Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday a few weeks ago in the introduction to a series on the importance of the press in making democracy work, there can be no doubt that experience matters. This is the seventh part of a series designed to show how experience matters when it comes to understanding media and politics — and how to make democracy work. It is a very rough first draft of what will eventually be a literary, non-fiction memoir published with ink on paper in book form, to be sold as a print-on-demand book and promoted on the Web.

In case you missed Chapter 1: Musical Chairs and the Summer of ‘79
Or Chapter 2: The Pioneer — To Print or Not to Print
Or Chapter 3: Chapter Three: The Crimson White
Chapter 4: The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette
Chapter 5: A Christmas Story

Chapter 6: Challenging Sacred Cows

By Glynn Wilson

The world of 1984 was so different from the world today in 2008 that it is hard to even remember exactly what it was like. Birmingham had a burgeoning Bohemian community on Southside in the early and mid-1980s that really was an extension of the 1960s and ’70s culturally. As they say, it takes awhile for national trends to reach the American South. We are a little slower around here. If I had to put a date on how slow, I would say the ’70s mindset continued at least until 1984 or ‘85 on Southside. At the same time, the rest of the state of Alabama joined fully in the politically conservative “Reagan Revolution.”

The writing was already there on the wall for anyone with eyes to see. Conservatism’s powerful reach into the growing professional culture, along with the growing influence of public relations in daily life, had already begun. Unless you were a trust-fund baby who could live the life of an artist, if you needed the pay from journalism for the money, you were required to live a certain way, to conform to strong societal mores.

To continue advancement in that professional world required a certain attentiveness to attire. The advice of a woman could be critical in such an endeavor, almost as critical as the ambition to achieve itself.

My fiancée’s Italian stepfather died of a heart attack in his club one day in late 1984, so she moved back to Birmingham to be with her Irish mother. So by Thanksgiving I had already begun driving the 300 miles from Bay Minette to Birmingham almost every weekend. Her stepmother and real dad had a secondhand store on 20th Street. They found a lot of their stock at estate sales, some of them in Mountain Brook and Homewood. Somewhere over the mountain, there had lived a wealthy lawyer who was exactly my size. I picked up three of his Brooks Brothers suits secondhand for $15 each. They fit perfectly with no alterations. First there was a grey one I really liked, with thin white pinstripes. There was the blue one, and then a Mafia black one with wide-spaced white pinstripes — perfect for funerals, especially with mirrored sunglasses, if you know what I mean.

When I got the call from the editor of the daily newspaper in North Alabama and decided to drive up for the interview, I got a fresh haircut from my good friend Jill in Homewood whom I knew from my music business days. I wore the classic conservative blue pinstriped suit with new crimson saddle oxfords on my feet, Christmas presents from my soon-to-be in-laws, or so we thought. The shoes do matter. It was classic University-of-Alabama look. I got the job as the top political reporter at The Decatur Daily covering City Hall, the most important government to the management, and a position guaranteed to get me on the front page almost every day.

While I was reluctant to move to a place like Decatur, it was bigger than Bay Minette — and only an hour’s drive from Birmingham. When the editor called me the first time offering me the job, I said I would consider it but didn’t think I was interested. He offered me $250 a week, $13,000 a year or $6.25 an hour. He called back a few days later, and this time said the highest he could go would be $267 a week, $6.35 an hour, almost $14,000 a year. He guaranteed me a raise at the end of three months up to $275 a week. He said if things went well I could be making $300 a week, $15,600 a year, by the end of the first year. And he said if I could come up and interview, and if everything went as planned, he would make me his “star political reporter” among a “team of the best investigative reporters in the state” that he was supposedly in the process of putting together. Sounded good anyway.

I went to Decatur, saw the newsroom, and noticed that the small city was located on the Tennessee River and somehow possessed a certain gaudy quaintness that might be interesting to write about.

I went back and talked to my new editor in Bay Minette, Steve Mitchell, who tried to get me to stay in Baldwin County, although in the end, he couldn’t match the daily paper’s offer. So the ladies in the office threw a surprise party and baked me a cake. Written in green icing on top were the words, “We’ll Miss You Glynn, Good Luck.” My time in Bay Minette was quite grand for a poor-to-middle-class Southern boy at the time. Maybe I should have married the daughter of the Chamber of Commerce president and stayed. Nah…

In between jobs at The Baldwin Times and the daily, I revisited the suburbs where I grew up and ran into an old classmate from school who was involved in the Ku Klux Klan. He had been the chaplin and chief speechmaker and rabble-rouser in 1979 when the KKK got involved in a violent demonstration in Decatur. A black, retarded boy named Tommy Lee Hines had been tried and convicted of raping and murdering a white girl, and was scheduled to be sentenced at the Morgan County Courthouse. The NAACP planned a march to protest, upholding his innocence. The Klan wanted Hines fried in the electric chair.

