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 eighth 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
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

Chapter 7: The Cleanest City in the World

by Glynn Wilson

We used to have a saying among the able news reporting staff at The Decatur Daily. “It’s a war, and no one is safe: GROWTH, OPPORTUNITY, NEW JOBS.”

We would whisper it over the phone to each other and almost fall out on the floor laughing. The extent to which the management of the newspaper was in bed with the local political establishment and the chamber of commerce was appalling.

One day one of our able reporters, an old friend of mine I had not seen since elementary school until my first day on the job in Decatur, went out to the Wolverine textile mill with a photographer to do a business story. Accidentally, they discovered the company illegally dumping toxic sludge into the Tennessee River.

When they came back and told us in the newsroom, several of us on the staff urged the editors to have the stuff tested and to do our own, independent newspaper investigation. The executive editor, a close friend of one of the vice presidents at Wolverine (who just happened to also be the president of the city council), decided to hold the story and call the state environmental agency. The Alabama Department of Environmental Management had been set up during the administration of Gov. Fob James in the early 1980s as a “one-stop permitting agency,” designed to streamline the industrial permitting process to help the state compete for jobs and industry with neighboring Tennessee and Georgia. It took ten days for the agency to send an investigator, and by then, of course, the company had been tipped off and had cleaned up the mess. There was no violation, and thus no story.

On another occasion I was sent over to the local Bunge Corporation to check out the rumor of a strike. Bunge at the time was one of the world’s largest grain-processing companies, and as far as I know, it still is. Workers had indeed walked off the job and had set up a picket line, and there had allegedly been shots fired at scabs and management, due to the firing of a worker who was a top union official.

Union activity was also a sacred cow, however, and the paper had a policy of only doing union stories from the perspective of the Labor Relations Board out of Birmingham. It all supposedly went back to the 1940s when striking pressmen had sabotaged the presses of The Decatur Daily one day, the only day in the paper’s history when no paper was published. The strike story I wrote was never published. The only mention of the strike was a small blurb buried deep in the paper a few days later, primarily the statement by the Labor Relations Board that, indeed, there was a strike going on. It did not explain it or give the worker’s side of the story.

Having become increasingly frustrated with the management of the paper along with almost every other reporter on the staff, I and two other reporters, who privately called ourselves the “Triad of Dissent,” had a meeting with the editors at a bar one day to discuss working conditions at the paper. Too many stories were not being covered. Working conditions were growing worse. And that goddamn coffee-vending machine in the hallway sucked. We wanted a real coffee pot in the newsroom. It was the least they could do. We all pitched in to buy the coffee.

But that was the beginning of the end for all three of us. That meeting constituted what we would later find out was called “protected concerted activity” by the U.S. Department of Labor and the Fair Labor Standards Act. To management, the meeting must have constituted labor-organizing, an act tantamount to treason in the news business. I can only imagine the paranoid dialogue that took place between the editor and the publisher.

Here’s how the end came down. Growing discontent from the staff mounted until the executive editor called us all together in the newsroom one day. He had recently been nominated president-elect of the local chamber of commerce, and as chairman of the litter committee, he had been assigning stories on an almost-daily rotating basis to various reporters to do stories about litter in various parts of town. The copy desk or some brilliant editor had come up with a logo for the “litter gitter,” a packman looking creature, which we began to run on the front page on a frequent basis. It was a constant source of amusement for the staff, and it must have been seen as ridiculous to most everyone in town.

I’ll never forget the one litter story assigned to me. I was never asked to do another. That day’s story was to be about “litter on bridges and overpasses” in Decatur. I took a photographer and went to see the city engineer. He pulled out a map of the city and showed me the location of every single bridge and overpass in the city. I took photographer Glenn Baeske, who later went to work for The Huntsville Times, and we went to every bridge and overpass in the entire goddamn city, and guess what? There wasn’t a single piece of litter on any of them.

