The Eagle By no means Sleeps – Strangers Information
The fireplace began in a disused condominium at the back of the previous stone constructing someday after midnight, in Whitesburg, Kentucky, August 1, 1974. By the point the city’s all-volunteer firefighting crew extinguished the final of the flames at 2am it had torn via three rooms and destroyed most of every thing. Though it was the Letcher County seat, Whitesburg was small and the fireplace truck’s siren loud and so a lot of the thousand or so residents in all probability knew that one thing on the town was ablaze. It was solely when the solar got here up that they’d uncover it was the workplaces of their newspaper The Mountain Eagle which had burned.
The Eagle constructing was at 120 West Most important Road in a bend of the North Fork Kentucky River and within the heart of issues so far as life in Whitesburg was involved. Enter the storefront and there was a reception space on the fitting the place you can renew your subscription for $3 a 12 months for Letcher County residents or $5 for these residing exterior of the county. On the left had been a couple of different desks with typewriters on high that had seen higher days, most of them lined in splashes of whiteout. You would barely see the editor Tom Gish’s desk in any respect, so stacked was it with papers. The Eagle’s workers considered the workplace as “barely managed chaos” however regardless of this, Tom and his spouse Pat managed to publish the newspaper on time every Thursday and had carried out so for simply shy of 20 years.
The evening of the fireplace the Gishes had been at a gathering three hours away in Lexington and so they didn’t discover out about it till mid-morning the next day when their daughter referred to as. By the point Tom and Pat acquired there it was a smoldering pile of charred paper and ash, the partitions black with soot, and the heavy, acrid scent of smoke. It might not have destroyed all the constructing however it was now not liveable. The worst harm, they seen, had been attributable to the fireplace hoses.
Tom and Pat salvaged what they may. A lot of the stuff might be changed, however the largest tragedy, they thought, was the packing containers of historic images of Appalachia that had been destroyed, along with a set of books and articles on japanese Kentucky. They had been irreplaceable. A few days later Pat discovered a pile of charred envelopes simply contained in the again door to the condominium, off a bit of alleyway, and seen they had been stained pink and orange and that they smelled like kerosene. A windowpane within the door had been smashed. As she dialed the variety of the state hearth marshal, Tom turned to the handful of workers who had gathered within the room behind them, and with tears in his eyes mentioned: “Who might have carried out this to us?” Then Tom promised them they wouldn’t miss a problem; The Mountain Eagle would come out the next week. “Even when we now have to make use of only one typewriter.”
In these moments standing within the gutted constructing, when Tom and Pat first suspected arson, they’d no thought simply what was across the nook; no clue that what occurred that evening was the fruits of a bitter battle between press freedom and a corrupt institution. Tom and Pat had been used to telling tales, however this one — the story of retribution on them and their newspaper for doing its job — was to be probably the most compelling of all; larger and extra outrageous than something they’d ever relayed within the pages of The Mountain Eagle. It was a narrative that might resonate far into the longer term, too; a future wherein native newspapers, so essential to a wholesome, functioning democracy, had been being decimated, and newsrooms gutted.
The identical 12 months The Eagle burned, Tom and Pat would stand on stage on the College of Arizona to gather the Zenger Award for freedom of the press. The earlier 12 months, Katharine Graham of The Washington Put up had received for her protection of the ‘Pentagon papers’ – the highest secret research of US political and army involvement in Vietnam. The 12 months after, it will be the flip of Seymour Hersh of The New York Times for his protection of the Watergate affair, the housebreaking that resulted in President Nixon’s resignation. Sandwiched between these two journalistic titans was japanese Kentucky’s humble Mountain Eagle: a neighborhood paper devoted to reality telling, no matter the price.
