"I've helped you out plenty of times," he said levelly, "and on cases that were just as murky in the beginning as this one is. I've done my share of cleaning up the murk. I've never—as you put it—gotten in the way. Admit it. Have PI have only been helpful—sometimes extremely helpful—and occasionally in dangerous and ugly situations."
"This is different," I said, knowing exactly where this was heading. "You are emotionally involved."
"Well, of course, I'm emotionally involved," he said, throwing up the hand that wasn't tightly clutching a bottle of beer. "Skeeter is going to die, for God's sake' And since I hurt Skeeter very badly at the beginning of his adult life, I think I owe it to him to make things easier, if I can, at the end of his life. I'm in a position to help Skeeter and ease my own guilty conscience over the hell I put him through thirty-two years ago. And damn it, Don, I want to do it!"
I thought, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter, Skeeter.
3
The Edensburg Herald had been founded in 1895, when young Daniel Lincoln Osborne, a fire-in-the-moral-soul Eugene Debs progressive, borrowed $11,000 from Hiram Young, his father-in-law, a foundry owner esteemed for his fair-labor practices, and merged two weekly newspapers of no particular distinction into the town's first daily. The new paper soon made a name for itself—not a good one, according to local mossback Republicans. From the beginning, the Herald railed against the depredations of the robber barons, supported labor and trustbusters, and was passionate in its editorials favoring the preservation of the Adirondacks' water, air, wildlife, and rugged natural beauty. It was almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of six state and two national parks, one containing what is now Lake Osborne, New York, and another Osborne Falls
Later, the Herald welcomed FDR's New Deal, which the Eden County Republican Committee branded "the triumph of the Bolsheviks." When Hiram Young was in his eighties, he was still shunned by Edensburg families prominent in banking, real estate, and canoe manufacturing who never forgave him for bankrolling his son-in-law's renowned and apparently indestructible purveyor of—in the words of the president of the Eden County Savings Bank—"socialist hog offal"
The paper won its first of three Pulitzers, just before old Dan's retirement in 1945, for its editorials urging the formation of the United Nations. The second came during the Vietnam war, when Dan's son and successor, William T. "Tom" Osborne, drove Lyndon Johnson to distraction with antiwar screeds so elegantly incisive that papers all over the country regularly reprinted them, and Frank Church and J William
Fulbright read them aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate. The Herald's third Pulitzer, ten years later, went to Eric Osborne for the "Letter from the Wilderness" reports that ceased only when he died the previous May, bludgeoned to death on one of the mountainsides he had so lustrously vivified for his readers.
Eric's was the most recent addition to a gallery of photographic portraits that half-filled the wall at the end of the Herald's second-floor newsroom in an old Victorian block on Edensburg's Main Street. Founder Dan Osborne was there, and his son Tom, and a series of managing and news editors, one of the earliest scowling out from under a green eyeshade, several of the later ones sporting polka-dot bow ties above their bulging oxford-cloth collars—the entire gallery comprising what I later heard some of the younger Herald reporters refer to as "the dead white males."
Janet Osborne was the Herald's first female editor, selected by her father upon his retirement in 1985 because, he told her, "You're the best man for the job." No one within the family, and few outside it, doubted the wisdom of the choice. Among Janet's siblings, only Eric had been as qualified as she was to put out the paper, and he hadn't been interested. He'd have had to come in out of the wilderness too often.
Eric's and Janet's brother Dan, namesake of the founder, had approximately the right politics for the editor's job, but he was notoriously hotheaded and inept in his interpersonal relations and would have driven the entire news staff at the Herald up the wall or out the door in a matter of weeks. Nobody in the family wanted that, despite the tug of Dan's name, pedigree, and gender. Nominally, Dan Osborne was "publisher" of the Herald, but a nonfamily member actually ran the business side of the paper, freeing Dan to organize on behalf of leftist third-party political candidates and lead sugar-harvest expeditions to Cuba.
Dan's early participation in the Venceremos Brigades was a source of sour amusement with the two of Tom Osborne's offspring who somehow turned out politically conservative. Chester, an Edensburg stockbroker, and June, who had devoted her years as head of the Eden County Museum board of directors to keeping twentieth-century art out of the museum and all but out of the county, regarded their siblings'— and parents' and grandparents'—unshakable principled liberalism as a
family pathology. Some families produced a lot of harelips, others a lot of liberals
Neither Chester nor June, however, had ever dared interfere with Herald editorial policy. For one thing, deference was due Osborne family tradition, however mushbrained Chester and June considered it. And anyway, the two weren't about to tangle with Janet and Dan—both scrappers who could get rough—or their widowed mother, Ruth Osborne. Even as her health had begun to falter, Ruth was understood by family members to be fully capable of protecting the Herald's pro-gressivism with savvy, diligence and—on rare, awful occasions—cold fury. Once, at a family picnic, June's husband, Dick Puderbaugh, chortled over a Herald editorial calling for Richard Nixon's impeachment— this was early in Nixon's first term—and Ruth tore into her son-in-law savagely, calling Nixon and Henry Kissinger war criminals who ought to be in United Nations-run prisons, and making a connection between the napalming of Asian babies and Dick Puderbaugh's fuel-oil dealership. This was a linkage that even young Dan, then a leader in the SDS, thought might be going too far.
Ruth's role in Osborne family affairs had been complicated recently by early signs of Alzheimer's disease, but only Janet knew about that. She did not expect her mother's so far negligible mental impairment to figure in the family battle over whether to sell the Herald to the good chain or the bad chain—the daisy chain or the chain of fools. But Janet was concerned enough over her mother's mental state that every day she stopped by the old Osborne family home on Maple Street after work en route to "the lake house," the Osborne summer home that Janet now shared year-round with her lover, Dale Kotlowicz
I learned all of this Wednesday morning while sitting in Janet Osborne's office, a glass-enclosed rectangle overlooking the Herald newsroom. The desk and decor in Janet's editorial headquarters—which had been her father's and grandfather's—were late Victorian, but the old Underwood typewriter up on a shelf and the pneumatic tubes for shooting copy to the linotypists in the rear of the building had been replaced for practical purposes by a video terminal and computer keyboard. And alongside the old framed wall photos of earlier Osbornes posing with Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin and Eleanor (separately), Chester Bowles, and Al Gore Sr., among others, Janet was pictured smiling happily in the company of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.
Janet gave Timmy and me her twenty-minute Osbome-and-Hemld-family-and-newspaper history, explaining in the course of her narrative how it all led up to the current crisis. The paper had always been profitable, she said, but in 1988 Stuart Torkildson, the Herald Company's vice president and chief operating officer, came up with a plan to ensure the paper's future economic health in the face of rising costs and growing competition for ad revenues. The company would cash in on the Reagan go-go economic boom with an $18 million mountain resort twenty-six miles from Edensburg in the village of Blue Valley. Profits from the resort, to be called Spruce Haven, were meant to guarantee the paper's survival—and editorial independence, Stu Torkildson emphasized—for at least the next century.
