The First Rule of Journalism
1. There's always something else. This story from early in my newspaper career is an example. It started as a routine government budget story, which ought to be a lesson in itself.
“He took me in like a son”
The next time I’m invited to speak to a university journalism class, I’ll ask them about the Rules of Journalism. I’ll stand at the board, if the room has one, with a piece of chalk in my hand, if there is any, ready to write down their answer. “What’s the first rule of journalism?” I’ll ask them.
Of course, they won’t know what it is. “Be accurate?” one of them might guess. No, I’ll answer. “Get both sides?” one of them will offer. No, I’ll say.
They’ll draw a blank and sit there silently, a couple will fidget with their phones. I’ll look over at the professor. “What the hell, Brent? What are you teaching these kids?” I’ll ask. He’s a friend of mine and a superbly accomplished former colleague - a Pulitzer Prize winner. He’s in on the hook, of course, so he'll shrug.
“What’s the first rule of journalism?” I’ll ask the students again. Silence.
“Rule number one,” I’ll say. And they’ll all look up.
“There’s always something else,” I’ll say.
And then I’ll tell them the story of old L.L.Swan, his wife, Ella, and their son, Tom.
Oh, poor Tom.
It was the spring of 1986 and I was covering Linn County government and courts for the Democrat-Herald, the daily paper in the county seat of Albany, an insular town smack in the center of Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
The county proudly called itself the Grass Seed Capital of the World, which it was. Farmers in that part of the valley literally grew grass for seed, which was shipped all over the world for lawns, parks, ball fields and forage. It was a successful, lucrative way to farm, but demanding and subject to bitter resentment and regulation because the farmers burned their fields after harvest to kill weeds that jeopardized the purity of their seed. Field burning was a major irritant, but when conditions were right and farmers hustled, the concentrated columns of smoke rose high and dissipated quickly. Sometimes, in the summer, you could look across the Willamette Valley and see column after column deep across the landscape. They looked like mushroom towers of smoke from atomic bomb blasts, which probably worked against the industry, too.
At any rate, field burning was eventually phased out after dense smoke from a field burn sank and settled on Interstate 5 and caused a deadly chain-reaction pileup. It was pretty damn horrible. I think three people died.
At the Democrat-Herald we were fairly polite to the grass seed farmers, the local lumber and paper mills, the Chamber of Commerce types and the somewhat secretive rare metals processing plant with the Chinese name, because they were the area’s economic drivers. The publisher, known chiefly for the loud plaid pants he wore at the annual company Christmas party, once gave an upset businessman a free ad because I’d supposedly soiled his family name by reporting, truthfully, that his brother was a scammer.
But the Democrat-Herald was a good paper, overall. We called it the DH or the Demagogue-Herald, and it was a hell of a fun newsroom. The editor at the time, Hasso Hering, was a legend of fierce work ethic and intense curiosity. We called him HH, and I loved that guy. He’s still the best journalist I ever worked with.
Like every county government reporter of my era, I paid way too much attention to the doings of the county commissioners and the various beefs and alliances between them and the other elected officials such as the district attorney, the sheriff, the clerk and the surveyor. They were all men at that time, of course, and each of them thought his specialized department was the most crucial and had to be protected from the commissioners, who they considered political hacks. All of them were like a bunch of hens, sometimes.
But, yes, of course, it was important to pay attention to them. Covering elected officials was and still is serious business. They decide how millions in public money gets spent. But it was too easy to get too involved and start telling government news from the inside out, as editors always warn against. I’d often go sit in the district attorney’s office and smoke cigarettes with him for an hour at a time. He was another Oregon legend - Jackson Frost, a Korean War veteran who’d been a captain in military intelligence. He had short black hair, thick glasses, rumpled suit jackets and a dismal outlook. I once wrote that if Jack Frost was a baseball player, he’d lead the league in pained expressions.
I never liked covering local government and I wasn’t very good at it, but almost every reporter had to do it at some point in their careers.
It was spring and so it was budget time for all Oregon’s counties and cities and school districts. They all operated on a fiscal year that ended June 30 and began again the next day, July 1. I’m sure those dates made sense at the time they were instituted, but I couldn’t tell you why. As a result, all the local governments spent the spring holding budget hearings.
Budget stories were a routine part of a reporter’s job. The mayor, commission chair, school district superintendent or administrative officer would come out with a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year and then preside over a series of hearings. Every government entity complained every year that it didn’t have enough money. They had themselves a “shortfall” - and so would have to make some deep cuts. Woe is us, they said. Looks like we’ll have to cut popular things like sheriff’s patrols, park maintenance, the county fair, high school sports or what have you. Sure hate to do it.
Reporters like me would grimly report the county, district or city had a “hole” in its proposed budget. “Difficult decisions face local boards,” we’d report.