Tom and Pat met in a Spanish class on the College of Kentucky within the mid-Forties. Tom, who was born simply up the street from Whitesburg within the SECO coal camp the place his father labored, had launched into an engineering diploma with the goal of turning into a mining engineer like his dad; Pat was finding out journalism and he or she talked Tom into reporting for The Kentucky Kernel, the scholar newspaper she edited. Quickly, he’d switched majors to affix her, deciding he’d moderately turn into a journalist as a substitute. Tom was a 12 months older than Pat, and when he graduated he landed a job working for United Press in Frankfort masking labor relations. After she left school, Pat was employed as a basic project reporter on the Lexington Chief. Tom at all times wished to return to Whitesburg sometime, and after his boss advised him {that a} promotion would see him transferred to both Ohio or England, he regarded for tactics to remain in Kentucky. In 1956 the house owners of The Mountain Eagle and Hazard Herald newspapers wished to promote up, and Tom’s father persuaded them that Pat and Tom may make the right new proprietors. The couple seized the chance, selecting to take over The Eagle.
Whitesburg was the archetypal American small city, straight out of a Rockwell portray. Its small Most important Road featured two {hardware} shops and submit workplace, with The Eagle on the west finish of the road throughout from a funeral house run by a part-time Baptist preacher. It was a busy little city, nestled in a valley dominated by Pine Mountain to the north, its rugged peaks and evergreen forests contrasting with the deserted coal mines scarring its slopes. On Saturdays, miners and their households frequented certainly one of two drugstores with their soda fountains, the handful of eating places, and the 10-cent retailer. However its idyllic setting, nestled alongside the river, belied a depressed economic system. Like many different neighborhood newspapers, The Eagle was funded largely by income generated from printing stationery for different shoppers. In fact, earlier than Tom and Pat got here alongside there wasn’t a lot precise reporting being carried out in any respect — its stock-in-trade was obituaries, wedding ceremony bulletins, and prolonged stories of Rotary Membership and 4H conferences.
The Gishes agreed to take over The Eagle when Pat was pregnant with their third little one, Ben and residing in Frankfort with the youngsters till Tom discovered them a spot to stay in Whitesburg. They had been decided to publish actual journalism, and so they acquired their probability a couple of months later when Whitesburg discovered itself beneath water. A month after their first problem hit the newsstands, the North Fork of the Kentucky River burst its banks and the most important flood of the century swamped the city. Water ranges rose so quick that townsfolk needed to evacuate with out their belongings. There have been few workers again then; till Pat joined him, Tom wrote the tales himself — reported them and duplicate edited them, earlier than sending the paper off to be printed. It wasn’t simply Whitesburg that was impacted by the deluge. Southwest Virginia and northeastern Tennessee had additionally borne the brunt of catastrophic flooding. In southeastern Kentucky, the headwaters of the Massive Sandy, Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers, swollen by heavy rain and snowmelt, flooded the counties they meandered via. The Crimson Cross proclaimed components of Kentucky a catastrophe space — components that included Corbin, Jackson and Whitesburg. In close by Hazard, Kentucky, floodwaters swept greater than 50 homes away. Paradoxically, the Hazard Herald, the paper Tom and Pat had been provided however which they’d declined to purchase in favor of The Eagle, was destroyed. There was no gasoline for cooking, locals suffered meals shortages, mudslides took out roads, properties had been ruined, folks died, and ninety p.c of the coal mines in 4 counties closed. That business — the area’s financial lifeblood — would by no means actually get better.
Tom and Pat had been decided to make their newspaper successful and lift their children in Whitesburg; they’d an awesome dedication to the place and its folks. Tom was a slim man who smoked 5 packs of cigarettes a day; Pat had quick, wavy darkish hair and wore spherical, black-framed glasses and, as one worker had it, possessed “extra vitality than God ever gave any lady.” Each had an astute humorousness and the newspaper workplace was typically full of laughter. The Gishes lived on Faculty Hill, close to the highschool, in a wood two story home with steep steps that climbed as much as the entrance door; large enough for Tom, Pat, and their 5 kids, to not point out the quite a few company Tom and Pat frequently entertained. Uncommon was the evening they didn’t have a dinner visitor and reporters from far afield would typically present as much as volunteer or cowl information occasions, crashing at Tom and Pat’s after they had been carried out for the day. Once they weren’t in school, the Gish kids, Ben, Ray, Katherine (often called Kitty,) Sarah and Ann, would assist out within the newspaper mailroom, or, after they acquired a bit of older, typesetting the information. If it acquired late and so they acquired drained, they’d curl up on cardboard pallets on the ground of the workplace. By the point they reached the age of 16, every of the Gish kids might publish a newspaper by themselves in the event that they wished to.
