Editor’s Note: As I indicated Sunday four 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 fourth 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

Rod Duren

My first mugshot in 1984

Chapter Four: The Baldwin Times in Bay Minette

by Glynn Wilson

In the final months of 1983, the Reagan administration authorized a series of military exercises in Honduras that some believed might lead to a full-blown armed conflict with Nicaragua, and then launched Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny island nation of Grenada in the Caribbean Sea. Reagan had already declared his intention to run for reelection in 1984.

While watching these events unfold on the three television network-news channels then, and reading about them in the mass-circulation daily newspapers of the time — there was no Cable News Network yet, that would not come until 1985 — I packed my belongings into a U-Haul truck and headed south for Bay Minette. My fiancée and I found a small, reasonably priced apartment right in town, just about a mile from The Baldwin Times newspaper office on the courthouse circle in the county seat of Baldwin County, Alabama.

On the first day of January, 1984, an ominous year considering the book title of that name, I took my place in a newsroom as a full-time professional newspaper reporter. Looking back at the history now, I see it was the very same day when the Reagan Justice Department split the nation’s giant telephone monopoly ATnT into 24 independent Bell System units. We would all watch again 22 years later during the Christmas holiday season in 2006 as the Bush Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission put it all back together again, this time run by Southwest Bell out of Texas — Bush country. That will play a major role in the future of the Web Press, as we will see in a later chapter.

But there was no way to predict that in January 1984. I just remember being thrilled and fascinated on my first few days on the job, walking across the street from the newspaper office to explore a small-town courthouse. It is my contention that one of the most important things for young reporters to learn is how to cover the legal system, from arrest and arraignment through indictment and trial. I told these stories often in my nine years of university teaching, although I’m not sure how many of my students were impressed. Only big-time celebrity seems to matter now, in Bush’s America.

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