again. That fierce joy now trapped in a body that needed to be pumped full of drugs to keep it from seizing like a bike being run without oil. He had a hard time talking, his speech now slurred. That's the most painful thing I remember about being around Leon after the stabbing ... the sad, hurt look in his eyes when he would try to talk to kids on the midway and they would recoil in fear.

The thing that always came to mind was Frankenstein.

Well, that's over now. Leon is free again. Fierce and funny and free. And for that, I am eternally grateful and a little ashamed at the selfish grief that wishes he was still here. The Buddhists have a concept that we shouldn't grieve too deeply, because it holds the spirit back from moving on. I got the message from Texas that Leon had died in the nursing home, more than two decades after being stabbed through the heart, the same weekend Harper, my youngest, was graduating from high school. Oddly, the sadness of his passing made it easier to mourn the moving on of my little girl. It put it in perspective. To hold her back, for my own selfish reasons, was as bad as feeling bad that Leon was finally released.

As the service was ending they played the Carrie Underwood song "Temporary Home." It talks about moving on. How this is but a passing place. As the song was ending, a guy with sunglasses and a Mohawk like Leon had when I met him walked by the window of The Mirror. He was there for a moment, and then he was gone.

I feel privileged that I got to spend that time with Leon just before he was stabbed. The bike wreck had softened him just ever so slightly, but he was still in his midway monster glory. To remember him, and that time, I plan to get another bracelet tattoo, right above the one on my right wrist made up of Day of the Dead skulls tweaked for those in my life who have passed on but remain forever in my heart. In the center of my wrist I will get, as a clasp, a Ferris wheel. And around the edges of my wrist the words that every reporter should remember… A mantra of my business.

Sit down. Shut up. Watch and listen.

Runaways at The Rack

Like mute metal newsboys on the corner, newspaper racks are the slot machines of journalism. You put your money in and take your chances that there’s news you want to peruse.

Slot machines, and piggy banks. When you own a newspaper with racks you have little cash stashes all over town. Run short in the video store because the girls forgot to bring back the DVD for a week … Take some change out of the rack out front.

I pay for lots of things in quarters.

When we bought the paper, I put a big red Folgers coffee can in the bottom drawer of the file cabinet next to my desk. I would put that week’s haul of coins from the racks into the can; the idea to save money for my oldest daughter Riley’s college.

We soon realized it was going to cost a lot more than a fistful of quarters each week to put a kid through college, and started putting money into college fund investments, which the three-piece-suited Wall Street Peg Boys lost half of just about the time we were getting ready to put her through school.

So instead, over the years, the Folgers can has become my own personal company slush fund.

I’ve bought weed with it. For two summers, I sponsored a late model stock car driven by a local woman. One time, when Riley wanted to buy a camera, I told her she could have whatever was in the can to put toward it.

I once gave it to a kid just because I was in a good mood and he walked into the office with his mom, and I used it once to buy a new boom box for a teen-ager in Milliken who had his stolen that I did a story about.

When we first bought the paper, I called down to the Rocky Mountain News and asked about buying one of their used racks. After we got the paper out one Thursday I drove down to Denver to their warehouse.

A guy led me into a vast room where hundreds of Rocky racks sat in rows like blue Chinese terra cotta warriors.

“Look at the shit people do to these things,” he said, pointing to one that was riddled with bullet holes, sitting next to another that looked like it had been ripped open with a giant can opener. “If your town will let you, fucking bolt them to the sidewalk. You’ll still have people who drive pickups into them and shit to knock them over, but it’ll stop the ones who cut the chain around the street sign.”

The Rocky guy was adamant that I repaint the rack, apparently concerned that somehow people would confuse my small town weekly cow-rag for the then largest circulation daily newspaper in the state. I took it up to the local high school and gave it to the art class. I wanted artistic, I told them. They came back with a collage of images … for some reason a shark on one side, which was a bit weird for a landlocked paper in northern Colorado, but … and we took a picture of the students and the newly-painted rack and ran it in color on the front page.