Coal is on the coronary heart of this story. Coal and cash. Tom and Pat took over The Eagle at a time when the economic system of the Appalachians was in free fall. Individuals had been close to hunger and it was certainly one of Tom’s previous schoolmates, Harry Caudill, who had introduced nationwide consideration to the dire drawback. Caudill was a robust presence; a neighborhood lawyer who had served in Kentucky’s Home of Representatives, susceptible to quoting Shakespeare and Dickens on the courthouse flooring and within the legislature. In his e-book, Evening Involves the Cumberlands, printed in 1963, he describes the historical past of coal and its affect on Appalachia. Following the outbreak of WWII, the Allies had positioned enormous orders for American coal. Lodges throughout the Cumberland Plateau which had stood empty throughout The Despair, had been now full of coal brokers and their brokers. Native miners, who had inherited household tracts and camp homes, watched their values rise. Caudill wrote that they had been out of the blue in a position to mortgage that inheritance and go into enterprise, “turning paupers into princes.” However just for some. Caudill painted a vivid image of the disparity it induced: whereas lots of dashed round flashing their new-found wealth “in probably the most irresponsible and profitless method,” schoolhouses, in the meantime, had been heated by pot bellied stoves that couldn’t compete with the Appalachian winters; water was drawn from wells “shockingly near stinking, fly-blown privies.” And whereas some coal miners loved the spoils of the growth, schoolteachers, docs and nurses needed to stay on meager salaries. Finally there was an inevitable exodus of the very folks the plateau wanted. What’s extra, automation within the mines meant 1000’s of idle miners, too, joined the flight out of the mountains. The “Steady Miner,” a large machine that minimize and loaded coal in a single uninterrupted operation and resembled an enormous orange monster with devastating tooth, along with belt techniques and shuttle automobiles, rendered numerous human labor redundant.
The business they left behind was rife with unscrupulous practices. Operators paid miners for “quick weights” — rigging the size so a automotive of coal confirmed a load approach beneath what it truly measured. Housing for mineworkers was low cost, constructed alongside highways and on hillsides from unseasoned low-grade lumber, inflicting their partitions and flooring to buckle and sag because the unrelenting Appalachian climate took its toll. In the meantime the booming business started to faucet seams of coal in beforehand untouched areas, removed from present roads. These new rural roads had been carved out of the shale, unstable clay and crumbling limestone with the intention to transport coal down the mountainsides, and as these roads inevitably deteriorated too, Caudill wrote that the mud the coal vans kicked up modified the colour of bushes and fields, making its approach into properties. Free rock and soil congested drainage techniques; roads flooded; and pavements cracked because the drenched earth froze and expanded in winter.
