P A G E 12
ROGER HAYES ¡1334)
A VOICE RENEWED
FROM PAGE 11
him out his newspaper. From the moment of its last issue
in 1976, its new publisher hiding out in another state with the
money he stole that might have given the paper a few more
months of life, I felt the Times Eagle had perished like a gifted
and precocious child killed too early.
I chopped wood, cleaned motel rooms, hauled garbage
and borrowed money from skeptical friends to get the first issue
of the Bom Again Bird out of the crypt and off the press, and I
have kept it barely afloat the last quarter of a century on dirty
dishwater in local restaurants, as a frycook burning burgers for
the masses, pouring beer and wine in shoreside taverns, selling
tickets at a museum and a movie theater, swabbing floors and
cleaning toilets. A journalist’s life.
(Publishing the Times Eagle has been a truly cottage
industry this past quarter century. I developed a labor intensive
method of producing each issue, copysetting and camera-ready
pasteup for photo-offset printing at tables and desks where other
furniture would normally be in a house. While print technology
erupted into incredible new forms in pace with the information
revolution, I engineered an antiquated, almost craftlike form of
newspaper production, emerging as a specialist in obsolescence
as well as an esthetic masochist.)
The Times Eagle has flown on improvident wings since
its resurrection, yet it has a tangible readership and most of its
advertisers have stayed with it despite small evidence of making
a nickel. It has sought to display or publish the works of artists,
poets and writers who live on the coast and inland, and its
readers submit a large portion of its articles. It is a newspaper
A LITTLE OFF THE TOP
BY CHRIS MEHLIG
A newspaper has to be a living thing, bom like people
and birds and other somewhat free creatures. It has to speak
and to teach and to leam, the way all living things must. A news
paper must become those who write it, print it and read it, the
anthropomorphic extension of our own minds, our thinking souls,
talking, arguing, agreeing. A newspaper like that, once born,
lives forever. Such a paper was born in the first half of this
decade (1971), under the care and feeding of a dedicated crew
of ambitious, if naive journalists who believed that excellence
alone would make their efforts prevail. But, the one unfortunate
similarity between us and our newspaper was the need to earn a
living. One can quickly starve in this business. It was unbearable
to watch the North Coast Times Eagle perish in a struggling
agony; many of us walked away unable to watch it die. But we’d
forgotten the big difference that makes a newspaper immortal;
newspapers, unlike writers, can be given life again, to rise like
the phoenix, to fulfill the legend at its masthead: She flies on her
own wings. The Eagle has risen.
When I was first invited to contribute to the Times Eagle
back in 1972 or so, I felt a little like the guest speaker at the park
bench social club. No one got paid, the circulation was so small I
could have autographed my byline on every copy, and a double
truck ad for Fred May’s Rockaway Market sold for less than a
sack of groceries and six-pack of beer.
But to a writer, being published is tantamount to a Nobel
medal, even if you don’t get paid. It's impossible to resist. I was
established with a “standing head," a regular column with a dash
of artwork and maybe a charicature, like Art Buchwald’s. The
title was ‘A Little O ff The Top', an obsolete phrase one used in
the barber chair before we stopped needing that kind of haircut.
The column usually ran from Buchwaldian whimsy to Socratic
dialogue, treating everything from political gimcrackery to the
lasting effects of tourism on local monuments.The political treat
ments, however, drew irate and threatening postures from that
same Fred May, the heaviest advertiser in the paper, the only
double-truck ad (centerfold) we ever carried My somewhat left-
handed political satire,which advocated inclusion of Independent
candidates in the Oregon primary, among other things, and a
tourist-go-home attitude about sharing Oregon with alien beings,
struck a vital spot in Fred.
The editor-in-chief, Robert Stanley Need, reluctantly
informed me that I was nipping our golden brownbag in the bud,
but that I had only to find someone who would write as a foil
I
against me. I found no one, so I created another column, and
Fred May never knew who he was talking to when he’d ask me,
“Hey, did you read Stewart Christian in the last edition? I guess
he told you what’s what!” Fred, the 'Wide World Of Stewart
Christian’ was far wider than you ever knew.
There was nothing oblique in that; many writers have
more than one view of an issue, but few editors will publish them
on both sides. The effect was to broaden the paper somewhat,
and occasionally to balance the horrendously verbose editorials
with which Need assailed everything. But then, with exception
of an occasional story on Aunt Maudie’s Tea & Biscuit Social,
or a report covering the most recent bam burning, the bulk of
the paper was editorial, and that, we were convinced, was the
great attraction it had. People would buy the paper and read it,
then scream and tear it to shreds, beating themselves over the
head with it, delighted with their own involvement. Some, bless
them, liked what we wrote and told us so. Did I say no one got
paid?
Every Monday morning was a circus of screaming
arguments among the staff, and every Tuesday night was a
hair-raising deadline, but on Thursday morning, the Eagle
flew, and it flew to places most of us will never see. It flew to
Bangkok, Thailand; Hong Kong; Sydney, Australia; Johannes
burg, South Africa; West Berlin; London; Rome; and to some
place near Belfast, Ireland. It flew to many perches large and
small around our own country, too, from border to border, coast
to coast. And yet circulation never exceeded 5,000 copies.
