The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2004, Page 10, Image 10

P A G E 10
A VOICE RENEWED
THE BIRTH, DEATH & REBIRTH OF THE SCREAMING EAGLE
THE BALD EAGLE: LAQUERED PASTEL ON WOOD BY ROBERT TURNER (1985),
COMMISSIONED FOR THE NORTH COAST TIMES EAGLE BY LEE ANNE KELLY-JONES
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BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
“The Eagle has landed!"
- U S . ASTRONAUT MICHAEL COLLINS
(July 20, 1969)
The North Coast Times Eagle presents itself to the
people of the North Oregon coast as an instrument through
which their separate and collective voices, irrespective of creed,
color, political bent, age (literal and figurative) may speak out
in determination of their own future. If it is not to be the Times
Eagle who shall perform this trust, then surely others will
inevitably come forth. If it is to be the Times Eagle, then let the
editorial staff of this newspaper take now and here a solemn
vow to uphold its flag motto ‘To Serve All People’ and further
to establish but one single editorial policy, to preserve, proclaim
and protect the Truth.
-RO BER T STANLEY NEED
(NCTE, VOL. 1, NO 1, MAY 13, 1971)
At the end of the Lewis & Clark Trail is the North Coast
Times Eagle. Its biography is bicameral like the human brain
and the modem calendar, divided into the early era of the Old
Bird and the contemporary Bom Again Bird raised from a three-
year crypt (with various smaller deaths and resurrections), which
celebrates its silver anniversary with this edition. A pioneer past
of Conestoga wagons and a celestial future of starships straddle
its double life.
The Times Eagle was reborn July 20, 1979, ten years
to the day after a human spaceman took a small step from his
spacebird and declared the sterile moonscape that surrounded
him, “a magnificent desolation." The paper Eagle's first front­
page banneriine verbatimed a message flashed to the world
from space when the moonlander Eagle struck the lunar surface.
‘The Eagle Has Landed." Beneath the banner an American Bald
Eagle glared fiercely out at the world.
The Times Eagle reawakened into its own desolation,
a planet swarming with billions of busy ambitious creatures who
recklessly despoiled Gaia in dogged resolve to transform Terra
into their own hubris. A few of the species impoverished the
many yet strangled on the effluents of their affluence. Half of
humanity was at least underfed. Millions killed each other or
planned to. Little has changed a quarter of a century later at
CONSIDER US
TO THE EDITOR:
I am a 13 year old girl. I live in Portland. I read
your newspaper, the North Coast Times Eagle.
I like your paper but I wish you could make a
special column for the younger ones, something we
would be interested in
-TO N I LINTON
(NCTE MARCH 1987)
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the advent of a new millennium: the world far and near has
proceeded with its usual human melodrama of wretchedness,
poverty, squalor, ignorance, needless tragedy, injustice and
wanton slaughter; and a few laughs. The mainframe of human
life remains essentially as it has been for millennia despite
influxes of a parallel virtual reality. The new century/millennium
begins with a worldwide war of horror and terror that seems to
target everybody against anybody, and vice-versa. As usual,
truth is the first casualty.
Persistent efforts by government and powerful elites to
control public dialogue, particularly in matters of political dogma
and social behavior, have always been dangerous and usually
the guise for arbitrary usurpation of the apparatus of communi­
cation. Realization of this led directly to the First Amendment
to the U.S. Constitution, which states clearly and simply that
neither government nor anyone else has the right to deny or
interfere with freedoms of speech, press or religion, or with
public gatherings. (Article 1, Section 8 of Oregon's State
Constitution is even more insistent: No law shall be passed
restraining the free expression of opinion, or restricting the right
to speak, write, or print freely on any subject whatever; but every
person shall be responsible for the abuse of this right.)
The genesis of the Times Eagle, and every other
independent newspaper in the USA, began on July 4,1776
when the world’s most famous press release was endorsed by a
rebellious crowd that was in revolt against King, Crown & Mother
Country. Two days earlier the breakaway republic’s revolutionary
Congress had unanimously voted to sever Atlantic America's
13 British ruled colonies from its European sovereign, a day
James Madison and John Adams claimed would live in the
fledgling nation’s heart in perpetuity. Instead, the day the fervent
Declaration of Independence was first made public is celebrated
as the USA’s birthday (this July 4 we are 228).
A cornerstone of the subsequent bloody revolution
was that not only would Americans be independent as a newly
formed nation but that each person was a citizen of a republic,
which reflected a fear of the founders that both aristocracy and
the masses provoked separate but equal problems. A free and
unconstrained press was recognized as essential and for more
than a century American journalism was robust if partisan, until
20th century journalism moved away from political feuding to
promoting a corporate/industrial status quo under the rubric of
“objectivity." The press itself became a huge corporate conglom­
erate of print, radio, television and Internet now called ‘The
Media'. The contrariety press was relegated to the fringes and
has generally acted as the mouthpiece for radical and esoteric
political (and neo-theocratic) causes: it is called the alternative
media (lower case).