Just recently, I tried to buy some more Rocky racks. In the intervening years the News has gone out of business, all its hardware swallowed up by The Denver Post, which won the newspaper war. I was always a Rocky man myself. The Breeze is a tabloid format, like the Rocky was, and I’ve never been fond of the inky-fingered origami mind-fuck that comes with reading broadsheet newspapers.

At first the guy at the Post told me that was fine. Later, he emailed and said that he had thought they still had some Rocky racks, but apparently they were all gone. Did I want some Post racks?

Who knows, maybe they shipped all the old Rocky racks to China and melted them down for Toyota fenders. Maybe my shit-talk about the Post over the years, and my obvious siding with the Rocky, hadn’t gone unnoticed by my daily Post brethren in Denver, but I honestly had to think about it for a moment. The vibe of it all. My papers in the Evil Empire’s racks…

Finally, I decided to buy the Post racks and just smudge them with pot smoke for a good cleansing after I got them painted … again by a new generation of teenage artists in the Roosevelt High School art program.

This time I said the only constraints were that somewhere on the rack, in whatever typeface they wanted, it needed to say “The Breeze.” I specifically wanted them to leave out the word “Johnstown” as part of our on-going campaign to convince Milliken, a town we cover just two miles to the east which does not have its own paper, that the Breeze is their paper too. Back when we used to put mailing labels on the paper, I used to have the crew put the Milliken address labels right across the word “Johnstown” in the nameplate on the front page.

I put that original rack out at Johnson’s Corner, a world-famous truck stop that sits several miles west of Johnstown along Interstate 25, a major north/south travel route across the country. About a year or so after we put it out there, the interior coin mechanism broke. You could now open the rack without putting money in. I was baffled how to fix it, and hesitated removing it lest I lose my position, so it became a de-facto test of the type of person people are: The kind who pulls the door before they put in the money, thinking they might get something for nothing, or the honest citizen consumer, who puts in their money and then takes out your newsprint wisdom.

My peeling paint barometer of human honesty. With a shark on the side.

Every week, I pull a handful of quarters out of the rack. And this past summer, I also pulled more than a weird share of runaways out of the parking lot in front of it.

The scene at the interstate truck stop at early morning is probably an every day scene. Truckers and other travelers pick up hitch-hikers somewhere in the state in the middle of the night, and if they’re heading north along the Front Range, it’s likely they may stop at Johnson’s Corner. Perfect place to leave or be shed of someone for the next part of their journey.

The all-night truck stop restaurant crew usually takes pity and lets them nurse a meal, and three or four cups of coffee, through the night, but when the sun comes up they start to run them off.

And that’s where I find them: standing in front of the rack when I show up on Thursday morning to put in papers.

It used to be, right after the economic crash, it was older guys. Construction workers, oil workers, laborer-types who couldn’t find something else when the lay-offs came so they hit the road. Gruff and grungy, grumbling like old dogs with arthritis, I’d usually give them a ride to the next interstate exit, and my next stop. As we’d talk in front of the rack, me trying to scope out whether they were going stick a knife in my liver and steal my truck, I’d unload the quarters from the vending box. As we’d shake hands when they got out, I’d hand them to them and wish them well.

One I didn’t give money or a ride to was The Zodiac Killer’s grandson.

Here’s what I posted on the paper’s Facebook page after I got back to the office that morning … I was so jangled.

We're not sure, but we think we met The Zodiac Killer, or his grandson, this morning when delivering papers to the rack at Johnson's Corner.

He was standing next to it. Late 40s or early 50s maybe … Hair slicked back with the toast he'd just eaten inside. Teeth browner than George Hamilton. 3-day growth. One-size-too-small leather jacket. Big Buddy Holly style glasses. He started the conversation by admiring us for not being part of the "consumer culture" for driving a 26-year-old LandCruiser. This led to a diatribe against Apple, all delivered with flat, emotionless affect, punctuated by these harsh, barking laughs … Heh, Heh, Heh … all the while staring off at the horizon. He was so creepy we actually worried he might jump in as we started to pull away, and tell us "to drive."