There’s a chapter in Caudill’s e-book referred to as “The Rape of the Appalachians.” It tells the story of strip mining, a department of the business that was about to invade the Cumberlands on an enormous scale. With strip mining, the soil above is scraped off and the coal scooped out, leaving a hellish panorama. A lot of these coal seams contained enormous portions of sulfur; when that will get moist it produces sulfuric acid which “bleeds into the creeks, killing vegetation and destroying fish, frogs and different stream-dwellers.” Caudill’s e-book was a devastating indictment of the business, one which quickly got here to the eye of Homer Bigart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Instances reporter. Again then, if you happen to had been a journalist from an American newspaper or TV community and wished to see what was taking place within the Appalachians, Tom, Pat and The Mountain Eagle had been the compulsory pit cease. And so when Bigart visited the Cumberlands, Tom and Pat gave him a tour of the realm, launched him to folks they knew had been important in telling his story, and confirmed him their very own reporting on the collapse of the area’s economic system, its well being and housing issues and problems with meals insecurity. “He went away and wrote the story and it was unfold throughout the entrance web page of The New York Instances,” Tom mentioned. “And the story goes that John F Kennedy, who would learn The Instances in mattress on Sunday mornings, noticed Bigart’s story about Kentucky, referred to as an emergency cupboard assembly that Sunday afternoon, and arrange a program of emergency aid for impoverished mountain households and jobless coal miners.”
In his Instances piece, Bigart described the devastating penalties of the automation of the mining business. “Changed by machines,” he wrote, “the miners can discover no work.” He described how one man even pretended to be blind by placing snuff in his eyes with the intention to turn into eligible for welfare; that when he’d fooled the welfare board, his spouse did the identical — with equal success. His ruse was solely uncovered when he introduced his daughter in to assert a 3rd examine. Bigart described “dirty-faced kids [who] haul water from the creek, which is fouled with rubbish and discarded mattresses.” Letcher County’s public well being officer even advised Bigart that he’d seen kids “pot-bellied and anemic … eat dust out of chimneys.” Following Kennedy’s assassination, his successor Lyndon Johnson advised America throughout his State of the Union Speech in 1964 that he would prosecute a “conflict on poverty.”
The Mountain Eagle’s reporting on what was taking place induced some within the space — notably the mining firms — to imagine the Gishes had been “anti coal.” However Tom, Pat and their household had been in Whitesburg as a result of of coal. Tom’s father, Ben, had labored as a miner for the Southeast Coal Firm earlier than turning into a mine superintendent. He’d invented a tool that made trendy mining potential: a roof bolt which might shore up in any other case fragile shafts to ensure that miners to extract coal, metallic ore or stone, free from concern of the roof collapsing in on them. Tom’s father’s invention had made mining safer for people, not machines. By now, Tom and Pat had been shocked at how coal operators — and people in authorities — had created a sort of native tyranny and so they had been aghast on the tragedy unfolding of their quiet little nook of Kentucky. That concern, which they articulated of their protection and editorials in The Eagle, along with reporting on black lung illness and strip mining, inevitably rubbed these on the high of the mining pyramid the incorrect approach. When Pat first attended a faculty board assembly in Whitesburg she was advised the discussion board was closed. Tom knowledgeable them that the state’s Open Conferences Regulation gave the press entry to public conferences, and whereas the board finally conceded, their concession apparently didn’t prolong to giving Pat a chair to sit down in, even when she was pregnant with their second little one.
Due to the huge curiosity in tales concerning the Battle on Poverty, a basic hostility to the media hung like coal smoke over the Appalachians. Reporters, Ben Gish recollects, “had been extra involved with exhibiting footage of abject poverty as a substitute of exhibiting the properties of the coal firm house owners.” And a few locals objected to that.
In September, 1967, a Canadian filmmaker referred to as Hugh O’Connor visited japanese Kentucky to conduct interviews for a documentary he was engaged on that had been commissioned by the US Division of Commerce. Unaware of the hostility to outsiders, notably members of the media, O’Connor and his crew noticed a miner sitting on his porch, nonetheless lined in coal mud, and the person agreed to allow them to movie him. However whereas their cameras had been rolling, his landlord, a person named Hobart Ison, who objected to them being on his property, ordered the filmmakers to go away. They packed up their gear however as they had been strolling towards their automotive, Ison pulled out his revolver and started firing. One of many bullets hit O’Connor within the chest and he died on the spot. Later, Ison would plead responsible to involuntary manslaughter however he’d serve only a 12 months in jail. This was the local weather the Gishes operated in as the brand new decade dawned.
