Matt Proietti

Below the Fold

Memoir extract

Crestline’s incumbent honorary mayor had decided not to seek another term for the symbolic office, which wielded no power and had no specific duties in the struggling mountain resort east of Los Angeles. Crestline was an unincorporated community, not a town in the legal sense, but everyone called it one. ‘Village’ or ‘hamlet’ did not feel right. It was small, sure, but too big for those labels. Plus, it had an edge to it. Perhaps because it was so close to the valley, just twenty twisting minutes uphill from San Bernardino, where until recently I had served as editor of a military base newspaper. 

Having no council or mayor provided an opening for local bars to come together in the name of community service with its honorary mayor’s contest. Crestline had more drinking establishments than churches or real estate sales offices, which was really saying something. What, I was not sure yet as I was new to town, having moved there just before being hired as news editor of its small weekly, the Mountain Courier-News. The campaign was simple: each bar nominated a candidate and patrons cast votes via dollar donations. Whoever raised the most money was declared pretend mayor for a year with the term beginning in September. The cash was pooled and presented to causes chosen by the winner.

The Courier (nobody called the paper by the full name on its masthead) did not report just once on the honorary mayor race. We did profiles of all seven candidates, one of whom had a dog for a running mate. The stories were written by a ‘stringer,’ a contributing writer who earned ten or fifteen bucks per story. It was my job to review submissions for errors in fact, proper sentence structure and readability. I revised all text that was not advertising and revised it to a Year Nine reading level, the standard I had learned in my military training. By doing so, we aimed to encourage teens and those who did not go to university to develop lifelong habits of newspaper reading. The writing style of the mayor series was a bit looser than how I would have tackled it, but I let the articles go to print with a simple proofreading as I did not want to edit the charm out of them. This was not essential news, but it was fun and showed off a bit of the area’s personality. I thought it was marvelous that we had someone covering the booze beat. The contributing writer submitted new candidate profiles each Monday so I saw them three days before they appeared in print, which felt like a little gift to me. Frankly, I was mesmerized by the series and vowed to visit each bar as quickly as possible as a source for stories.

The outgoing honorary mayor was a cook at The Stockade, a saloon and restaurant with a western façade and plank walkway between a hardware store and trophy shop on Lake Drive, the town’s main commercial road. In an exit interview with our contributing writer, he reflected on his tenure and acknowledged that obligations were pretty much left to the office holder. One of his achievements was setting up a reunion between elderly cousins after receiving a letter from a Texas man trying to locate a relative who had last lived in Crestline. The post office was just steps away from The Stockade, so it was possible a clerk hand-delivered something addressed to ‘city hall’ there thinking the symbolic mayor was the right person to receive it. In fact, he was. He tracked down the missing woman in a convalescent home in San Bernardino and raised money to buy an airplane ticket to fly her cousin to see her. They enjoyed a touching reunion. The trip happened just in time, as the Texan returned home and promptly died.

The campaign’s early favourite, at least in his own eyes, was The Stockade’s subsequent nominee, a jovial pharmacist who had already served three terms as symbolic mayor: twice consecutively a decade earlier and a single stint more recently. He had the gift of gab, particularly when the topic was himself, and he told the Courier stringer that his mayoral accomplishments were ‘too much to mention.’ Then he did anyway, saying he initiated a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony and restarted the lapsed Miss Crestline Pageant. Both achievements technically occurred when he was president of the local chamber of commerce, not faux mayor, but the boasts did not result in a fall in the polls as there were none. If re-elected, he said, his plans were ‘so many that I can’t even list them.’ He predicted that his ‘well-oiled political machine’ would lead him to victory and said the only thing his opponents should run is ‘for their lives.’ Covering this guy would be exhausting if he won a fourth term.

The lone female candidate was a former nurse who moved to Crestline with her husband a year earlier after buying a restaurant and renaming it the Country Cookin’ Café. She sounded business-like in our story about her and I imagined she would approach the position in a professional manner and get quite a lot done. She said the race was the most exciting thing to happen to her since she ran for Spam Queen in her hometown of Austin, Minnesota, where the massive Hormel Foods Corp. had its headquarters.