But this summer it was young people. Literally teenagers. Personally, I blame it on the fact that they are now teaching “Into the Wild” in English classes, setting another generation off on their own personal walk-about. If you haven’t read the book by Jon Krakhauer, it’s about a young man named Chris McCandless who decides after graduating from college to go to the Alaskan wilderness, where he eventually starves to death.

But in reality it goes far back beyond that, and even your grandfather’s beatnik, Jack Kerouac. In “Everett Ruess A Vagabond for Beauty,” (Ruess could have very well been McCandless’ grandfather. At age 21 he went along into the Utah desert with just his supplies and a burro and disappeared, never to be seen or found again), author W.L Rusho says, “Like Everett, we all yearn to cut ourselves off from the comforts and securities of a drab existence at some point in our lives. We too feel a need to enter our own small wilderness in that difficult search for a unique destiny…”

One morning there was three of them out in front of the rack, laying against the wall rummaging through their backpacks as they tried to scope out their next ride.

One of them, a small blond kid, said he was from Maine on his way to Los Angeles. The other pair, a girl with a guy who was obviously her boyfriend, initiated the conversation after I broke the ice by saying “hey” and looking at them as I started to load the rack.

We talked a bit. The couple was from Florida they said … One of the things I learned this summer was to just go with their story. Admire it for its creativity and not bug on the fact that more than likely, they are lying right to my face … The girl looked about 19. A tangled mass of black and bright blue hair hung in her eyes. The guy had dreadlocks down to the middle of his back. Momentarily I felt sorry for the blond kid, imagining what he must have to think of to try and distract his mind when the girl and guy are going at it late at night in the next stall of whatever rest stops they find to sleep in for the night.

“Can you give us a ride, mister?” the girl said.

For some reason I wasn’t into getting anymore involved in this Generation Y Peyton Place.

“I’m only going a couple of miles up the road,” I said. “The next exit isn’t the best place to pick up a ride that’s going to take you anywhere amount of distance. You’re probably better off hanging here and trying to catch a ride with someone else.”

Mr. Dreadlocks, obviously uneasy about not being the alpha male in this scenario anymore, quickly agreed.

“I just want the fuck out of here,” the girl whined.

“Really,” I said with the same smile I’d give one of my daughters, “I think you’re better off here.” I walked over and handed the girl the change from the rack. They thanked me and scurried back into the truck stop. I finished filling the rack with papers. As I was leaving, they came outside with a handful of food and drinks and started scanning the parking lot.

Then there was Tyler.

Despite the Wall Street Peg Boys, Lesli and I had been able to send Riley to college. In several weeks, she’d leave for Montana State in Bozeman to start her freshman year. Eighteen years old and straining at the reins to get out on her own, she had recently, and nicely, told me, “I really don’t care where I live, as long as it’s not with you guys.”

Tall, taller than me, with short blond hair under a baseball cap and eyes bluer than the skies my baby would soon range under alone, 10 hours away from my embrace, Tyler saw me walking toward the rack and shuffled off across the parking lot.

“Hey,” I barked. He turned around. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know,” he said with a shy grin.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eighteen.”

I motioned him over to the rack.

“I’m going up the road about three miles,” I said. “At the next interchange you’ll have I-25 going north and south and Highway 34 going east and west pretty much through the state. You want a ride?”

Tyler tossed his backpack in the back of the LandCruiser with the papers and climbed in. He said he had been on the road for a bit. He had started out in his Toyota pickup, which he spoke of lovingly and like a gearhead, but it had blown up in Idaho and he’d just sort of kept going. He’d picked up a ride in the mountains of Colorado and they’d left him off here at the truck stop.

We pulled up to my next stop. He climbed out. I handed him the handful of change from my jacket pocket. I also pulled out a business card.

“See this side of the highway,” I said. “This is the town of Johnstown. See that side of the highway?” I said, motioning across the road. “That’s the city of Loveland. If you’re going to get in trouble, get in trouble on this side and give the cop my card and tell him to call me.”

“What’s on that side,” Tyler said.

“A huge mall,” I said.

“there would  be girls there?” he said with a grin.

“Lots and lots,” I said.