A few thousand low-profile publications constitute
the alternative media in the USA (which includes ’zines) —
and perhaps half as many independent listener sponsored radio
stations such as KMUN-FM in Astoria and KBOO in Portland —
and they operate on the cutting edge of political, environmental,
cultural and ideological controversies providing fresh ideas and
insights that mainstream megamedia, initially reluctant to
jeopardize its profits by espousing change or radical concepts,
later trumpet as their own when some of the ideas catch on.
Without an independent press journalism is hardly more than an
artfully deceptive method of misleading the public, of providing
illusions and deceits to thwart public response to the chicaneries
and jingoism of the corporate/capitalist class which regards itself
as the country's rightful aristocracy despite the admonition of
history.
The independent press in the USA and all over the
world provides an indispensable forum for the exchange,
analysis, synthesis and arguments that are the basis of any
culture or society. Their objectives are in microcosm the same
as are debated everywhere on Earth: to assist in the eradication
of sexism, racism, poverty and war, and to document the dooms
and glooms, the perversities and horrors (rarely the triumphs) of
our busy illtempered species. Occasionally a maverick, limited
distribution publication can reach into the heart of the nation.
I.F. Stone’s Weekly, for example, profoundly influenced a gener­
ation opposed to racism and a vicious corrupt war, and was the
archetype for numerous other journals.
Although it is as difficult to project as well as portray
the cumulative history of a nation or a people through a single
individual, it might be rational to attempt a history of media
through a particular newspaper. In the case of the Times Eagle,
the history it projects is a local and out at the edge projection
of journalism that might seem paradoxical if not antithetical to
mainstream media, which claims its history the center stage
of American journalism.
The first issue of the original incarnation of the North
Coast Times Eagle was published in Wheeler, Oregon on
May 13,1971. The original newspaper was a weekly that
lived five years, from 1971 to 1976. It was a good newspaper,
irreverent and raffishly honest with the courage of an Androcles
among the lions, seldom cowed by power brought against it.
Yet it perished wretchedly and in disgrace, terminally in debt
and spiritually compromised. Its founder and first publisher,
Robert Stanley Need, was a prickly dreamer who erratically
battled for political and social justice. His successor was a
charismatic crook who manipulated the paper’s reputation for
honesty and poverty to defraud staff and contributors.
After its death a former Times Eagle reporter, John
MacCormack, wrote a long epitaph. He described the Times
Eagle as a “renegade Oregon weekly that for nearly five years
rained a fiery, strange synthesis of populist journalism and
outrage on a 100 mile stretch of the North Coast from Astoria
to Lincoln City. It was a paper that consumed 200 staff members
in less than 300 issues, that championed the most arcane and
libertarian of human endeavors, that would have been labeled
’Underground’ had it not been so far from conventional that
Underground was a title too wishy-washy to apply. It was a
publication that strove to be so ‘honest and independent' that
it frightened away advertisers by the carload. It was a paper
that lived a hand to mouth, day to day existence, that was
waylaid at each turn by adversaries both real and imagined,
that was fueled by an odd combination of heady idealism and
skittish paranoia and that collapsed under the weight of its own
pervasive ineptitude."
Any attempt to understand the history of the primal
Times Eagle must begin with its founder, first publisher and
editor, Robert Stanley Need, an orphan of French descent who
trekked to the Oregon coast after service in the U.S. Air Force
and the Vietnam War. His name was its own metaphor: his
consummate need was to impress his own notions of right and
wrong on the society that surrounded him. His purpose was to
be a roaring mouse challenging the Philistine mainstream press
that he considered false and cowardly. He wrote fervidly against
lies and deceptions that most people accept or accommodate.
For nearly five lean and stormy years he published a feisty,
rashly eccentric newspaper patterned in style and design after
the independent newspapers of the 19th century. He employed
about 200 kindred and generally unpaid spirits who stayed as
long as they could endure hunger and his Napoleonic nature.
He and another Vietnam veteran started the Times Eagle in
the spring of 1971, and almost immediately the newspaper
was in hot water. Need began receiving threats to his health
and his partner, pleading family considerations, withdrew from
the paper.
Need published the Times Eagle until another friend
he had asked for help betrayed him and forced him out. During
those years he developed one of the best and most reputable
newspapers in the country. The Times Eagle never made much
money, never enough to pay the staff or the rent, and its reader-
ship never exceeded 5,000; but they lived all over the world. He
took great risks. He was not afraid of being considered a traitor
or a fool and he never played it safe. He was a raw independent
who believed passionately in the First Amendment. He was
assisted by a revolving staff, mostly young and idealistic, who
virtually slaved under his caustic tyranny and left only when their
brains burned out or their bodies craved nourishment. More than
once he was left alone to get the newspaper off the press and
out on the street by himself. Finally he too burned out and a year
after he was ruthlessly shoved aside the old Eagle died.
He was an intense, erratic man whose psychological
makeup was indistinguishable from his personal identification
NORTH COAST
TIMES EAGLE
A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION
PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON
757 27TH STREET 97103
MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
EDITOR & PUBLISHER