The workers of The Mountain Eagle weren’t resistant to abuse. In 1971, reporter Phil Primack went to cowl a protest — a gaggle of 5 girls had been trying to get a strip mine shut down in Knott County. Primack recollects three males current that day — him, a person who ran an anti-strip mining strain group, and one different — had been overwhelmed up “by a bunch of drunk, pissed off arduous hats who thought they had been protesting their livelihood. They weren’t going to beat up the ladies in order that they beat up the lads there as a substitute.”
In the summertime of 1970, Tom suffered a serious coronary heart assault and two years later underwent open coronary heart surgical procedure. It did not gradual him down although, and again at The Eagle workplace, he and Pat labored a brutal schedule. On press day, Tom, who now sported a giant reddish beard, was at his desk late into the evening, sleeping on a cot within the workplace so he might be up once more on the first light, again to work. Pat had taken a job on the housing company so she might convey house a gentle paycheck, however after she left the workplace every day she’d head straight to The Eagle, working into the evening alongside Tom to verify the paper, the circulation of which now hovered round 7,000, got here out on time. Tom and Pat had gotten wind of the truth that coal firms deliberate to double the load limits on their coal vans at a time when mountain roads had been already falling aside. What’s extra, these firms had managed to influence the native legislature to agree to alter the load limits with out telling the general public, figuring they’d get away with it so long as the Gishes didn’t discover out. However these coal firms had been oblivious to Tom and Pat’s dogged dedication to the First Modification. Jim Branscome, who began reporting for The Eagle in 1971, mentioned the couple weren’t revolutionaries however “they had been folks ready to combat for the basic ideas of journalism.” And proper now they had been able to go to battle.
At one coal firm assembly on the Letcher County Courthouse which was ostensibly “public” though everybody there was sympathetic to the coal firms’ plans, a coal truck proprietor stood up and introduced that if the Gishes disclosed particulars of the “association” wherein officers had agreed to miss the chubby vans, they’d “burn their constructing down.” No person apparently seen a reporter for the Louisville Courier Journal sitting quietly in the back of the room, taking notes. After Tom heard what had occurred he wrote within the subsequent problem of The Eagle how disgusted he was {that a} menace like that might be made with out problem — to not point out the truth that the native decide was at that assembly, albeit in his capability as somebody with a monetary curiosity in a neighborhood coal enterprise. Tom referred to as on the decide to “repudiate those that made the general public menace to burn down The Mountain Eagle.”
There was one other problem the newspaper had sunk its tooth into. And this one upset the native police division. Not lengthy after The Eagle revealed the key settlement between county officers and the coal business, it took problem with what it felt was pointless police harassment of Whitesburg’s youth. It was 1974. By now Tom and Pat’s son Ben was in highschool and he remembers he and his buddies would hang around on a bridge over the North Fork Kentucky River close to the middle of city, one thing younger folks had carried out for generations. There, Ben and his buddies would hearken to “Bluebird” by Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles band Wings again and again on an eight observe stereo. One evening, the police picked all of them up for disorderly conduct, insisting the bridge was a hive of drug exercise, regardless of by no means making a single drug-related arrest. “Have you ever heard that track?” Ben would say. “It’s a ballad.” At metropolis council conferences, involved dad and mom introduced up the assorted threats they mentioned the police had made to their children. “And so dad wrote an editorial saying if town actually wished to maintain children out of city at evening they may put up a drawbridge and dig a moat,” Ben mentioned.
Tom didn’t cease at one Op-Ed; all summer season The Eagle ran information tales and editorials condemning the police remedy of younger folks within the county. In return, the police ensured Ben and 4 of his buddies confirmed up in juvenile court docket. The decide threatened to ship Ben and his buddies to juvenile camp, however the case was later dismissed. On April 1, 1974, Whitesburg enacted a curfew requiring dad and mom to maintain their kids off the streets after midnight — and which stipulated that the dad and mom themselves might be arrested and charged with a prison offense in the event that they didn’t. Ben recollects that each time he’d drive via city, one officer particularly, a person by the title of Johnny Caudill, would pull him over, accusing him of dashing, which Ben says he by no means did.