I told Lesli when I got back to the office about meeting Tyler. She smiled and suggested that when I give them the change I need to tell them that they needed to call home with part of it. They didn’t have to say where they were, if they didn’t want to, but they needed people to know they were alive. She also joked that Tyler was going to wind up in a field dead, with no ID, and just a business card with my name and a bunch of quarters in his pockets with my fingerprints on them. I said that well at least I would be able to tell them that he said his name was Tyler, And he said he lived in Montana.

Tyler and I shook hands. I told him to be careful. As I walked into the store with my papers I looked back at him. He had shouldered his pack and was already scrambling up the grass berm hill on the other side of the road. He had not looked back.

Borne on the winds of a fateful Breeze…

The Johnstown Breeze has been publishing weekly news since 1904, covering the northern Colorado communities of Johnstown and Milliken. Johnstown was founded in 1902, when Harvey J. Parish platted a town where nearly two decades before he had begun to farm.

The town got its name from his young son, John, who lay in a Denver hospital with a ruptured appendix when the community-creating was going on.

Asked what he'd name his new town, Parish replied, “It will be my son's town. Let's call it John's Town.” Lore even has it that he went down to the hospital in Denver and told his sick son of his plan, and encouraged him to get better so he could come back to his new “home.”

One wonders, given the chances for survival from peritonitis in those days, if Parish didn't secretly believe in his own breaking heart that at least his son's memory would live on in the name of the new town. John Parish in fact rallied and returned to “John's Town.” In the early 1930s, he would serve as its mayor.

The newspaper sits on the main street: Parish Avenue. Down the block there's a McDonald's on the exact spot where Harvey Parish set up his tent and began to farm. Some see that as a sign of success and progress. Others an omen of more ominous things.

The town is changing. After nearly a century, a project to fix a weird jog in the main intersection, at the then only stoplight, finally was completed. The jog had been necessitated at the beginnings of the town, when one farmer could not be induced to part with a portion of his land for the road easement. The jigsaw intersection was something different. Disputes with landowners to fix it continued until the day the asphalt was broken to straighten it out.

With the new intersection came a new stoplight. The old one was a snake-ball of wires attached from light pole to light pole like someone's grandfather had erected it in a bit of weekend civic volunteerism. The new one looked like any intersection anywhere else. And a bit more of Johnstown's unique identity was subsumed.

Just across the street from the McDonald’s, they also finally leveled a house and old convenience store that had served as a corner landmark, albeit a ratty looking one, for generations. After a local woman became too old and tired to run the store anymore she sold it to someone, who couldn’t make a go, and quickly sold it to a guy from India.

An Internet string of stories about lawsuits and several private investigators followed him to town, and early one morning in the spring of 2005 the store caught on fire and burned to the ground. At first there was talk about rebuilding, then some vague promises of a new convenience store, a corporate one. As if that may happen, the old building was razed.

A woman who grew up in the house, whose parents had run the store while she was growing up, found out from a story in the newspaper. She wrote a bit chiding, if not altogether appreciative letter to the editor the week after the story ran, setting the record and the lineage of the property straight regarding several mistakes we had made.

Coming over from Loveland where she now lived to get some copies of the paper, I thanked her when she came into the office for the contribution to the historical record. We had been caught off-guard when the wrecking crane had started smashing walls, I told her. The landowner and his real estate agent called the old building an “eyesore” in the story and we told her we shared her hurt feelings. That's why we had tried to lay out the building's long history and legacy in the community the best we could on deadline.

She asked how much she owed for the papers. I told her nothing, she helped fill it. She smiled and pressed the dollar bill into my hand, reminding me, “You've got to make a living to.” I thought about the beautiful absurdity of my life that someone pays me for a copy of a correction to an error I made.

Later that day, while walking to get the mail, I saw the woman picking through the rubble that was left of the store. Looking for a piece of a time she could take with her. I don't intrude. I just walked through the intersection when the coast looks clear, proud at my little blow for anarchy, as I ignored the new WALK and DON'T WALK signals.

Nearly a decade later, the lot remains vacant.

