OPINION: Reporter finds himself back in the saddle again

February 10th 6:16 pm | Jim Paulin    

It almost seems like "Déjà vu all over again."

The newspaper is back after a six month absence, under new ownership. Glory hallelujah!

It arrived Saturday on Peninsula Airways. I picked it up at the air cargo office and made the deliveries: North Pacific Gas 'N' Go, Alaska Ship Supply's liquor store and the grocery store in the old A.C. store, Captains Bay convenience store, Safeway, the Grand Aleutian Hotel, and the Unisea liquor store.

A déjà vu is a feeling you've been here before, or history repeating itself. Even after history did repeat itself in the Superbowl and the New England Patriots lost to the New York Giants, I still feel compelled to quote a legendary New York baseball sports figure, Yogi Berra, on déjà vu all over again.

My first full-time news job in rural Alaska was as a reporter and photographer at the Bristol Bay Times and Dutch Harbor Fisherman in Dillingham in 1990. The two papers were merged prior to my arrival, and a couple of years later were separated again.

The Dillingham job came with housing included, an unheated room upstairs over the office, with live music on weekends from the nearby Willow Tree bar. That was fine: no heat, no problem, with enough blankets and a sleeping bag. The heated newsroom downstairs served as the living room, kitchen included, since the place was a former private home. I spent a lot of time inside the Willow Tree too, drinking non-alcoholic beer.

The office was not accidentally adjacent to the Willow Tree, since both properties were owned by the late Rance "Hutchy" Brannon, a supporter of the newspaper owned by Fritz Johnson. Hutchy thought the non-alcoholic beer was funny, but he did keep it in stock.

Before moving to Alaska in 1988, I'd worked as a reporter for daily newspapers in Amherst, Gardner and Greenfield, Massachusetts. I also freelanced community profile articles to the real estate page of The Boston Globe, and clips, or copies, of those articles greatly impressed the Bay Times editor. I don't recall which clips I sent, I remember I profiled Fitchburg, Berlin, Stockbridge and Webster, Massachusetts, and Nashua, New Hampshire.

I heard of the Bay Times job from Mike Rostad, publisher of the former Kodiak Fisherman newspaper where I worked briefly in 1989 before getting a job as an oil recovery technician on the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I can honestly say I took money from VECO. The oil field support company was my employer when I did environmental janitorial work on Kodiak and Afognak islands and Alaska Peninsula beaches. VECO officials later got into deep trouble for bribing state legislators. When I took money from VECO, it was for stuffing oiled seaweed into garbage bags.

When I was demobilized as an OR Tech in August, 1989, I put my car back on the ferry and drove up to Anchorage and enrolled in the state university for a semester, funded with oil spill wages, what I called my "Hazelwood scholarship" after the tanker captain's name. And very recently I got a little something more from the Exxon class action suit, over 22 years since the grounding. I picked it up Christmas day, 2011, when I went to the Dutch Harbor post office and found a check in my mail for $222.26 from the Kodiak cannery worker class.

When the semester ended at UAA, I delivered Dominos Pizza in Anchorage for two months from the store at Karluk and Fifth. I lived on pizza. The manager would make one for the workers and call it the "crew pie." Then I traveled back to Massachusetts for a wedding, and spent a month in Mexico visiting Mexico City and the Mayan ruins to the south, before returning to Alaska and processing seafood in Kenai and Homer before getting the newspaper job in Dillingham

I was a journalism student at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst between 1974 and 1979, never graduated, I spent too much time around the student newspaper and not enough in the classrooms. Plus, too much time in the campus bars, not drinking non-alcoholic beverages, at the Blue Wall and Top of the Campus, during the brief window of opportunity when the legal age was lowered to 18. I was 17 years old when the drinking age was lowered, and 22 when it returned to age 21. Perfect timing! Or not? Maybe I'll finally get a degree from somewhere before I turn 60, I'm 56 now.