Bill Riccio, I found out, was under surveillance by the FBI, and was about to be arrested for firearms violations and anything else they could get him on. He was scheduled to be sentenced for civil rights violations in federal court for his activities in Decatur. But the judicial system, for some reason I don’t remember, had broken down and allowed those involved in the violence in Decatur to walk scot-free.

I knew Riccio growing up in the suburbs east of Birmingham, mostly from summer camp, where some of the older bullies liked to make fun of Bill. He used to go around camp in Walker County, a church camp in Nauvoo on Black Creek, carrying a silver metal garbage-can lid around like a shield. He would wrap a towel around himself like a Roman toga, and brandish a sword made out of two pieces of scrap wood. He was all about warding off evil demons that seemed to haunt him all the time. I guess in adult life, he found the organization of the Klan somehow comforting. They had real-life enemies he could rail against in public in a forum where other nuts would listen to him, rather than stealing his underwear and running it up the flagpole in place of the American flag as we had done.

I tracked Riccio down in late December 1984 and planned to interview him for a story. But my new editor in Decatur was not interested in the exclusive. He told me to “come on up and get oriented in the job,” and then “we would see” about the Riccio story. A couple of days before I started in Decatur, Riccio was arrested. Was it a sign of things to come in Decatur? When the defendants (members of the Klan) in the case were sentenced, the editors in Decatur deleted the names of those from the area from the list in the Associated Press story for the paper. I can only assume the publisher or others in management had friends on that list.

Meanwhile, I moved into an apartment in Decatur overlooking the pool at a large complex, and began working as a reporter for a daily newspaper, one of two independent, family-owned dailies left in Alabama. Looking back on that odd beginning, it’s funny. But things were taken dead seriously by the management of the newspaper at the time.

The first story I was assigned to cover came as a surprise. I was to interview people standing in line at a state-owned ABC liquor story – people who were there to buy the first legal bottles of whiskey to be sold in the city limits in about 80 years. I had never lived in a dry county before and did not understand what this meant to the people there. The city of Decatur had voted to “go wet” in the fall, to allow the legal sale of alcoholic beverages inside a county where it had been illegal since the early 1900s. Morgan County had prohibited the legal sale of booze years before national prohibition passed in 1919, and continued the practice for 50 years after prohibition was repealed in the late 1930s.

I drove the Toyota to the store. There were about 30 people in line. Now I’ve seen people wait in lines to buy things before. I once stood in line to buy tickets to see the Rolling Stones in a rare concert in Birmingham. I’ve seen the pictures on TV of Russians standing in line to buy bread. But standing in line at 9 a.m. on a Friday to buy whiskey? Weird.

I interviewed the girl who had been chosen by the store manager to buy the first bottle, and found out she didn’t even plan to drink the whiskey. She planned to savor it like a souvenir bottle of Coca Cola from Bear Bryant’s last game, as if there was a chance of it becoming valuable some day like a rare coin or stamp.

The most interesting story I heard that day was never allowed in the newspaper anyway. It seems the primary forces behind keeping the “evil brew” out of Decatur were an odd combination of preachers and bootleggers. The preachers wanted to keep it out for moral reasons, the bootleggers for economic reasons. The preachers had a monopoly on people’s souls. The bootleggers for 80 years had a monopoly on their spirits, at least the recreational kind.

Here’s how the story was told to me. On the last Sunday before the crucial vote, one prominent local bootlegger had gone to the most powerful church in Decatur where a special offering was being taken up for the “dry” campaign. The bootlegger stood up, clad in his cleanest, newest pair of overalls, ready to put $100 into the collection plate. But he called out to the preacher to make sure it was OK.

“Brother Brown? I’m Chester Arthur and I’m here today to contribute to this here offering to help stop this vote to go wet this week. But I just wanted to be honest and all and let you all know that I made this here hundred dollars Saturday night selling my special brand of whiskey, and well, I didn’t know if you would want to take my money or not,” he reportedly asked, to some shock and some laughter from the congregation.

Brother Brown bowed to the bootlegger and assured him that, “any and all contributions to save the everlasting souls of the fine people of Decatur will be accepted, Mr. Arthur. Thank you very much.”

The paper’s publisher and the entire editorial board had been pushing for the wet vote for years, primarily arguing what an economic boon it would be for the town. Of course, they failed to mention publicly that it would also be an economic boon for the newspaper, since every alcohol license would have to be advertised three times in the legal advertising section of the newspaper, and any bars that opened in town would most assuredly advertise in the pages of The Decatur Daily, the only newspaper in town. The last thing the newspaper management wanted to do was print anything to fire up the dry forces and give them fodder for another referendum in a year or two.