We knew better than to go back to the office without pictures, however, so we rooted around in our car and in the bushes and found some paper and a few aluminum cans to drop into the picture. We went back to the office. Glenn went into the darkroom to process the film, and I went to see executive editor Tom Wright to see if I could talk him out of running the story.

“Tom, I have good news. Me and Glenn Baeske went to the city engineer’s office and got a map showing the location of every bridge and overpass in the city. We drove around town all afternoon, checking out every bridge and overpass in Decatur. I’m happy to report that there was not a single piece of litter on any of them.”

Tom’s hands began to shake. He glared at me. He lowered his head to where I could barely see his steel-gray eyes under his bushy-silver eyebrows.

“Do the story anyway,” he demanded, and motioned me out of his office.

I did a story admonishing the local citizenry not to toss litter out on the local bridges and overpasses, and Baeske managed to produce one acceptable picture of a bridge with our trash on it. It was an ethical breach, but the editors didn’t care about ethics. They cared about pleasing the people with money so they could bring in more of it in the form of advertising dollars.

I’ll give them credit for this. The little city of Decatur was pretty good at promoting itself. A few years later, after a failed public relations attempt to get Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev to visit Decatur, the chamber of commerce came up with another brilliant idea. They erected billboards on each end of town saying, “Welcome To Decatur: The WORLD’s cleanest city.”

What a place. How could anyone respect an editor willing to help cover up a major story like toxic pollution being illegally dumped into a river, yet insistent on running stories about non-existent litter on bridges?

So here we were, the entire Daily staff, gathered in the center of the newsroom (newly renovated and expanded from the proceeds of all the new booze money floating around), hearing Tom Wright assure us that, “This is not a chamber of commerce newspaper. If any of you have any dirt on anybody, you bring it directly to me.”

It sounded like a statement of re-dedication that the management of the paper from that day forward would begin to print the truth. Of course, I figured it was a lie, but decided to put his statement to the test. I had just found out that Dwayne Hood, my old friend and the reporter who tried to expose Wolverine, had been asked to resign just after Christmas. He had agreed and was working out a two-week notice. Brooks Boliek and I figured we were next. But I had a job to do.

I was checking the police logs one day and noticed that the chairman of the local industrial development board, who was also the vice chairman of the planning commission and another good friend of our editor and publisher, had come out of jail disheveled, as if he had spent the night in the drunk tank for being caught driving under the influence of alcohol. I started checking it out, and discovered this same man had been arrested two previous times for DUI, but still had his driver’s license and was driving around legally in his new, shiny-white Lincoln Continental Town Car.

I started asking questions about why the cases against him had been dropped, and found out the magistrate was ready to talk about a scheme in which certain local lawyers and the local district attorney were fixing DUI cases. The way it worked was simple. If you could afford to fork over $1000 to $1500 or more to the right lawyer, he would in-turn pay a sum to the DA and the municipal judge. When your continuances were exhausted and the case delayed as long as possible, your case would be called at the end of a night docket, when everyone else had been tried and either released or convicted and locked up for the night. The judge would call your case, at which time your lawyer would argue that the charges should be dismissed. On what grounds? An old state law dating back to the 1920s, which said anyone charged with a crime must be called before a magistrate “within a reasonable period of time” after arrest. Of course the case had been delayed so long, the judge would deem that you had NOT been called within a reasonable period of time, and he would summarily dismiss the case.

If you were a poor schlep with no political connections and no big cash-money to fork over, you were ordered to pay the mandatory fine of $500 to $1000, or to do up to 30 days in the city jail, and to turn over your driver’s license for a minimum of 90 days or up to one year. You were on your own, of course, if you dared break the law by driving back and forth to work without a license. But then how else could you afford to pay off the court system?

I took the information to Tom Wright, personally, as he had instructed, and he authorized me to work on the story for most of the morning. After lunch, there was a note that appeared on my computer terminal telling me to report to Tom’s office at 5 p.m. sharp for a staff meeting. At 15 minutes till, I walked over to another reporter’s desk to ask if he knew what the meeting was about. He didn’t. I asked another reporter. She didn’t know what I was talking about.

