An Actual Celebration

When I walked into the newsroom of The Athens News, nearly 19 years ago, the first thing I noticed was the clocks.

There were three of them, arranged in the fashion of big international newsrooms that had arrays of clocks showing the time in major cities around the world. These, though, were labeled “Nelsonville,” “Athens,” and “Coolville.” The three towns are all in Athens County, Ohio. Nelsonville is about 20 minutes north of Athens; Coolville, about 20 minutes east.

They had not been put there by some newsroom crank. They had been installed by Bruce Mitchell, the founder and publisher of the News. One of the first things a person would learn about Bruce was that in any situation, he would look for the path that was likely to be the most fun.

I hadn’t met Bruce the first time I saw those clocks. I was there for a meeting with Terry Smith, the editor, that resulted in my writing a column — this column — for the paper, which ultimately led to my writing a lot more for them and making the paper’s photographs.

Athens has a famous Halloween street party, usually the Saturday night before Halloween. It is attended by thousands and thousands of people. Things occasionally get out of hand but not usually. In 2006, the News had a party for advertisers, employees, and other selected guests, in its second-floor offices that overlooked Court Street, where the Halloween shenanigans were taking place. There was even a secret code word to get into the building, because not all of those thousands of people were invited. As the three-weeks-now columnist, I was given the code. I went up to the party and had some memorably delicious shrimp and other food. I looked out onto the crowded street and said to no one in particular, “We ought to bring back streaking.” From behind me I heard a cheerful voice, laughing, “I could get behind a column on that.” It was Bruce, and I think those were the first words we ever exchanged. I decided I’d like working for this place.

It was only a week or two ago that I learned that Bruce and I were born 37 days apart into the same small Missouri town. His professor father and family moved to Athens when he was still a baby. He grew up here and went to Ohio University where he was that unique 1970s amalgam of hippie, activist, and hellraiser. In the middle part of that decade he dreamt up the ANews, for “Alternative News.” “The Athens News” name came later. It was originally a standard counterculture paper, with features including reports on the availability and quality of recreational drugs on the local market. The paper got embroiled in dispute when it ran a piece on the best nearby spots to go skinny dipping. No, it wasn’t the local populace that howled. It was the enraged naked people, angry because their secret places had been revealed (as they themselves were wont to be).

I think it was after the name change — I’m not sure of it, but either way — a local law enforcement official, I think an assistant prosecutor, at an ANews party drew his pistol and fired it toward the ceiling several times. The innocent murder victim, an acoustic tile, was on proud display until recent years.

Bruce’s paper sponsored all kinds of community events. We had scores, sometimes hundreds, of kids show up to get their pictures taken for free at Halloween and Christmas time. The paper came to be a beloved and important part of Athens. It was free. In 2009 Editor and Publisher magazine listed The Athens News as one of only three newspapers in the country that were actually growing, during the beginning of what would be the end of the industry in most places. There was a venerable daily paper here, but its offices were on the outskirts of town, not in the middle of things on Court Street, a block from city hall and the courthouse the way the ANews was. (In the early 2000s the daily was owned by an Australian outfit, but then it got bought up by a vampire company of the sort that purchase newspapers and suck the life out of them. I believe Dante predicted such companies, of which there are several.)

That week in 2006 I wandered around Athens, making a picture here and there — one that comes to mind is the ANews building on the day before the Court Street Halloween festivities, festooned with a large and appropriate Budweiser banner dangling from the roof. I wandered up the stairway of many, old, very uneven steps to the ANews offices. In the room where she was busily taking classified ads — they were a good moneymaker at the time — was Bruce’s endlessly delightful wife, Susan. She was decked out in a genie costume. She posed for a picture. I had worked at a bunch of newspapers, but had never encountered anything equal to the publisher’s wife, in costume, selling classifieds.

