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In certain common fantasies, the small-town editor gets in plenty of fishing when he's not enjoying an idyllic career in some serene Mayberry or Lake Woebegone where everybody mosies along in peace and harmony.
As I remember the drill, it's 90 hours on a slow week. You have few friends, and you get to make a lot of enemies if you do your job right. Such is apparently the case in Meeker, where Glenn Troester edits and publishes the Herald.
Early in January of this year, rumors were swirling all over town about the high-school wrestling coach, Mike Tate, and what might have happened during a scuffle at a practice.
An editor can ignore the rumors, and hope they'll go away. Troester had already done that on an earlier incident in early 1996.
It seems that some Meeker wrestlers, in the spirit of
sportsmanship produced by the oft-praised
character-building aspects of sports, had grabbed a kid,
stripped him, sprayed his private parts with tuff
skin,
and tied him to a chair with duct tape. Then they
dumped him in the middle of girls' basketball practice.
Court documents say the coaches were present when this happened, and did nothing. The boy's parents complained to school officials, then the district attorney. The parents eventually backed off because the town rallied around the coach by attacking the parents: a phone bank was organized to provide round-the-clock harassment, their windows were broken, they were snubbed in stores, their car was vandalized.
You'd think that a coach -- a coach of such exemplary character as they claimed Mike Tate was -- wouldn't need such vigilante support.
Anyway, Troester said he was assured that this was all being fixed, and there was no reason to make a public issue out of it, and so he didn't pursue it. He was fairly new in town, and for all he knew, it was an isolated incident.
But this January, some wrestlers were scuffling with an assistant coach at practice, and Tate is charged with breaking up the scuffle by lifting one of the wrestlers by his genitals, which may leave him sterile for life.
After that,
Troester said, there were rumors
all over town. Some said a wrestler had attacked an
assistant coach, others said an assistant had gone after a
wrestler, one said a kid was crippled -- you know how that
goes.
Indeed I do. Hot gossip spreads faster than the speed of light. A dutiful editor will check it out, and often the gossip is more lurid than anything supported by evidence.
For instance, years ago I kept hearing rumors that coaches had been supplying steroids to young athletes here. Eventually, after hearing friends accuse me of abetting the cover-up of a major scandal, I pursued the story.
It turned out that a couple of wrestlers, desirous of gaining weight, had received some Periactin from a coach who'd gotten it from the team physician. Periactin may improve appetite, but its common use is on children with chicken pox to ease their itching -- as drugs go, it wasn't especially dangerous or potent. This didn't go on for long, and it stopped when everyone involved came to his senses and realized it was stupid and wrong.
But the only decent way to deal with the rumors -- rumors that were much worse than what really happened -- was to get and publish the full story.
Troester felt the same way. He pursued the story. At first he was forced to rely on anonymous sources -- it's easy to understand why no one wanted to talk on the record, given how the earlier complainants had been harassed and intimidated.
Tate has been charged with second-degree felony assault, and two sets of parents have filed a $10 million suit against the school district and administrators, charging that they ignored the abuse of their sons.
And for reporting this, Troester has suffered subscription cancellations and obnoxious phone calls. He's been accused of sensationalism and scandal-mongering. One store, owned by a wrestling booster, refuses to carry the Herald, and Tate's sister tried to persuade a Herald employee to quit.
From what I've seen of the Herald's coverage, he took a sober and responsible approach.
And one that took considerable courage, considering how
Tate supporters had treated the parents who had dared to
put their son's well-being ahead of the Meeker
way.
The temptations to just go along
are immense, and
I hate to think of how many times I succumbed to them
during my small-town editor days, ignoring matters that
should have been pursued if I'd had more stamina and
fortitude.
So I tip my hat to Troester, and I feel better about the state of journalism in Colorado.
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