The North Coast times-eagle., July 01, 2004, Page 11, Image 11

NORTH CO AST TIM ES EAGLE 25TH A N N IVER SA R Y ISSUE, J U L Y /A U G U S T 2 0 0 4
with the Times Eagle. He was responsible for its best and worst
just as the paper with its continual staff rebellions and walkouts
was its own definition of dissent and revolution. His idealistically
unhinged form of journalism made the North Coast Times Eagle
a mouse whose bite made elephants roar. His editorship, if not
covered with glory, was smeared with the blood of enemies and
friends: absolutely nothing or anyone interfered with his Gallic
obsession to challenge the institutions and individuals that he
believed were obstructing or manipulating the will and freedoms
of the people. He had guts, a desk pounding outrage against the
powerful or wealthy who squeezed the little people. He was an
environmentalist who fought against the Oregon coast becoming
a Coney island of tourism. And there were times when Robert
Stanley Need and his little Times Eagle acted out the morality
drama of Horatius at the bridge or the little Dutch boy who stuck
his finger in a leaky dike.
His own fingers were bruised many times for the stands
he took, which were generally unpopular with those who might
have provided advertising. His politics were an ambiguous range
from benevolent tyranny to sentimental radicalism. His editorials
goaded friend and enemy. Sometimes his writing succeeded
brilliantly, at others it broke its spine from the weight of his meta­
phors and misanthropy. Beneath his pomposity and cunning was
a primordial basalt of integrity and kindness as genuine as it was
absentminded. He had spent a career in the Air Force but his
service in Vietnam affronted his morality to the point of a mental
breakdown. The war was incandescent in his spirit. It had almost
destroyed his sanity, left him shaken and chaotic, but it made
him acuminately sensitive to pain and injustice. He fought long
before others realized a struggle was in process and often long
after it was over. An angry letter once denounced the NOTE as
a local Pravda and its staff as communists. Need responded
with an editorial that suggested the Times Eagle staff would
most likely be among the first shot if communists or anyone else
took control of the country while good citizens such as the letter
writer would probably continue to be law abiding denizens under
the new regime.
“Neither the Times Eagle nor its writers have any
obligation whatsoever to please the state, or for that matter,
please all of its readership, all of the time," Need wrote in an
editorial in 1975. “Intelligent readers have found this dramatic­
ally true over the past four years and have assisted us in an
expansion of influence that has led the Times Eagle to an
unassailable position as a widely read forum of public opinion.
The freedom to express one's self, either staff or readership,
has developed a favorable recognition of this publication as
‘one of the finest expressions of independence' within the state
of Oregon and even beyond."
He literally carried the paper for almost five years.
The stories of his attempts to keep the Times Eagle alive were
legendary to the point of disbelief. He juggled schemes that
were as often astonishingly complex as they were preposterous.
He was in constant search for Angels, either financial or editorial
who could keep the NOTE afloat, and he touted them as virtually
superhuman when he found them which caused misunderstand­
ing among other Angels. One wealthy Angel who had agreed
to bankroll the newspaper received a heavenly call only hours
before he was to sign the check. Other prospective Angels had
little money or talent and tarnished quickly. Somehow during
even the leanest years the Times Eagle was printed every week,
often a bare skeleton and just as often a day or two late.
“For five years the (Times Eagle) shined a light on the
activities of Tillamook and Clatsop County government, the
state legislature, tackled development and environmental issues
and made enemies of the corrupt and powerful with every new
issue that appeared," Peter Smith, editor /publisher of the Bay
City Slug (“The Paper That Hates Progress") wrote of the dead
Old Bird’s 30th anniversary in 2001. “Dozens of neighbors
helped get the paper out — mostly seniors and teenagers writing
articles, taking photos, answering phones, drawing pictures,
pasting up copy and then delivering newspapers. For many
teenagers, working at the Eagle was their first job, though few
who "worked’ there ever recall receiving money for doing it.
The paper was a community affair. Subscriptions and advertise­
ments never paid the bills...Sadly the wages for reporting on
corrupt business practices and stupidity in government have
always been low."