Well, the ABC store opened, and the Daily carried the historic lead, with a front-page, full-color picture of people lined up buying their first legal bottles of whiskey in more than 80 years — and the bucks started rolling in. My next few months were primarily spent documenting the ins and outs of the onslaught of money that legal booze sales brought to town. Every license application and approval was duly noted in the local paper of record, a testament to the new prosperity.

Never mentioned in the paper was the story that one year after legal sales began, alcohol-related traffic fatalities doubled. The police department went to quite a bit of trouble to get the information out, sending me a computer floppy disk in the mail with the details, but the story was never printed.

Meanwhile, the paper propagated several policies meant to keep ambitious reporters in check, to socialize us into obedient servants of the status quo. On my beat, the new growth spurred by alcohol sales meant covering many late-night meetings of the city council and the planning commission and the board of zoning adjustment. Management had a strict policy that reporters covering night meetings must write the story that night, just in case in the morning there happened to be a “triple ax murder” or the space shuttle blew up. Of course, gruesome murders were a rarity in rural North Alabama. But one day the Challenger did blow up in mid-launch, right on deadline. It was an important story for us, since Decatur was a bedroom community to Huntsville, where much of the space program was located.

Having to write those meeting stories up at night did not come with a reprieve in the time one had to be at the paper in the morning. Even if you worked until 2 a.m. or later, you were still expected back at 7 a.m. sharp. We were an afternoon paper with a first-edition deadline at nine and the final-edition deadline at noon.

Approval of overtime pay for the long hours, or even compensatory time off, was rare. You were expected to work all hours of the day and night — even if there was no significant breaking news — and to keep your mouth shut and not complain. The unstated rule was that there were plenty of other hungry, young, ambitious journalism graduates out there who would jump at the chance to do your job, and for practically nothing. And if you were five minutes late, the managing editor would either scowl at you or bawl you out, depending on his mood.

After a few months of this, I developed an unnerving habit. It got to the point where I was so afraid of being late that I began sleeping most of the night with one eye open, aimed at the clock. I kid you not. I would open one eye at a minimum every hour on the hour and check the time on my bedside clock. Perhaps the practice would be necessary if you were a foreign correspondent covering a war in Nicaragua, Kuwait, Bosnia, or Somalia. Under extraordinary circumstances I would have it no other way. But it was totally unnecessary in Decatur, Alabama. The pressure was artificial, a product of the editor’s ego. I don’t remember getting eight hours of sleep during my entire tenure at The Decatur Daily. It must have been like being in boot camp in training for the army, only your mission was not to save the country, but to make sure the newspaper publisher made a healthy profit.

One of the mechanisms of social control talked about in journalism and communications schools is what is referred to as “sacred cows.” A sacred cow is an issue or a story that the publisher does not allow reporters to cover under any circumstances, or allows to cover only under tightly controlled conditions. Now, I remember asking Tom Wright in my interview with him before taking the job whether or not the paper had any sacred cows. He looked up at the ceiling and said something like, “Well, we don’t really have any here at the Decatur Daily.” But it turned out that there were sacred cows at every turn, in every pasture, so to speak.

The DUI fatality rate and the strange alliance between the preachers and the bootleggers were obvious ones. The Browns-Ferry nuclear power plant across the Tennessee River in Athens was another, primarily because “Old Man Shelton,” who published the newspaper and practically ran the town for 60 years, had been largely responsible for recruiting it to come into the area in the first place. The paper was pro-nuclear power, so the only in-depth coverage ever printed in the paper that I know of emphasized “the good and bad about Browns-Ferry.”

It was a little difficult to find anything good about it, because due to cost overruns, shoddy workmanship, corruption, and delays, not one single kilowatt hour of power had been produced at the plant since its construction several years before. Billions of tax dollars had gone into building it, purportedly to “save the poor rate-payers in the poor Tennessee Valley money on their power bills.” Instead, the plant was the site of the second-worst nuclear-plant accident in American history next to Three Mile Island. A fire had started inside one of the walls of the plant and the reactor almost melted down when emergency measures proved inadequate.

Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic nominee for president, had perhaps the best solution for shoddily built nuclear-power plants, even though he was trounced by George H.W. Bush in the general election. His advice was to, “Bury them in thousands of tons of concrete and make them a monument to human stupidity.” I was there in Atlanta in ‘88 for that convention.

That should have happened at Browns-Ferry, although I understand they are still trying to re-start the damn thing and make electricity. Even if they finally do produce power there, what will they do with the waste? Shoot it into outer space? I think not. It will be stored at the site until the plant is finally shut down, and then it will be contaminated for thousands of years.

Did the local press do its job of pointing that out? Billions of tax dollars could have been saved, along with hundreds of thousands of lives. What did the local politicians and the newspaper want? Jobs now. Short-term profits and to hell with the long-term consequences….

Check back next week for the second part of this chapter…