At 5 p.m., the city editor, a yellow-bellied character named Paul Foreman, who would later end up working on The Birmingham News copy desk, ordered everyone out of the newsroom except for me. Then he ushered me into Tom’s office. I was asked to resign. I asked on what grounds. Even though I had been given a raise three weeks earlier, and Tom had told me I was the “BEST City Hall reporter he had ever had,” he told me on this day that my “work was no longer satisfactory.” That was it. If I refused to resign, I would be “terminated.”

No, I could not take two weeks to think about it. I had five minutes. I went to my desk and began clearing it out, while Wright and Foreman stared at me as if they expected any minute for me to start bashing in computers or destroying the presses or something. I told them I had done nothing wrong, and refused to resign. They asked for my key to the building and gave me another five minutes to “clear out your desk and get off the premises.”

Obviously, their attempt to “break” me of my idealism, to socialize me into accepting the corruptness of the system and the inevitability of the power of the status quo, did not work. I thought back to several conversations I had had with Foreman, to times when he tried to get me to understand why the newspaper was not engaged primarily in seeking the truth.

“That’s just the way it is,” he said to me softly, almost kindly, as if he were the one to let me down and to make me understand “how the world really works.”

It reminds me now of a line familiar in American movies. In fact I think this story should be done as a movie.

I walked out of The Decatur Daily newsroom for the last time, down the long hall leading to the publisher’s office, past the dark-room, down the loading dock where the giant rolls of paper were unloaded from trucks, past the train tracks that passed directly behind the newspaper building, and I drove to our big white house on Danville Road. Many a good time was had there, a place we called the “Danville Road Church of the Holy Light.” We used to dance until dawn and climb up on the roof to drink and laugh and escape the pressures of the news business. It was a place where we could escape the petty politics of Decatur and the problems of the newsroom. I moved in there with two other reporters, Keith Clines in sports and Brooks Boliek, who worked on the State Desk.

As they went to their respective jobs every morning for the next month, I slept late and contemplated the past and the future. I finished writing my Political Science-History paper on the politics of the South on a Tandy laptop plugged into one of the first electric typewriters that worked as a computer printer. It was a paper I had to finish for my last three credits toward a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Alabama.

One day I got up and looked outside. It was snowing and the huge flakes were gathering like giant cotton balls on the first spider webs of March. I called the U.S. Labor Department in Birmingham, and made an appointment to meet with an investigator. He advised me of my rights, and I signed the complaint, seeking back overtime pay for all those hours I had worked during the past year for which I had not been paid.

I was a dedicated reporter willing to work all hours of the night and day for practically nothing, if only it were real news, of import to the citizens, to the readers, to the country. If only I had been treated like a human being, not a slave for the status quo. It was just not worth it anymore to be a hatchet man for the publisher and the local government and to spin my wheels on public relations for the paper and the city. I could have sued for my job back, but I didn’t want it. I just wanted to be paid for the hours I had worked, and I wanted a judge or a jury to send a message to management that it would not be wise to continue abusing the time of their reporters any longer. At least this reporter was willing to stand up to them and fight.

In Hood’s last night in Decatur, shortly after I was fired and when Boliek decided to resign, we had a huge Decatur Daily party at the Danville Road house. By the end of the night, everyone danced from room-to-room ripping copies of the Daily to shreds all over the floor. It was redemption for those of us who were leaving, and something of a catharsis for those who planned to try and stay. None of them survives there to this day, except for one — the executive editor.

Over the course of the next few months, the Labor Department found the paper’s management “guilty of willful violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act over a long period of time.” On the day when the claim for damages was to be filed, I got a call from the investigator, who told me it would be my last chance to pull out of the claim and hire a lawyer to file a separate action in federal court.

“I can’t advise you of what to do. I can’t say you should sue,” he said. “But if you take this money, it would hurt any case you might bring.”