No person was exempt from criticism if Tom and Pat thought they deserved it. Mining firms, the college board, police, native officers. All had been honest sport. Tom mentioned over time they realized that if the newspaper was going to challenge any sort of opinion it was certain to offend anyone, and consequently it will lose promoting. If that occurred, so be it. “By no means assume you’ve received any everlasting buddies ‘cos you haven’t,” he mentioned. The Letcher County institution, led by the coal business, noticed The Eagle and the Gishes as a menace to their energy. They usually retaliated by boycotting the newspaper and trying — unsuccessfully — to strip it of its standing because the county’s official paper of document.
When Sarah Gish referred to as her dad to inform him that The Mountain Eagle workplace had been all-but destroyed in a fireplace, Tom thought it will need to have been a wiring problem: it was an previous constructing, in any case, and these items generally occurred. By now Jim Branscome had left the paper and was residing in Tennessee. When he heard, he drove straight to Whitesburg and located Tom sitting on his entrance porch. By then Tom suspected foul play. A typewriter stood on a small desk in entrance of him and, decided to not miss a problem, he was already hammering out a entrance web page. On the left hand aspect of the masthead was the acquainted sketch of an eagle, its wings outstretched. Previous to the fireplace, beneath that the masthead had learn: IT SCREAMS! in all caps. However Tom had altered it for the subsequent problem. Now it learn: IT STILL SCREAMS!
Just a few days after The Eagle burned, Kentucky State Police arson investigators turned up in Whitesburg to examine the newspaper workplace. Tom thought they solely got here due to the assist he and Pat had acquired within the speedy aftermath from the opposite main dailies in Kentucky who had leaned closely on the authorities to analyze. Even then, he mentioned there was numerous wanting and speaking — which went on for a couple of months, after which not very a lot occurred. Tom was disillusioned, however unsurprised, that not one member of town council expressed concern or sympathy for what had occurred. At first the arson investigators mentioned they may discover nothing conclusive.
“Then the large frame-up began,” Ben mentioned. “Whitesburg police mentioned somebody had seen me and a few buddies working from the again of the constructing that evening; that me and a few buddies had been within the again workplace smoking pot.” In truth, Ben mentioned, he had been “buzzed out (his) thoughts” that evening — however nowhere close to The Mountain Eagle workplace. “A month earlier a lady I’d been seeing was killed in a wreck when a truck crashed via barrels the place a bypass was being constructed and t-boned the automotive she was in, killing her and her brother. The evening of the fireplace I’d purchased a six pack of beer and had gone to her grave to drink it. I had no alibi. I went house on my own and acquired to sleep fairly fast.” The state police made Ben take a lie detector check — which he handed.
Two months after the fireplace, suspicion had fallen on 25-year-old Whitesburg metropolis police officer Johnny Caudill — the cop who had focused Ben earlier within the 12 months, and had no relation to Tom and Pat’s buddy Harry Caudill. As one former reporter mentioned, Caudill was an extremely widespread title within the space. “When you depend folks with the final title Smith, Craft, Caudill and Collins, you’d have about half the county.” Somebody who lived close to The Eagle workplace had noticed three males that evening and acknowledged them, however they hadn’t come ahead right away. A state police officer, already suspicious of Johnny Caudill, was in a position to get a type of younger males, Benny Bentley, to admit. Bentley, then a freshman at Jap Kentucky College in Richmond finding out regulation enforcement, occurred to be a former classmate of Ben Gish; the pair had recognized one another since kindergarten. Caudill, Bentley advised the officer, had paid him and one other different younger man, Roger Stewart, $50 every to pour kerosene into The Eagle workplace that evening and set it alight, assuring them there was no want to fret about any repercussions. “We received’t let anyone contact you,” he mentioned.