People passing through picked up the North Coast rim es Eagle
as a souvenir. Then they read it. Then they subscribed to it.
We were scintillated by the thought of being read in so vast an
arena, but Fred May wasn’t. People don’t come from Bangkok
for the 69# special hamburger. Zagata’s Chevron didn’t get
many customers from Sydney, not even at 35# a gallon. In fact,
we didn’t have a thousand circulation in an area we so urgently
wanted to make our market in. We were “required reading" on
the table of the Oregon Congress, but not on the table of the
North Coast consumer. When the Eagle died, people wondered
why.
Today, the Times Eagle spreads its mighty wings and
with a scream of “Now or Never," lunges into the air, bom anew.
How far it will fly depends on you. How skillfully it flies depends
on us.
~ JULY 20, 1979
Chris Mehlig rejuvenated his column in the Bom Again
Bird for a few years He lives now in Astoria.
some people think is necessary, though they do not always
regard it with rapture. It is a polemical publication laden with
doom and gloom, which prompted one reader to ask if any
purpose is served if its readers are in such despair after reading
an issue they consider suicide.
I only know second-hand the effect the Times Eagle
has on people who read it. It flowers into a separate life outside
my presence or knowledge after it is printed. My role is finished
after the press run of each issue except for distributing to small
cities, towns and villages on the Oregon coast; to bars, cafes
and restaurants, markets, motels and bookstores where it is sold
over the counter; by UPS to towns up or down the coast or to
inland cities; anyone going anywhere who knows a good place to
sell it or give it away; and to friends. Once in a while someone
tells me the newspaper means something to them or might
describe a complex circulation of each issue among family and
friends. Teachers say they use the paper in their classes. Its
articles are read on radio stations (obviously KMUN) or reprinted
in other publications. One issue is iceberged in an underground
time capsule, sent toward the center of earth for half a century
to be unsealed at Clatsop County's bicentennial in 2044.
“The Times Eagle serves as an important forum for
many members of the North Coast Community who have kept
faith with their less settled pasts," David Harlan wrote in the
Daily Astorian in 1989, commemorating the Born Again Bird’s
tenth year out of the crypt. “Social injustice and environmental
responsibility are recurring themes...Democracy and capitalism
— two decidedly different concepts in (editor McCusker's) point
of view — have become indistinguishable in American society,
he argues."
John McClelland wrote in the Long View Daily News in
1988 that “regardless of its leftist political leanings, the (Times
Eagle) is not like the underground papers of the 1960s, which
were long on rhetoric and short on facts. It could be called
underground only because it stands apart from the mainstream
press."
Small impoverished newspapers like the Times Eagle
dwell in local obscurity. They are often in stormy opposition to
the bland or autocratic community rule and standards of their
circulation areas. The fringe is most normally their habitat; they
defy the momentum toward megabig as they incubate ideas
or ideologies that captivate or hold them captive. Controversy,
flirtation with original ideas or any other form of media experi
mentation (aside from the purely technical) is anathema to
megamedia, which consolidates immense energy and talent to
hype the salacious, mendacious and indigestible. Commercial
media exists to make money. Micromedia is always looking for
a buck so it can publish or (like KMUN and KBOO) broadcast.
A writer for The Oregonian once criticized a rightwing
newspaper for leaving the mainstream to preach to its own
choir, in this case a publication by the odious OCA to rouse
intemperance among the ignorant and intolerant, and though the
target was worthy of severe criticism, it is somewhat myopic to
suggest that only mainstream approaches to issues that critically
affect society should be considered. The common ground (which
is not represented by the mainstream media) is certainly a forum
at which extremes meet and seek rapprochement, but the more
specific audience ought not to be ignored. It is just such esoteric
publications, left or right, shrill or reasonable, that keep the self-
styled mainstream media on a somewhat honest course and not
entirely blown about by commercial interests and its own hubris.
The information highway is plastic, fluid, still unpredict
able despite corporate and government invasion of its wide open
cyberspaces. But the pervasive ambitions of monopoly are felt
and reverberate through electronics networks. The concentration
of ownership of the media is ominous and significant cause for
paranoia. Huge conglomerates own and manipulate information
that is increasingly vital for personal survival (info breeds info)
while simultaneously producing mediacrity. Power in the new
world capitalist order is shifting to control and manipulation of
the immense flow of information, up until recently a vital
resource but now a post-Orwellian system of indoctrination,
propaganda and sensationalism.
Printed independent media such as the Times Eagle
and the recently resurrected Hipfish (a common trait among
periphery press is to either revive from a few deaths or succumb
forever) must keep popping up because they are not simply
fringe publications but are more cogently the incubation of
American journalism — and the more castrated and monopo
lized the mainstream media becomes (a painfully long and
insipid form of oblivion), the more necessary for small self-
reliant (noncentralized) publications and media to flower.
Mainstream media focuses on its own self-made
celebrities — and the smarmy notion that when the camera is
not on you in the USA, you disappear as though you don't exist.
On the other hand, an independent radio station like Astoria's
KMUN draws a wideranging pool of very intelligent and creative
members of the surrounding community — non-celebrities who
FARZAHN KAMAU, 'PORTRAIT OF THE PUBLISHER’ (1982)