The Labor Department settlement established that reporters worked an average of 42 hours a week, and asked the paper to reimburse all present and former reporters for the past three years at a rate of half-time. I withdrew my name from the claim, and the next day my lawyer, Joe Whatley of Birmingham, filed a lawsuit in federal district court asking for me to be paid for 58 hours a week at time-and-a-half, plus treble damages. We asked for $11,000, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.

A few months later, it was time for the trial. Eight past and present reporters had agreed to testify for me against the paper, including my predecessor on City Hall, Dana Byerle, then with United Press International, later the Montgomery bureau reporter for the regional New York Times papers. Still the paper refused to settle the case. We had a jury made up of three white women, three black women, and a gay male librarian from Birmingham. We knew we had the case in the bag.

The judge, a craggy old liberal named Seybourn H. Lynne, who had been appointed by President Harry S. Truman in the 1940s, called the lawyers into chambers. He urged them to save the taxpayers money and settle the case, “or I’ll screw it to you in there. I’ve reviewed the file in the case and I say give the boy the money,” said the judge, according to my lawyer’s account of what took place. When the lawyers came out, the newspaper’s old country lawyer’s lips were white as dry chalk. He was visibly shaken. We were all called back into the courtroom by the judge’s long-time law-clerk bailiff, who talked like the cartoon character Deputy Dawg.

“Ah say, ah say, ah say … give me seven good jur-rars. Come on back into the courtroom … The honorable Justice Seybourn H. Lynne presiding … All rise.”

We sat down, and the judge had the clerk hand the order over to one of the jurors, who had no clue as to what was going on. They had not heard a shred of evidence in the case, but the judge was ordering one of them to sign an order, finding for the plaintiff (me) against the defendant (the Tennessee Valley Printing Co., a.k.a. The Decatur Daily), in the amount of $11,000. It was a legal victory that set a precedent in federal court for allowing reporters to collect back-overtime pay from newspapers.

In some ways it was a moral victory that changed the way newspapers treat and pay reporters, at least in some quarters in the state. I’m sure they would deny any connection, but shortly after the case, the New York Times Co., which owned three newspapers in the state, implemented a thirty-seven-and-a-half-hour work week. Any reporter reaching 40 hours in a week was henceforth to stop what he was doing, right in the middle of a major breaking story if need be, and go home. That was one way to prevent having to pay overtime to reporters. Tell them to stop in the middle of a story.

Do you think any reporter actually ever stopped in the middle of a story at precisely forty hours? Of course not. They go right on working the overtime hours for free. Most reporters love their work, even if they have to compromise any sense of integrity to continue doing it. As the old saying goes, “It beats digging ditches.”

Glynn Wilson v. The Tennessee Valley Printing Co. never received a single paragraph of publicity anywhere in the country for six years, until the Columbia Journalism Review did a story about it during the summer of 1992 in the context of the larger issue of journalism pay nationwide.

I moved back to my native Birmingham and began preparing to open my own business, a San Francisco-style newsstand/bookstore/coffee and tobacco shop, where I planned to study the magazine business and concentrate on becoming a freelance writer.

I assembled many of the reporters who departed the Decatur Daily around that time, and other people in the news business from across the state, for a celebration party in the Grand Suite of the famous Redmont Hotel in downtown Birmingham on the weekend of the Alabama-Auburn game, the Iron Bowl, in 1986. The feeling was unanimous that at least one small victory for reporters everywhere had been won. Everyone at the party signed in on my new laptop computer bought from the lawsuit money, a Zenith with a large backlit LCD screen and grooved keys that made it easy to pound. That machine made the cover of PC Magazine that year. I would write many a freelance story on it over the next nine years.

Next week, the story moves back to the Southside of Birmingham.

” border=”1″ alt=”triad1b.jpg” width=”504″ height=”335″ />

Photo by Rowland Scherman

The Triad of Dissent, the Garage Cafe courtyard, June 23, 2006

Tags: The Cleanest City in the World

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 11:55 pm and is filed under Making Democracy Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.