Reverend Ray Collins, who owned the funeral house reverse The Eagle, as soon as advised his congregation that Jesus would approve of what Tom and Pat and Harry Caudill had been making an attempt to do, educating folks about what was taking place within the Appalachian mountains of japanese Kentucky. After the fireplace he provided an empty constructing he owned throughout from the hospital as a short lived refuge for the newspaper. Tom was decided to not let feelings get in the best way of unbiased protection of Caudill’s trial. They’d cowl it intimately; and so they’d play it straight. Harry Caudill, who would symbolize one of many younger males employed to set the constructing on hearth, advised Tom there was little doubt that “coal cash” had paid for the arson assault.
A 12 months on from the fireplace, in August, 1975, Johnny Caudill lastly appeared earlier than a jury on the Letcher County Courthouse, a 3 story concrete, metal and glass constructing constructed a decade earlier than that stood proudly on Most important Road in downtown Whitesburg. He was accused of “procuring the willful and malicious burning” of The Mountain Eagle workplaces. Caudill was, the jury heard, inspired to torch the constructing as a consequence of The Eagle’s criticism of his police division and its remedy of the city’s youngsters, together with Tom and Pat’s son, Ben. 4 months earlier Benny Bentley and Roger Stewart had pleaded responsible to diminished expenses and had been every fined $300. Now they had been telling the court docket about Caudill’s involvement; concerning the money he’d paid them and the way he had masterminded all the factor. Bentley and Stewart’s testimony sealed Caudill’s destiny, and the jury advisable a sentence of a 12 months within the state reformatory. However the punishment that Decide F. Byrd Hogg would finally mete out turned out to be shockingly lenient. Hogg, who himself occurred to personal a number of coal mines, gave Caudill a one 12 months suspended sentence and instructed him to report as soon as a month to his probation officer. In different phrases, Caudill was free. Tom wasn’t shocked and he headlined his subsequent editorial: “Open Season on The Eagle,” noting that Caudill had acquired away with arson.
Nobody is aware of for positive if any coal firms had been complicit within the arson plot. Reporter Phil Primack mentioned that on the very least their animosity created an enabling surroundings for Caudill to do what he did. “I keep in mind sooner or later waking as much as see all the size of Most important Road plastered with stickers in assist of the coal business. It had occurred in a single day. The 2 exceptions had been The Mountain Eagle workplace and Harry Caudill’s workplace. And you are taking that as a message.”
Jim Branscome mentioned surprisingly little modified within the aftermath of the fireplace and trial. “Tom at all times carried a simmering residue of shock; Pat rather less so, however it was there. There have been at all times threats to his life, his kids, the paper, from coal pursuits, going again a long time. I believe he was in all probability shocked this one was instigated by a policeman.”
For the 12 months he was on probation, Johnny Caudill left Whitesburg. When he returned, he ran a used automotive dealership and every week he’d place an advert for his firm within the pages of The Eagle. For a very long time, Ben mentioned the pair wouldn’t acknowledge one another. Finally, as time handed, they’d nod: a easy gesture, however it was a recognition of their shared existence. It wasn’t pleasant, however it wasn’t hostile both. With time, a few of the ache had healed.
Right now, Benny Bentley volunteers for Whitesburg’s hearth division.
I first met Tom, Pat and Ben in 2004, across the 30th anniversary of the fireplace that might simply have destroyed their enterprise and any need to stay round in Whitesburg. It was noon once I drove via japanese Kentucky, previous homes and barns nestled in hollows between mountains. There have been vans parked up, piled excessive with logs. I might hear the rumble of coal vans as I motored previous a diner serving “breakfast anytime steaks” and a bit of flea market promoting fruit and greens, whereas every station I tuned my automotive radio to provided equally beneficiant doses of faith. Though formally retired — Tom and Pat had handed the reins of the paper over to Ben — they every nonetheless had an workplace within the newspaper constructing. We sat in the lounge of their modest house within the valley, Pine Mountain virtually totally filling the window body. In an adjoining room, a seven foot tall portray, proudly displayed on the wall, was of an open hand with an eagle above it and flames overhead — a reminder, Pat advised me, of the resilience of The Mountain Eagle.