I arrived in Unalaska/Dutch Harbor in 1996, as the editor of the The Dutch Harbor Fisherman. The newspaper chain, the now-defunct Alaska Newspapers Inc., transferred me from Kotzebue where I was the editor of the Arctic Sounder for two years. In Kotzebue, I learned radio broadcasting at KOTZ radio, valuable transferable skills for my job as the first news director at KIAL radio in Unalaska from 1998 to 2004, since renamed KUCB. I lived in a nice houseboat owned by Chris Skelly on C float in the small boat harbor. It was unofficially called the "ghetto dock," though $900 monthly rent didn't seem very downscale.

I covered the fish economy broadly, from the small boat sector to the major local revenue producing shore plants, factory trawlers, and crabbers. In the pre-rationalization era, the crabbers would meet to talk price at "Strikers Hall" as they called the old Alaska Ship Supply's upstairs warehouse meeting room. The predecessor show of the Deadliest Catch had scenes of a meeting there, with yours truly in the front row covered with pre-digital media gear - a film camera, an audio cassette recorder. Sometimes the crabbers would go on strike, and with many more boats not yet bought back or leasing out quota, you'd have plenty of financially-stressed crab fishermen wandering around town. This year's ice-induced slowdown seems tiny by comparison.

The new boat harbor finally opened, not without controversy when it was proposed. It is named for our former state representative and local businessman. The Carl E. Moses Boat Harbor is a fine facility, but I really miss Carl's store and bar in downtown Unalaska. I also really miss the Elbow Room bar, owned by Larry Shaishnikoff and family.

Certainly accuracy is of the utmost importance. One of my journalism professors, Ralph Whitehead Jr. was also a much-quoted and very quotable political analyst, and I asked him how accurately reporters quoted him.

"Oh, about 80 percent. The American press is blunt instrument," he said.

Naturally I aspire to a higher standard than 80 percent, after all my hometown of Athol, Mass., "Tooltown USA" is well known in the machine tool industry for precision instruments such as calipers and micrometers. I was born there in 1955, of Irish and Acadian French Canadian descent.

Ralph and the department head Howard Ziff had both worked on big city newspapers in Chicago. Howard once said if you're not at a big city newspaper by the time you're 30, you'll end up doing something else. In those terms in that place, The Boston Globe seemed to be preferred destination on the conventional (urban) career path. Howard was right. But I did get a few clips from the Globe, which helped me get the job at the Bristol Bay Times, which led to the Arctic Sounder and Dutch Harbor Fisherman and four rural public radio stations, with a lot of freelancing for the Anchorage Daily News, Associated Press and fishing trade publications.

It's almost like the old days, with lots of quotes in the Feb. 2 paper from city natural resources analyst Frank Kelty. Of course nothing totally stays the same. Small boat fisherman/activist Bobby Storrs isn't around anymore to provide dissenting opinions. They both have something named in their honor for their advocacy of diverse Unalaska interests. Frank's got the fish tax-funded ballfield, Kelty Field. The small boat harbor was renamed for Bobby, where he kept his little boat, the Flying Oosik, when he wasn't going to fish council meetings to argue with Frank. Sometimes they joined forces if a small boat issue didn't threaten the large-scale fishery. Bobby was always better at creating opportunities for the small boats than at obstructing the processing companies, though he seemed to put equal energy into both projects. A nice metal park bench has been installed his grave at Memorial Park, more easily accessible now since city public works built a road to the top of the hill a few years ago.

These are tough times for the print media, but this newspaper is back, and shoppers and cashiers were delighted when I delivered the bundles to the stores. Not having a weekly local paper left a void in the community. That temporary loss followed the continuing loss of daily newspaper delivery from Anchorage, even though that newspaper keeps publishing, under reduced circumstances. Apparently that downturn means that shipping to this rural area is more trouble than it's worth. When I heard they'd moved their newsroom down into the basement, I expected to see the reporters typing atop 55-gallon drums while dodging forklifts. Instead, it had the same carpeted cubicle look as upstairs, just smaller. The online edition is good, but the Internet is slow out here, and not everybody has a computer, at home or in the office, and most people here don't work in offices.

I know I'll be getting positive and negative feedback from the public soon enough, immediately if not sooner. I never saw the job as a popularity contest. I believe it is a public service.