Milliken, about two miles to the east, started a handful of years after Johnstown's beginnings. The planned hub for a fledgling railroad company led by a Denver lawyer and judge, Judge John D. Milliken, that hoped to lay a line that would someday stretch to the Pacific.

It never even made it out of Colorado, or even to the new town of Milliken, for that matter.

The railroad died, but somehow the town lived on. And like a man who knows he should have perished, and is now living on charmed, borrowed time, it developed a wild and reckless streak loudly celebrated in its saloons and road houses. An image that residents began to wear as a pioneer punk-rockish badge of honor, like vomit stains on your lapel smelling of whisky, tobacco and women's perfume. It’s an attitude that is quieter now today, more refined and buffed up, but still retaining the sly grin of debauchery and resemblance of dangerous and drunken DNA.

Rumor has it that the streets of the new town -- all women's names -- were in honor of the prostitutes that serviced the new residents faithfully as they built a community by day and partied all night. It has never been confirmed, but it's known that the female names do not correspond to the names of wives of the railroad officials.

Judge Milliken had a house built in the town, but never lived there. Today, a grinning biker by the name of Pat Day does, along with his constant companion, a wiry Jack Russell Terrier he calls “Panhead.” A welder by trade, Pat refers to himself as “The Hottest Rod in Town” in his ad in The Breeze.

One morning, years back, Day awoke to the sounds and smells of a fire consuming the house across the street from him. Rushing outside he grabbed a ladder and rescued a young girl that was stuck in a second-floor bedroom. Asked if he wasn't afraid of what might happen to him, he said he was more afraid of having to live with himself for the rest of his life if he didn't do something.

Several years ago, in trade for his advertising bill owed to the paper, Pat agreed to rebuild the wrought-iron handrails on our front porch. Sometimes, Pat and Panhead would show up just around the end of the day, and tinker and measure and mutter among themselves -- without much of any work getting done -- before they'd wander back to Pat's truck and disappear into the night.

Then, some mornings we would begin to awake to the fact that somehow in the night, Pat had managed to come and remove the rails entirely.

Days later, they would return, evolved in form and function. Sometimes they'd sit unchanged for months, other times, they'd change every week. Then, they would disappear again. For a period of time, we even grew fonder of the porch without rails, and fretted about what we could and should tell Pat.

One winter, when temperatures were below zero, he would show up late at night and weld on the rails, his work creating our own private personal lightning storm as my Lesli and I lay in bed and watched television with the girls, as Pat and Panhead barked and bickered outside our bedroom window with each other, a huge go-cup of coffee made by Lesli sitting beside them and steaming up into the night.

“We're going to have moved for twenty years and he's gonna be coming over here and taking those rails in the middle of the night,” I would tell Lesli as we'd round the corner onto our street and see Pat's truck parked out front. Finally, the project now seems to have come to some permanence. But Pat has yet to submit a bill for payment to settle against his steadily growing ad bill that has also gone unpaid, so perhaps, the job is not yet finished.

And chronicling it all, every Thursday for more than 110 years, another issue of The Johnstown Breeze has hit the streets as they've gone from rutted, rural dirt roads to asphalt state highway. I've worked at the paper since 1991. In 1997, Lesli and I bought it and she came to work here: becoming one of more than a dozen husband and wife teams -- sprinkled with the occasional ink-stained bachelor printer/owner -- that have kept the pages coming off the presses.

Still independently owned, the paper bears little resemblance to the cubicle word-farms that corporate bean counters have planted in newsrooms across the country. “We have a dress code,” my wife tells new employees and interns, “you have to wear clothes.”  In Erik Larson's book “The Devil in White City” he describes the Whitechapel Club, a group of Chicago journalists at the turn-of-the-century, and their clubhouse:

 “.…a room full of men, some young, some old, all seeming to speak at once, a few quite drunk. A coffin at the center of the room served as a bar. The light was dim and came from gas jets hidden behind skulls mounted on the walls. Other skulls lay scattered about the room. A hangman's noose dangled from the wall, as did assorted weapons and blankets cake with blood …. The weapons on the wall had been used in actual homicides and were provided by Chicago policemen; the skulls by an alienist at a nearby lunatic asylum, the blankets by a member who had acquired it while covering a battle between the army and the Sioux.”