The 12 months earlier than I met them, Tom and Pat had been honored with a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Skilled Journalists. On the ceremony, the SPJ’s then-president Al Cross mentioned Tom and Pat had lived “a life consumed — and generally put in danger — by the journalism they’ve practiced for 45 years,” and that “their careers might make an incredible e-book or perhaps a movement image.” Tom was usually modest when speaking concerning the quite a few accolades he and Pat had obtained over time. “They’ve tried to place us outta enterprise, threaten us, intimidate us,” he advised me. “And we acquired a good quantity of consideration from different media people who find themselves involved about freedom of speech.” However none of that actually mattered to them. It was all concerning the reporting; talking reality to energy.
Ben Gish started working for The Eagle within the Nineteen Eighties after he graduated from school. He deliberate to — in his phrases — “simply grasp on the market” till he discovered a job and acquired married. However Tom advised me again in 2004 that working for the paper quickly consumed him. Ben’s siblings by no means adopted him into the newspaper commerce. His sister Katherine continues to be a health care provider in Kentucky; Sarah, a now-retired kindergarten trainer, and Ann, who died in 2020, was a social employee in Virginia, whereas brother Ray labored for Greenpeace for a decade earlier than leaving to turn into a bartender — and now bar proprietor — in Brooklyn.
Tom died in 2008, just some years after we met. Within the obituary he penned, Phil Primack wrote: “Newspapers do face severe monetary and different challenges right now, however Tom Gish confronted them each week for half a century and prevailed and printed till the top. His Eagle, now edited by his son Ben … a hopeful register darkish instances that newspapers nonetheless matter and may — should — survive.” Pat died eight years later. Jim Branscome wrote of Pat that her life was a profile in braveness, endurance, and dogged arduous work “all pushed by a deeply principled dedication to the concept there’s nowhere a free folks except there’s a free press.”
Right now, Whitesburg is much from the bustling place it as soon as was. The legalization of alcohol gross sales within the mid-2000s has meant extra eating places and bars, so the city is busier at weekends, however the coal business is decimated and the streets all however empty throughout the week. Pine Mountain casts its shadow each actually and figuratively over the city. As The Mountain Eagle itself famous: “If all of the coal mined in Letcher County since 1900 had been loaded onto 100-ton rail automobiles, the coal prepare would attain from Whitesburg to Los Angeles greater than 22 instances.” Right now it’s a unique story. “Now, the mineable coal — and the cash that got here with it — is sort of gone.”
Jim Branscome advised me that within the early days of Tom and Pat’s tenure, The Eagle referred to as consideration to the issues of strip mining and black lung illness; within the ‘60s it was starvation and diet; right now, with Ben within the editor’s chair, it’s poverty and flooding and the lack of jobs.” Whereas the problems it stories on have modified, The Eagle nonetheless screams.
January, 2022
With the deadline quick approaching, eight extra candidates filed their paperwork to run for election in Letcher County. Among the many quite a few positions, for county clerk, coroner, magistrates, constables, conservation and training boards, had been the candidates for mayor. Throwing their hats within the ring had been Tiffany Craft, Patty Jo Wooden, and a reputation acquainted to most in Whitesburg: Johnny Caudill.
Inform the information. Inform the neighborhood. Play it straight. That’s what Tom and Pat at all times did.
“Johnny Caudill has turn into the third particular person to file for Mayor of Whitesburg,” The Eagle reported. “Caudill was convicted in 1975 of arson, for his position in a fireplace that destroyed The Mountain Eagle workplaces on August 1, 1974.”
Caudill quietly withdrew his candidacy.