“The Times Eagle was a quixotic circus of romantic
idealism and fiscal mismanagement that time after time
snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, but its editorial
credo of printing the 'Truth' remained inviolate to the end,"
former staffer MacCormack wrote in his epitaph, Death o f
the Screaming Eagle. “It had emerged as a fierce crusading
coastal advocate of strong environmentalist persuasions and
a watchdog of local city and county governments, with an
equally adamant overview of state, national and international
affairs.”
The Times Eagle finally consumed Need. He ran out
of inspirations and Angels. He lost control of the paper and he
did not know why he should regain it. Toward the end he was
regarded as unstable and with contempt by a new staff of writers
who were captivated by what they thought was the charisma of
the friend who betrayed him. Robert Stanley Need, flamboyant,
richly articulate, socially pretentious and editorially fearless had
once been a legendary figure but is now barely remembered
on the Oregon coast his newspaper heated white hot for five
remarkable years.
». :\
’-f \ *
GAYLE McKENNON (1979)
I was the next to last editor of the old Times Eagle.
My six month tenure, which was about average (MacCormack
also grabbed his hat off the rack after six months), began in
the summer of 1974.The paper had survived three tumultuous
years of heartrending poverty, constant staff insurrections and
a number of 11th hour recoveries. The phone was disconnected
and there were no vehicles to get around for stories or to the
printers 100 miles away in Toledo. The staff was unpaid and
hungry, and a few days after my arrival deserted enmasse. I
THE EAGLE HAS LANDED
The only corpse successfully revived in recorded
history was that of Lazarus, who is said to have lived
several years afterward. Jesus Christ is reported to have
arisen from the dead, but even the most ardent supporters
of his resurrection admit he was on Earth only 40 days,
and Jonah was still alive when the whale spit him ashore.
Countless other claims of resurrection or rebirth have
been made, not the least among them Count Dracula and
Richard Nixon. With such inspired precedent, the North
Coast Times Eagle is born again.
It is born again because First Amendment news­
papers have become as rare as the nation’s symbol,
the Bald Eagle. The independent press has virtually
disappeared, homogenized into the huge corporations
that also control the country, and probably the world.
In this age of the great systems devotion to any
principle other than perpetuation of the status quo seems
quaint and naive, and faintly dangerous. Yet even the
most random demographic of this wild and stormy coast
would show that loyalty to the metallic demands of the
corporate structure is not a prime aspiration of its
inhabitants. To the contrary, this rare splinter of sand
between mountains and ocean has traditionally served
as a refuge for those seeking the fundamental freedoms
guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Men and women of all
ages and preoccupations who have immigrated here or
who have remained here demand personal control over
their own lives.
But even that has come into conflict.The enormous
pressures of population and economics threaten the way
we live. The great contradictions between freedom and
property have finally reached us.
Like everything else the role of the press is in
question. There should be no doubt. The press should
represent no other special interest than the First Amend­
ment. This becomes patently impossible when the press
is controlled by the corporations whose interests are often
in conflict with the Constitution. The renegade newsman
A. J. Liebling once said that of course the press was free,
to whoever who owned one.
Exactly 10 years ago a space capsule named the
Eagle landed on the Moon, and for the first time in history
a human being stepped onto a planet other than Earth.
It was the most spectacular accomplishment in history.
Our expectations since then have more or less followed
the course of Skylab, which fell out of the sky.
We live in an increasingly nasty time. The
petroleum age races to its end Inflation and recession
tumble over each other. The country crawls with greed
and corruption. Perhaps the war to end wars will occur
soon. Even the world's weather is grim.
Twice out of the egg and once out of the crypt, the
reborn Times Eagle will attempt lighting matches against a
darkening wind
P A G E 11
spent the summer and fall hitchhiking to events and interviews
up and down the coast (meeting in transit many gregarious
residents and visitors). I slept on the newsroom floor or on a
lumpy musty couch and ate spaghetti and canned chili washed
down by cheap red wine. My relations with Need were usually at
critical mass. My opinion of him was contradictory, a mosaic of
anger, frustration, affection and respect. It was difficult to not
be drawn to his blustery and lofty idealism, although it was also
wearisome and not always endearing. I began to retaliate by
putting the name ‘Robert Stanley Bananas’ on his byline, which
he always discovered before the paper went to press. (It was
also tradition to conceal a 19th century Punch drawing of a well-
dressed rodent among the few advertisements: “No rats in the
food adsT Need would shout after careful scrutiny.)