There are no skulls hissing fire at The Breeze today, but on one wall hangs a Texas state flag that flew over the capitol on the day Lesli and I were married. Right next to it still sticks an ad with the visage of an unsmiling Charlton Heston promoting the National Rifle Association convention in Denver that year, that got pulled at the 11th-hour of deadline when the shootings at Columbine High School hit the media and the ad agency cancelled all the ads.

Newbies at owning the paper, we had struggled with whether to take the NRA's money in the first place. We needed it. And didn't they have a right to advertise their event? History never forced us to swallow hard on our principles and cash the check, but I keep the ad on the wall, with Heston looking down on me with his Moses-With-A-Musket glower, as a talisman/reminder of the responsibility we've been given, and what kind of paper we want to own.

I came up in journalism with the traditional mindset: you get a job on a small paper as a reporter, then a larger paper, then a larger one, and eventually you’re either a war correspondent for the New York Times, or changing Bob Woodward’s adult diaper at the Washington Post.

Never, sitting in journalism classes at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, did I say to myself: “You know, someday I want to find a small town weekly newspaper somewhere to buy and settle down and raise my family there.”

I tell people now that was simply an indication of how limited my imagination was.

Lesli and I were living in New Mexico in 1991. She hated her job, and her boss, maybe in reverse order, missed her family back in Colorado, and I had never been able to crack the Land of Enchantment Cool Kids Clique at newspapers in the Santa Fe area.

After being fired from a used bookstore, where the old hippie woman who owned it told me she had had had teenagers (I was 31 at the time) who picked up the arcane theory of how much for this book and how much for that book faster than I did, and getting fired, I had managed to land as the assistant director of public relations at The College of Santa Fe, a rich-kid liberal arts school run by a weird off-shoot of monks called the Christian Brothers.

My attempts to fit in with the PR crowd weren’t much more successful than my attempts to get in with the journalism crowd. My tenure at CSF may best be summed up by the comment one day of my boss, a bitchy social-climbing troll of a woman whose stiletto heels were like a cat bell when we’d hear them click, click, clicking down the hall and scurry back to work at our desks.

I bought a pair of boots. Proud as could be of them, I asked her what she thought when I came to work one Monday morning.

“They look comfortable,” she said coolly.

For whatever reason, my boss assigned me to write the commencement speech for the president of the college’s board of trustees, a banker in Santa Fe. The first Iraq War has just ended and I took the opportunity to have him remind the graduates that a lot of young men and women has recently been maimed or killed fighting for their country, not out of any grand sense of patriotism, but because joining the military had been the only way they had had a chance to get a college education. Maybe they, the CSF grads who mom and dad had paid for the sheepskin, should keep that in mind and do something with their degree.

The banker went ballistic on my boss. My boss went ballistic on me. Then, together in her office one afternoon they went ballistic on me together, and no doubt smoked a cigarette after I left.

“I wanted to say something happy, for Christ’s sake,” the banker said. “Maybe something about remembering the friendships and connections they made at the school by joining the alumni association or something, not this liberal crap”

I could literally hear them typing my termination papers across the hall one afternoon when Lesli called and asked if I wanted to move back to Colorado. She had just been offered a job with the Weld County Health Department in Greeley.

Calling around to the newspapers in northern Colorado I got some middling interest from the daily in Longmont, which was looking to start a “Weld County bureau.” I came up and interviewed for the job, and even got introduced to the managing editor, not a bad sign.

But there were no guarantees, or offers, so I had scheduled interviews at other places as well. The next morning, I interviewed at a Boulder advertising agency.

Sniffing like a baboon with a $500 razor haircut coming upon some rotting mangos, the partner of the ad agency who met with me wasn’t much more impressed with my boots than my boss in Santa Fe had been. It’s more than two decades later, but in my memory his office was dark, like Dracula would keep things if he was selling soap.

Let’s just say I didn’t leave with much hope I’d be playing golf with my new boss anytime soon.