Bruce and Susan liked each other. A lot. It was obvious. It was commented upon, and not in a disparaging fashion but instead in tones of admiration. They were two kids holding hands, running through the meadow. Always. They truly had something we all had expected or at least hoped some day to have. Even during very difficult times, and there were some, they were a single, loving unit.

Perhaps the worst of those times was in March 2014, when their son John ended his life. Like the newspaperman he was (though I’m not sure he ever thought of himself as one), he wrote his way through it, and reading his words again now I find them as impressive and desperately touching as I did the day the piece appeared. In it he said he was celebrating young John’s life. We hear a lot about celebrations of lives, and it is often all fluff and feathers. Bruce showed how it’s done. Here’s a very small part of what he wrote:

“John, who gave us so much love, got trapped in a quickly rising tide of terrible dark thoughts. They robbed him of hope and clouded his judgment.

“The pain was so great, the despair so overpowering, he thought the only way out was to end his own life.

“John made a tragic mistake.

“I forgive you, John Boyd Mitchell, and I hope everyone that loves you and everyone that knows you will forgive you, too.”

You are proud to work for a paper whose publisher can write that. Young John — I think he was 22 — had grown up with the paper, and there were many tears shed in the office that week. Businesses often claim to be families, but The Athens News, at least the core people dedicated to making it the best paper it could be, really behaved like one.

The standard newspaper cliché — which is one because like most clichés it is true — has the hair-on-fire editor having to be restrained by the publisher, wise in the ways of keeping a business afloat. That relationship was reversed at the ANews. It was Bruce’s hair, if he had had any, that was all the time on fire, and Terry Smith — with each passing year I realize more and more just how good an editor he was — who acted, not always successfully, as the brakes.

“Bruce wants us to . . .” he would begin, with a touch of doomed resignation in his voice, as if the light at the end of the tunnel had, yes, turned out to be just a train. Whatever it was, it meant a lot more work, which given the existing workload was not a cause for celebration. (Except for me — I was paid by the picture or the piece I wrote. More work? Bring it on!) There were special issues, magazines such as The Annual Manual, and other one-shots. Somehow they always worked. I think Terry talked Bruce out of the ones that might have been an issue too far.

There was no place like it, and Bruce and Terry, and Guy Philips, who had started as an ad salesman near the beginning and was now a partner in the paper and a fine fellow generally, though he was more on the business side, had made it so.

I suppose I should mention, just to attest that it was once possible, that Bruce and I were just about as far apart politically as two people could be — and that fact had no effect on anything.

One learned not to be thrown off by the unexpected.

An example: The widely feared and well-disliked Athens County sheriff was on trial for a number of corruption charges. We of course covered the story, and I spent many of those days in the courtroom. One day the defense lawyer got sloppy and left his laptop open and on, facing the spectators. Bored, I focused my long lens on its screen. I was more than surprised to see that the page displayed had to do with some 2003 investigation — let me hasten to add that if there had been such an investigation, this was the first and last ever heard of it — of Bruce and Guy being some sort of high-level local drug kingpin financiers. We never figured out what it was about, except that apparently the sheriff didn’t like Bruce and Guy. It never came up in court. The sheriff was convicted on all charges and went to be prison, sheriff no more.

One day shortly before an election I ran into Susan on Court Street in front of the diner. We stopped and talked briefly and somehow during the course of it we made a secret pact to vote for Jim Pancake for whatever office he was seeking. Jim was a colorful local character, the host of the “Sell-a-thon” show on the Nelsonville radio station (“If you break the rules of Sell-a-thon, you can’t watch NASCAR this weekend.”) He was nationally slightly famous because in an earlier election he had tied for some public office, so it was resolved by a coin toss. You would think someone named Pancake would have an advantage in anything involving flipping, and you would be right. But that was in the primary — he lost the general election, despite Susan’s and my votes. (To be honest, I don’t know if I remembered to vote for him or not. He is a Democrat.)

