Vol. 152: Herald angels? Where?

And you thought nothing ever happens in small towns

All that Yuletide caroling at this festive season invariably takes me back to December 1967 in Portland, Indiana— specifically, that year’s Christmas party for the Commercial Review, the only daily newspaper in a town of 7,000 souls. On that joyous occasion, my five-person news staff serenaded our colleagues with our own version of “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” which conveniently summarized the key local news events of the previous year. It remains a useful corrective for urbanites who think nothing of note ever happens in a small town.

Hark, the C-R staffers sing:
Woe onto the news we bring.
No police, and unpaved roads,
Bridges which can’t hold their loads.
School disputes and one dead eagle,
Slot machines which are illegal.
We may find out in the end
Harold Floyd is our best friend.
Hark, the C-R staffers sing:
Woe onto the news we bring.

Some of this song is self-explanatory. Let me guide you through the rest.

No police, but one dead eagle

—Two vacancies on a police force might go unnoticed in New York or Philadelphia, but in Portland— where the entire force, including the dispatcher, consisted of six cops— it was a very big deal indeed. Suppose Marlon Brando showed up with his motorcycle gang from The Wild One? You can sympathize with our concern, yes?

—Portland’s slender police force was abetted by the faux muscular Sheriff’s Department, one of whose deputies made a name for himself by shooting an American eagle. Any such destruction of our nation’s cherished national bird was (and still is) prohibited by the federal Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, but our deputy must have been absent on the day that tidbit was covered in sheriffing school. Not only did he kill a bald eagle, but he also photographed the dead bird and boasted about his achievement. (I understand he expects a pardon from President Trump any day now.)

Vanishing schools

—The major continuing controversy in our county, as in many rural counties then, concerned school consolidation. A county-wide school board for Jay County (population: fewer than 23,000) had been installed just three years earlier. Since then, the board members had been trying to figure out how best to serve a county which in 1967 still had six high schools, enrolling a grand total of 1,600 students. Half of those kids were in Portland High School, and the remaining 800 were sprinkled among five very small but dearly beloved village schools. As you can imagine, most of those smaller schools lacked science labs, music and art facilities, and in some cases even auditoriums, athletic fields, and gymnasiums.

Consolidating them all into one single high school made sense, both educationally and economically. But politically the task was a minefield. The smaller towns jealously cherished their identities, and they also feared and hated Portland, which to their minds was a big city (seriously).

The beleaguered school board tried to compromise by voting to build not one but two high schools for the county, neither located in Portland. But when that plan proved financially untenable, the board was forced to adapt the single school plan after all. By the time that county-wide high school opened in 1975, I was long gone. And today few people would argue with the wisdom of the board’s decision, however reluctantly it was taken: When I last visited Portland a few years ago, the enrollment at Jay County High School had dwindled to about 800— precisely half the high school population in 1967.

Was this our business?

—Gambling of any sort was illegal in Indiana, but as long as it was confined to private venues— bingo games in churches, say, or slot machines in fraternal lodges— law enforcement officials routinely ignored it. On the other hand, the federal government required all operators of gambling devices to purchase gambling license stamps, which were registered as a matter of public record. Thus, the Indiana conundrum: Everybody knew who was operating illegal slot machines, but state and local law enforcement officials pretended they didn’t know.

For us journalists at the Commercial Review, this problem was more than theoretical. Over the Christmas holidays in 1966, the local distributor of jukeboxes and slot machines, one Cliff Plaisance by name, threw a large holiday party whose guests included the Jay County sheriff and one of his deputies, the commander of the nearby State Police post, and three prominent public officials from Randolph County, just to the south of us: the Circuit Court judge, the county prosecutor, and the mayor of Winchester, the Randolph County seat.

So you can imagine the sticky question that Hugh Ronald, my publisher, and I wrestled with that week: Was the presence of all these public officials at a private party thrown by a man who openly made his living illegally any of our business as journalists? After a relatively brief discussion, we both agreed that it was.

Four of the six public officials cited in our subsequent stories and editorials demanded retractions and, when we declined, three of them sued us for libel. (Most of them insisted that they didn’t know Plaisance, but that their wives had been invited to the party by Plaisance’s wife. You see, Samuel Alito wasn’t the first public figure to hide behind his wife’s skirts.) To his credit, Hugh never wavered in his determination to fight the suits rather than settle them. Those cases dragged on for several years— long after I had left Portland, in fact— but ultimately all three suits were dismissed.

A major league embezzler

—The “Harold Floyd” referred to in our song was the manager of the Jay County Rural Electric Membership Corporation, which supplied electricity to the county’s farms. He was also, it turned out, a crook.

Our journalistic nosing around triggered an investigation by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which concluded that Floyd had diverted more than $50,000 worth of co-op funds— the equivalent of $500,000 today— since he had taken charge of the co-op in 1949. During that time, Floyd had charged the co-op for all or most of the cost of nine trips with his family— two African safaris, two fishing trips to Canada, two to Alaska, and one each to Mexico, Hawaii, and the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair— not to mention winter clothing, the use of co-op employees to construct his new home, and enough other miscellaneous items to fill five columns of our paper when the report was released in September 1967.

By then, Floyd had resigned his position and fled across the state line to Illinois, where he filed a $1.5 million libel suit against our paper in federal court. (The suit was subsequently dismissed.)

No Pulitzer Prize?

You may ask: Why didn’t the C-R win a Pulitzer Prize for uncovering this scandal? The answer is simple: We were too busy putting out the paper every day to prepare the necessary application forms. In later years, especially in the ’70s when I worked at the much-honored Philadelphia Magazine, it occurred to me that awards are won by publications willing to devote the time and energy to apply for them. (Each January, Philadelphia Magazine hired someone who spent the entire month assembling award applications.) But excess time and energy were luxuries a small-town paper couldn’t afford.

You may have noticed that the last two “hot” stories on this list— the slot machine purveyor, and the corrupt rural electric manager— were developed entirely by our newspaper. We had to dig to find them. Had we not written about them, they never would’ve surfaced.

The Commercial Review, incidentally, still survives. In fact, it has acquired the papers serving two adjoining county seats. But other rural areas haven’t been so fortunate. Between 2004 and 2020, one-fifth of all American newspapers vanished. No doubt some Internet service may arise in their place to expose the Cliff Plaisances and Harold Floyds who inevitably pop up everywhere, sooner or later. But that may be the big challenge of our time.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com