After leaving that interview I went to the Boulder Daily Camera, the daily newspaper. The editor who I met with took one look at me, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes.

“Dude, I am really sorry, but I am so fucking hung over,” he said.

I knew that somehow, I had to get back into journalism.

With Lesli going to work in Greeley, and it looking I would maybe be getting a job in Longmont or maybe Boulder, we were looking for something commutable for both of us. Something in between.

I remembered a girl, Becky, who I had known briefly when I had attended a journalism summer camp at UNC while still in high school.

She said she was from a small farm town just outside of Greeley called Johnstown.

So I did what I hate now. When I got back to New Mexico I found a phone number for the local newspaper in Johnstown and called and asked if there were any rentals in the classifieds. Not asking if I could buy a paper, just could someone read them to me.

Now that I own the paper I tell people to buy a fucking copy, but a sweet-voiced woman answered the phone and read me what little in the way of rentals the small town had. She even whittled out the meth-dens, suggesting nicely that, “I’m not sure you’d be happy with this one….”

Still without a definite job, I made another trip north back to Colorado to check out possible houses while Lesli finished up work in New Mexico.

The woman on the phone had said there was, “It’s an old house, one of the first built in the town. It’s a really nice Victorian one,” she said. I pulled up at just the house one afternoon, with an old man standing in the front yard raking the grass. As I got out of my pick-up several beer bottles fell out, clattering onto the street. Now I see what a sign of things to come it was that they did not break, however.

She was right. The house had a funky old vibe to it and sat just a block away from the single-block downtown area. I hadn’t been in for more than five minutes and I was telling the guy, “I’ll take it.”

“Oh, this one is already rented,” he said, leading me back outside and telling me to follow him up by car up the hill, where he took me to your typical ranch tract house. I told him this would do, but that I really liked the other one better.

The next morning the man’s wife called. She said “the check had bounced” on the deposit for the old Victorian and if we wanted to rent it, we could. It would be years later that I would find out that the woman who was going to rent it had just gotten a divorce, and hadn’t told the woman that on the application, and when the woman called to check something, she got the soon-to-be-ex because they were still living together.

So, on Mother’s Day weekend 1991, we moved from New Mexico into our old Victorian in Johnstown. As we were unloading boxes out of the U-Haul an investigator for the Weld County Sherrif’s Office came up the walk. Apparently the guy who had been living in the house prior to use had been busted for selling meth. He had been hiding his stash in the duct work, the detective said. This explained why none of the furnace grates had screws in them. He also had a stolen Harley parked in the living room when they made the bust, the deputy said.

It was several weeks after we moved in that the paper in Longmont told me they had “instituted a hiring freeze” and not to expect that to change anytime soon. Lesli mentioned that she had noticed there was a weekly paper in town…

“I picked up a copy,” I said. “It’s owned by a husband and wife named Clyde and Ardis. With names like that they have to be in their 80s. I’ve done my time on the little small town weekly with the grumpy old editor….”

It was several weeks after that, with nothing on the job horizon, when I finally decided to walk into The Johnstown Breeze and see if maybe I could at least pick up some freelance to bring in some money and bolster my ego till something opened up on a real newspaper.

Behind the front desk sat a guy with long hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was wearing a pair of black leather motorcycle chaps over his jeans.

Obviously, this guy was on work-release from the county. Well, at least these old farts hired felons.

“Uh, is the owner around?” I asked.

The guy laughed and held out a tattooed arm. “I’m the owner,” he said. “My name is Clyde Briggs.”

I learned that the paper wasn’t owned by a couple with a mixture of Geritol and ink in their veins, but rather it was owned by Clyde and his wife, who were only about 10 years older than Lesli and I. While he usually didn’t use many freelancers, he said, the reporter at the paper had recently suffered a heart attack and would be out for a month.

Clyde made me a deal … I could work for a month, but when the reporter was ready to come back, I was out of a job.

Years later Clyde would say what first impressed him about me was that I came in on a Thursday after a Wednesday night town board meeting to make follow-up calls, even though the story wouldn’t run until the next Thursday. At the end of the month, he matter-of-factly told me that he had called the reporter and fired him and that the job was mine if I wanted it.