I last saw him a couple of weeks after he had been
deposed. He was leaving Oregon that day and going back home
to Norfolk, Virginia. He said his nerves were shot and he looked
frazzled and downcast as a chewed chicken wing. A woman I
knew gave him a ride to the Washington side of the Columbia
River. He gave her a dollar for my back wages, hitchhiked to
Seattle and rode a train back east. A friend from Nehalem
visited several years ago and reported to me that Need had
made a success of publishing another newspaper. I suspect
any success would bear little resemblance to “the distinctive
and unique journal of the Oregon coast," a lofty slogan he
emblazoned on the face of every Times Eagle.
The paper did not last long after his departure. The
new publisher picked it clean and abandoned it after ruining
its reputation. “At the end, in March 1976, the North Coast
Times Eagle was a ghost, hunted by its creditors in the streets
of what once were its own cities," John MacCormack wrote in
Death o f the Screaming Eagle. “The corporeal body, a few
crates of hastily stacked files and decrepit equipment lay in
ignominious cold storage in Manzanita, its final place of rest.
Why the paper failed is a question that screams with possibili­
ties. It started with a suicidally inadequate financial base and
quickly alienated what little advertising that existed along a
poverty stricken stretch of Highway 101. But the deeper question
is whether a newspaper that maintains an unbridled editorial
voice and exploits fully its First Amendment rights to freedom
of the press, as the Times Eagle undeniably did, can still survive
in modem America without being as large, well ensconced and
unassailable as The New York Times."
(MacCormack’s epitaph for the NCTE began a new
set of publishing tombstones. One Dollar Magazine in Portland
folded soon after printing it in the summer of 1976, and a
magazine in Eugene [ ‘Eugene’] that carried One Dollar's eulogy
soon died. It became a curse in Northwest publishing to pay
tribute to a fallen press.)
The Times Eagle lay dead for three years and almost
all evidence of its former existence was burned, bulldozed, lost,
buried in libraries, forgotten in basements or attics, or in the
case of its former staff, scattered across the country and around
the world. Its death was unmoumed by many, particularly those
who dealt with it financially. Perhaps also a few public officials
and others who were treated critically in its pages were pleased
by its demise. But here and there along the coast and tucked
into the mountains were pockets of a contrary view, people who
missed the paper and wished something like it would start up
again.
Bay City Slug editor/publisher Peter Smith wrote in his
30 year tribute in 2001: “From its inception the North Coast
Times Eagle with its whimsical 19th century engravings and
penetrating witty coverage of local politics, to its unpleasant
demise five years later in 1976 from financial starvation,
informed, amazed and at times infuriated readers. Three years
after the original paper folded, in 1979 writer Michael Paul
McCusker revived the Eagle, publishing it from Cannon Beach,
but soon moved to Astoria where he has (here Editor Smith
bloviates) stood in the breach defending the First Amendment
and human dignity in its pages...."
I waited three years to revive the dead Eagle from its
sepulcher. I was traveling around the Pacific, unsure of what
I wished to do yet consciously attempting to avoid being an
imitation Somerset Maugham character. I almost took a job
on Guam as a copy editor for the Pacific Daily News, a Gannett
acquisition with a large local readership of neo-colonial loyalists,
most of whom were transplanted Filipinos who acted stuffily
toward native Moros. At the moment I was about to accept
the job I experienced an epiphany that brought me back to the
Oregon coast and resurrection of the Times Eagle. I had worked
on many newspapers and at least one wire service* — the old
Times Eagle was the one that captured my heart, brain and
fervor. From the moment I accepted Robert Need’s exhortation
that I help save his newspaper, I was impressed by its simple,
hardheaded honesty. Its readership, though small, was impas­
sioned and varied, from the eccentric to the ordinary. I never
received a wage, each issue was always in threat of not being
printed because of no money, and although Need and I were
often arguing or not speaking to each other, at the end we acted
in concert and refused to abet the treacherous crook who tricked
CONTINUED ON PAGE 12
SHÀHûHAiE» iN ASTOPiA
¿0™ ANNIVERSARY GALA REVIEW
EVERY THURS, FRI & SAT NIGHTS 8 P.M.
JULY 8 TO SEPT 11
325-6104
UNDER THE BRIDGE ON MARINE DR, ASTORIA
-MICHAEL McCUSKER
20 JULY, 1979
/