And as I wrote that paragraph I remembered how Susan and I had come to discuss it. A day or two earlier I had run into Jim Pancake on Court Street, meeting him for the first time. He spoke to me and I recognized his voice. He said nice things about some column I had written. He was wearing a “Pancake for County Commissioner” hat. I told him that if he would give me one, I’d wear it. He didn’t. He couldn’t. Some campaign supply company had sent it to him in the hope he’d buy more. He decided against that, but he was happy to wear the sample. It was the only one.

Wouldn’t you love living in such a place?

Then came a day in the very sad September of the very sad 2014. We were all called together, the entire staff, for a meeting in the newsroom. There, Bruce — I’m sure I saw him in a suit and tie some other time also, but I don’t remember it — announced that The Athens News had been sold. There was, for the second time that year, general weeping in the office, and no one was crying harder than Bruce. It was rumored that Guy wanted to devote full time to his real-estate business (in which I think Bruce was also involved, but don’t quote me). I imagine that John’s death also pushed Bruce and Susan to want to spend more time at their Key West home.

After the meeting was over, I ran into Bruce on Court Street (there really are other streets in Athens), and he had a request.

“You’ve been through this kind of thing at other places,” he said to me. “Everybody is worried. You can tell them it will be okay.”

“I’d love to, Bruce,” I said. “You’re right that I’ve been through it before, and it’s never okay.” I wish I hadn’t said that. He wanted reassurance that the family he had built would survive intact, and I didn’t provide that reassurance. I doubt he heard many encouraging words that day. It would have cost nothing to give him a few. I was a jerk.

He and Guy had sold the paper to the same outfit that had bought, and was in the process of dismantling, the daily. Things went on as before, for a short time. Then offices were being emptied, one by one. People who left were not being replaced. Family feeling became state of siege.

Bruce and Susan were in Athens frequently, at all kinds of events. It was always good to see them. I grumbled about how the paper had changed — being an ass, it seems, was not a one-time thing for me. But I truly wish there had been a way to let Bruce know how essential he had been to The Athens News being the paper it was.

(Penultimately — the only thing left is to suspend publication — the Court Street office was closed and publication, such as it was and is, was moved, too, to the outskirts. The staff had dropped to two people, and instead of twice a week it became a weekly. It now is good for nothing, until it is determined that the newsprint used won’t cause a rash on the buttocks.)

I hadn’t seen Bruce and Susan since the before times, but that is unremarkable — no one has seen anyone since the pandemic changed everything for everybody.

Two weeks ago I looked at the ANews — now its formal name — website, and was floored, not only because through some inadvertence a bit of actual news had sneaked in, but also because of what that news was.

It wasn’t a detailed story, but it was enough to get me to ask around.

I learned that in late April, as he and Susan prepared to board a cruise ship in Miami, Bruce went into cardiac arrest. He was partially revived but did not regain consciousness. A little over a week later, even that spark of life left him. There would be a memorial event in Athens, in the auditorium at The Ridges (originally the Athens Lunatic Asylum) on May 24. So last Saturday, several hundred other people and I were there to hear stories from those who had populated the various parts of Bruce’s life. It’s good that the fire code inspector wasn’t among them, because the place was well beyond capacity. He was a much-loved fellow here.

There was food, too, and music, and lots of conversation. Much of the Athens News staff, from back when it was a newspaper, were there, so it had its reunion aspects. I hadn’t seen most of them for seven or eight years. And they looked, as is to be expected, seven or eight years older. (This introduced a mystery: I have a mirror in my bathroom, and I look at it when I comb my hair or shave. Each day I look no older than I did yesterday. Why was I immune when no one else was?)

Susan hosted the event in the superb fashion we would have expected. She spoke movingly, openly, and cheerfully. I don’t think I know anyone else who could have done it as well. As with Bruce’s writing 11 years ago, when she said it was a celebration of life she meant it.

This is the story that would have been in the newspaper here, if we still had one.