Again, I took the work just waiting for something to open up on one of the dailies. But slowly, I began to like working at The Breeze. I worked Monday through Wednesday, the heavy part of the news cycle, and then had Thursdays and Fridays to do freelance for other magazines and papers. The office had a loose, hippie-like vibe to it, and Clyde’s biker friends were always hanging around.

While I kept my ears open for other openings, I never really tried very hard until Lesli became pregnant in the spring of 1994 and we had our first child, a daughter we named Riley. Lesli had a good job at the county, which was providing health insurance, but she also was missing much of the raising of Riley, working 60 hours a week. It was me who was spending the time with our kid.

It looked like I might have my foot in the door at the daily paper in Greeley. I had grown to know the editor, he knew I was interested in coming on-board, and it was starting to seem like the next opening I’d get a shot. Then, when Riley was just a couple of months old, Clyde and Ardis’ son, Luke, was killed in a car wreck at age 16.

It was just Clyde and Ardis and me at the paper, and I didn’t feel good leaving as they tried to deal with the loss of a child and still having to put out a paper each week.

I went into the editor of the Greeley daily the next time I was in town and explained the situation. Not now, I said, but maybe in a year… after they got their feet back under them.

Several months later, the editor left the paper and the new editor and immediately got off on the wrong foot it seemed. Maybe my name was on the old editor’s list of potential next hires that got passed along. Maybe the new editor wanted his own mark, who knows, but the next couple of reporter slots I interviewed for I was always the second or third choice.

Then, in late 1995, we had another daughter, who we named Harper Lee, and things became more stressed with Lesli and I about her being the majority breadwinner. She was tired. She was missing her girls’ growing up, and she begged me to find something and take the pressure off her. More and more I was hearing from the dailies surrounding Johnstown that I needed to go spend some time in the smaller daily wilderness somewhere else in the state, then talk to them about a job. With a wife and two small kids, my days of being able to wander from town to town and paper to paper were growing less appealing and possible.

Editors, like dogs, smell fear, and this just made things worse. I had begun trying to get on with the daily in Loveland. The editor there took it upon himself to explain condescendingly to me one day that he had people from the L.A. Times who wanted to move to Colorado who would come to work for him.

“I’ve got a stack of resumes three inches thick on my desk and yours is pretty close to the bottom,” he said. I later came to be glad about that, because it was eventually revealed that he was having an affair with his secretary and was doing it with her on that desk at night after everyone else went home.

In the summer of 1997, I was beginning to think I was going to have to get out of the business, if I was going to save my family. Many a night I lay awake at 3 a.m. in bed thinking, “Matt, you not only have fucked up your life, but the life of your family.”

Then, a literal feeding frenzy started between the Denver Post and a chain of newspapers in Texas. It seemed like every week they were buying another weekly somewhere. I began to encourage Clyde and Ardis, who were still struggling with the death of their child and the chaos it had wrought, to consider maybe selling to one of the other. I figured I could finally get health benefits, and could probably hang on for a year or two before getting run off by the suits.

Simultaneously, I also went and looked at a small weekly for sale in the southern part of the state. Moving to a new town and taking over the paper, as a stranger in town, seemed daunting, and I wondered how Lesli would do in a new town, still remembering how she had missed being close to her parents when we were in New Mexico.

One weekend after I came back from looking at the paper, Lesli and I talked. What, she asked, were the chances that maybe we could buy The Breeze ourselves.

I walked into work that Monday and proposed that. Clyde and Ardis smiled at each other. They had spent the weekend talking about the same thing, they said. They didn’t want to sell the paper to a corporate chain, they wanted to sell it to a husband and wife. A price was agreed upon, and they agreed to carry the note, allowing us to make monthly payments to them. Lesli would come to work at the paper and run the advertising and business and production side, while I’d take care of the editorial duties.

With the stroke of a pen and the shake of the hand I was no longer one of the more unemployable journalists in the state.

The editors who wouldn’t give me a job worked for newspapers, and I now owned one.