Azalea City News (& Review)
(The Azalea City News was a newspaper I published, selling it after a few years to Jocko Potts who renamed it Azalea City News and Review.)
It was a Tuesday. We normally went to press on Wednesdays but Hurricane Frederic was bearing down on Mobile so everyone was in the battening down mode, stocking provisions and making sure things would be ready for what was promising to be a real dilly of a storm.
At the last moment we were being warned that we were facing a monumental storm.
I had gone to the office to make sure everything was in order. I ran into Jocko. He was packing his car. When I asked him what he was doing. He said he and Jane were getting ready to go to Mississippi to ride out the storm. I reminded him that he had a newspaper now and had an opportunity to cover what could possibly be the biggest news event getting ready to unfold right here in front of us. "Are you crazy? You can't go anywhere."
I had started the Azalea City News some years before Jocko purchased it from me. He had been an account exec at a local advertising agency, had come into some money and wanted to get into the newspaper publishing business. I was worn out and recognized that I had reached pretty much the apex of what I could do.
I wanted the paper to get to its next level but didn't have the wheels to make it happen. I thought his money, business acumen and contacts were a good fit.
I had agreed to stay around for at least a year in order to give the paper some editorial guidance and even if he didn't have a lot of newspaper experience, he was gifted with a lot of grace and common sense and immediately acknowledged that I was right.
We agreed to ride out the storm and figure out what we were doing afterwards.
I went home and spent quite possibly the most horrifying night of my life there on Houston Street.
We were in a small frame house and it was being shaken to its roots. The walls pulsed, bellowed and expanded to the point that I thought the roof was just going to blow away.
The windows were pitch black, covered with debris that was so mulched and ground up that it was oozing through the glazing.
Buffeted by those winds and scared out of our minds we eventually fell asleep from exhaustion.
We woke up the next morning to a sight the scope of which I'll never forget; The street was full of debris - mostly our beautiful Oaks - piled 40 or 50 feet high. It looked like a deep Amazon forest rather than a residential street.
The city had no water or power. The office was a disaster. But our equipment was essentially intact.
We set about to put together an issue. Knowing that it was a self-contained city, I called my friend Buddy Clewis, the manager of the Mobile Auditorium. Would he, I asked, permit us to use one of the rooms in the auditorium to set up our newspaper?
He agreed.
We now had power and water and a place to publish. While the rest of the city was undergoing monumental hardships, we had ice machines and air-conditioning. We spent the next couple of days navigating around a city suffering primal conditions.
We moved equipment, rewired things when they needed to be, scrounged supplies, set up a makeshift darkroom, a composition room and delegated assignments.
It was our finest hour; we had survived the storm, overcome its effects, had banded together, improvised around the obstacles, put out a "real" newspaper (I suggested to Jocko that we change the format from tabloid to broadsheet to signal that we were there to compete with the MPR mano a mano.) and actually and beat the Press Register to publication.
And for me it was an even sweeter revenge as I had been fired from the paper for publishing the Azalea City News. I had suggested this "soft news" format as a supplement for the paper but it was turned down by the powers that be. As they were not interested, I published it on my own, using many of the press register's staffers. They called me in and gave me the ultimatum of ceasing publication as I was now "in competition" with them. They fired me when I published the next issue.
That's the day I credit as the real start of the Azalea City News & Review because even though it kept much of the same content, it moved into the arena of being a serious community newspaper.
No comments:
Post a Comment