The county budget processes were usually the goofiest. They’d hold budget hearings, people would grumble, shout or even cry, 4-H and FFA kids would show up with signs, and a parade of department heads would explain how things were and what they would have to cut if it came to it.
In Linn County, budget time meant it was time for most gnarled of the county commissioners to speak up, as he did three or four times a year. He was a hollow-eyed old white guy with slicked down strings of hair combed over his mostly bald head. He’d be wearing a shiny suit jacket, short-sleeve white shirt and a clip-on tie. A life of farming and smoking had turned him brown. He retired from grass seed farming several years before and his grown kids or grandkids were running things now. So he got himself voted in as a commissioner, one of the three that made up the paid board.
He never said much, but he’d speak up when the staff was done summarizing things about the hole in the budget and so on.
The old commissioner would slump back in his chair with a cigarette going on the side. And you knew he thought he was some kind of Rube Lincoln who had to speak up for the people. The taxpayers, the property owners, you understand. When somebody would complain to the commissioners about potholes and speeders and maintenance out on their road, the old commissioner would pipe up and say something like, “That’s not YOUR road. It’s a county road.”
Come budget hearing time, he had a few more things to say.
“So what you’re saying,” he’d begin, tapping his cig, “is that our revenue don’t match up with our expenses.”
And he’d let that statement hang there for a bit while the smoke from his cigarette rose in a silent, narrow blue stream, backlit by a weak spring sun, the kind you’d get in the Willamette Valley in late March and early April. Light coming in the high windows of the Board of Commissioners’s meeting room. It was actually kind of pretty.
“The money we got coming in isn’t enough to pay for what people want,” the commissioner would say. All gruff and plain, because what he said passed for wisdom at the county level.
Tap, tap the cig. Slow thin blue rising stream, backlit.
The commissioners would hold a couple public hearings and the elected officials would all testify about how much they’d have to cut, boy, if it came to that.
Better put a property tax increase on the ballot, the commissioners would agree. Tell the folks what they'll lose if it don’t pass, Sheriff.
Then the sheriff would talk about the jail and rural patrols and letting criminals go free and cutting deputies. Every once in a while the sheriff would get pissed off and say he didn’t like the commissioners always balancing their budget by threatening to cut law enforcement.
Side note: All of the Oregon sheriffs I knew over the years were characters but my favorite was Kenny Goin, there in Linn County where this took place. No offense to Joe Wampler in Hood River County, who I’d gone to school with. He was a good guy. I always liked Joe, and played baseball and football with him in high school, where he was in my sister’s grade a year behind me.
But Kenny Goin in Linn County was the best, come budget time. He would sit in the front row during hearings, wearing his biggest revolver strapped to his right hip for the occasion. He always wore short sleeve uniform shirts so his biceps would show, because even in middle age Kenny was a big strong country boy with a glare and a mustache and kept his hair short, and he could summon a growl when he was talking. He’d sit there in the front row with one big leg crossed over the other and his tan polyester pants riding up over his dark brown cowboy boots.
Anyway, it was during one of those spring budget times in Linn County that I came to abide by the first rule of journalism. I needed some detail so I visited the county treasurer in her office. Her name was Shannon Willard. She was proper and short-haired, with glasses, one of those competent, pleasant, efficient and intelligent women who in those days kept county commissioners, school boards and city councils out of trouble, for the most part. Not that they would run for office themselves at the time, of course. Mainly, they stayed behind the scenes and kept the trains on track.
Shannon knew the budget numbers and played straight with them. She provided information; she didn’t offer an opinion unless somebody asked her, and they usually didn’t, in public anyway. She was going over projected revenue figures with me in her office when we came to what seemed like an unusual entry: $4,000 from the L.L. Swan Trust.
Shannon said, oh, yes, the county got $4,000 every year from what was left of the Swan estate. She said L.L. Swan had been an attorney and banker in Albany, and served a term in the state Legislature, too. He left nearly $600,000 to the county when he died in 1963. The county had used it to build the courthouse addition, which included a couple courtrooms, the D.A.’s office up on the top floor, the county clerk’s office in the middle floor and a small cafeteria and coffee break room in the basement.
There was a memorial fountain at the west entrance to the courthouse, outside the addition old man Swan’s money built. It had a plaque and three fountain slabs rising out of a pool. People figured there was one for each of the Swans - L.L., his wife, Ella, and their son, Tom.
Shannon, the county treasurer, had grown up in Albany and knew all about the Swans. At Halloween when she was a girl, she said, the kids in town were afraid to trick-or-treat at the Swan’s house.
The kids were scared because they said Ella Swan was crazy.
“They said she killed her son during World War II,” Shannon told me.
And you’d have to be a deaf reporter indeed if you didn’t hear the story bell ringing.
