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 sixth 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 Five: A Christmas Story

by Glynn Wilson

The weekend before Christmas in 1984, I made the rounds in the Baldwin County courthouse and ended up in the office of the new district attorney, David Whetstone, who had an open-door policy for the press. Actually, that’s an understatement. He was a media-hound like no politician or lawyer I encountered before, or since. He would prop his cowboy boots up on his desk (which he always wore even with his best Sunday suits and in court), light a cigarette (since you could still smoke in public buildings in those days) and regale me with the details of cases he was prosecuting. Mostly, though, we talked about national, state, and county politics.

On this day, however, his door was closed. And I could tell from the body language of his secretary that something was up. So I hung around for a while. While sitting in the outer office, I distinctly heard a woman crying behind the closed door. My reporter instincts told me big news was about to walk out that door, so I waited, and waited.

After a little while, a young woman came out of Whetstone’s office, still wiping her eyes. I asked him what was up. He hesitated at first, but our relationship was such that I finally broke him down and got him to talk. It seems the young Fairhope woman had married a man of Syrian descent, had his baby, and then divorced. The day before, the man had visited the woman at her apartment in Mobile and gained her trust long enough for her to go to the grocery store — and leave the child at home with him. When she got back, her ex-husband and her baby were gone.

Read the rest of this entry »