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.