One of the beauties and flaws of Oregon towns like Albany in the 1980s was that they were still full of people who’d lived there forever and remembered everything. I started asking around and found a longtime attorney who had gotten his start in L.L. Swan’s law office after World War II.
The attorney was a Navy veteran come home from the war and looking to put his law degree to use. Another lawyer in town suggested he call on L.L. Swan. “He’ll either take you in like a son or throw you down the damn stairs,” he advised the Navy veteran.
Swan made the young man wait for an hour and greeted him gruffly. “What the hell do you want?” he demanded.
But the old man, white-haired and stern, apparently took a liking to him. He let the young attorney set up shop and said he could use his son’s office. He said his son had been a fine attorney but he’d lost him in the war, and he never said anything else about it.
“He took me in like a son,” the attorney told me.
Other townspeople spoke up about the Swans, each person’s memory leading to somebody else who had another story. An old pastor, a retired doctor, even Kenny Goin, the county sheriff, who’d approached old L.L. Swan for a loan when he and his brothers were starting a gas station back before he got into law enforcement. The sheriff said people advised him he’d have a better chance of getting a loan if he took his kids in with him, and they were right. He said old L.L. spent most of the visit playing with the kids, but approved the loan. Old L.L. loved kids, everybody said.
He was cantankerous with adults, however. One guy said he passed by the Swan’s house one snowy morning and saw L.L. shoveling snow off the walk. “Good morning, Mr. Swan,” the guy said. “You’re a damn liar,” Swan replied.
He’d cross the street to avoid sharing the sidewalk with a lawyer who bested him in a court case.
But then he’d see a couple boys playing catch and buy them a baseball bat because they didn't have one.
When he died in 1963, it was front page news in the Democrat-Herald. He left $596,630.87 to the county to build the courthouse addition. That was the trust fund the county still tapped for $4,000 a year more than 20 years later, when I was writing my budget stories.
Ella Swan, his wife, was something else. The Swans were rich, by the town’s standards, but she’d serve guests tea made from reused bags. She hoarded coffee, flour and sugar, and snuck her garbage into a neighbor’s trash can to avoid paying the pickup fee. When she died, they supposedly found cash squirreled away throughout the house. She left a sizable amount to the local Presbyterian Church, surprising the hell out of the pastor.
She was outlandish, the oldtimers said. One time, when poor Tom took a girl to the Saturday serial at the movie theater in town, Ella insisted the girl’s mother treat her to the movie in return, and all four of them went. It was the only date anybody could remember Tom having.
Yes, the Albany town kids were scared to go to Ella’s house at Halloween, as the county budget officer told me that spring. The kids whispered that crazy Ella had killed her son during the war.
It wasn’t true, of course. She didn’t kill her son. There was something else.
Tom was L.L.’s and Ella’s only child. He’d followed his imposing father into law, gaining admission to the bar in 1929. He was sharing L.L.’s downtown office when World War II kicked the table over. Like so many men, Tom was swept up and drafted into the Army. The military sent him to officer’s training, probably because he was older than a typical recruit and a college graduate. Decades later, people in Albany would say he most likely didn’t want anything to do with it. “He was so mild,” one woman told me.
In November 1942, poor Tom came home on leave before shipping out to Europe or the Pacific. He was 36.
The Nov. 13 edition of the paper carried startling news. “Thomas Earl Swan Dies Thursday; Illness Is Brief,” the headline said. The story said Tom died “following an illness which was known to be acute only a short time before his death.”
It wasn’t true. Like many small town papers of its era, the Democrat-Herald sometimes covered up for the important people in town. But there’s another rule of journalism that comes into play when people try to scuff dirt over the truth. That’s the Seventh Rule: Somebody, somewhere, wrote it down.
I called the state Vital Records office in Salem and asked them to send me Tom Swan’s death certificate. I don’t know if you can do it that simply these days; probably not.
The 1942 death certificate was signed by Dr. Lew Hurd, who by the time of my inquiry was wrapping up a 47-year career in Albany. The certificate didn’t say Tom died of an illness that suddenly became acute.
“Suicide,” the doctor wrote. “Gunshot - head. Sudden.”
The doctor remembered the case clearly. He told me Tom wrapped a sheet around a pistol to muffle the noise, put it to his head and pulled the trigger. Some people in town said Tom left a note, saying he couldn’t order men to their deaths in war and this was the only way out he could see.
Maybe that’s what made Ella so rattled and nutty; seems like it would. And maybe it explains how old L.L. Swan received the young attorney, the Navy veteran who came looking for a job at the end of World War II. The attorney had told me, “He took me in like a son.”
So that’s the first rule of journalism. Hardly anything is what it seems to be at first take, first glance or first read. There’s always something else.
A master class in journalism! Thanks for capturing the way it used to be -- and will be again someday soon!