The only candidate I knew was real estate agent Ted Williams. The Illinois native represented the Enchantment Lodge, a bar close to a rustic cabin I rented briefly when I moved to the mountains the previous spring. Ted was at the lounge as often as the couple who ran it and we had quickly become friends despite him being older than my parents. He had a hangdog face and a cigarette always at hand, often unlit. He waved it like a tiny sword to punctuate pronouncements he made in a raspy voice. Ted was the bar’s resident comedian and had a habit of using a person’s name when talking to them that I found endearing. He volunteered as a clown to visit children in burn hospitals around Southern California and was the lone candidate with a running mate: his dog, Chester Roddick, a small Havanese. Their campaign was managed by Ted’s wife, Connie, a former honorary mayor herself, and featured the slogans ‘Keep it in the Family’ and ‘Vote for Mr. Connie.’ 

The contender from the Mountain Lites bar stopped by the Courier office with a complaint about our coverage. I came up to the front counter to talk to him. He was ancient, frowning and wearing braces that pulled his trousers so high that I thought for a moment that he was wearing fishing waders. I greeted him with an extended hand, which he took warily. He got right to the point, claiming our profile of him contained a factual error.

‘It said I was a ‘self-proclaimed dancing fool.’ Other people call me that. I don’t put labels on myself. It’s important for the community to understand the difference.’

It was not really but a mistake is a mistake. I jotted down the information in a notebook and promised we would print a clarification in the next issue. He acknowledged the rest of the article was accurate, including his pledge ‘to do whatever the public wants, within reason’ and him having said he loves ‘most everybody, and I hope everybody loves me.’ I wished him well, but secretly hoped he did not win. We did not need a glum fake mayor. Plus, the incessant dancing.

Our handling of the campaign gave me a feel for the fun side of town, the part away from the crucial yet tedious work of government and business. In its breezy way, the coverage was like a weekly Courier feature called ‘Around the Mountain’ that also required me to restrain my editing talents in the interest of entertaining readers. It was a collection of snippets about the doings of people, a catch-all place for birthday wishes, university achievements, updates on locals serving in the military, that sort of thing. It included light, friendly gossip, some of it submitted by the subjects themselves. These brief pieces might not have otherwise made it into our pages if for no reason other than they were too small to justify a headline. I realized immediately that the column was the actual soul of the paper. ‘Around the Mountain’ anchored our second page, running across the first half of it in text set wider than our news stories. Three centred asterisks separated the blurbs, helping readers see them as individual nuggets of information. When people flipped from the front page, their eyes would be drawn naturally to the third. Newspaper design studies – yes, they existed – showed this. It took something to draw a reader back to the page on the left. A photograph or bold headline helped. All but the newest readers knew where to find ‘Around the Mountain.’ By them searching for it deliberately, other items on the page – obituaries or announcements of births, weddings, engagements and marriage anniversaries – would reach a larger audience. Vee Ward, the general manager and my immediate supervisor, said the column was in place with a different name, ‘Crestline Briefs,’ when she started at the Courier eleven years earlier and was written for years by an elderly woman who had died the previous autumn. 

‘She was a hoot,’ Vee said.

She showed me a picture of the late columnist, who looked positively grandmotherly with a head of tight white curls and wire-frame glasses. Vee surprised me by saying the woman cursed freely and wrote her column longhand while drinking milk and bourbon. The Courier report on her passing was the top story in the next issue, complete with a headline calling her a mountain legend and printed in red to highlight the significance of the loss, I supposed. The column was too important to bury with her (though she was cremated, the article noted) and was renamed ‘Around the Mountain.’ It survived by newspaper staffers adopting an unofficial tasking to each contribute two items per week to bolster what the public mailed, called in or hand delivered.

I was perplexed by a few ‘Around the Mountain’ submissions early in my time on the Courier staff. One was from a woman who had spent a summer holiday at her vacation cabin and wanted to tell others about friends she had made during walks on the three-mile fitness trail around Lake Gregory. One of them was an athletic ‘Armenian-looking’ young man who ran the trail in twenty minutes, she wrote, while another was a ‘pretty blonde who holds her arm as if it were recently removed from a cast.’ I wondered if the latter had some sort of palsy or other condition that had left her arm withered, and here we were about to describe it in print. Hmmm. Since they were friends and all, why had not the writer simply asked these people for their names instead of relying on physical descriptions of them? Still, into the paper went the information. We had a deadline to meet.

Another submission mentioned that two couples had witnessed a single-vehicle accident the previous weekend and administered first aid to the occupants until an ambulance arrived. There were no names or other details. That was all it said. We printed it. I could not insist on full professional reporting from our readers, who were comfortable bringing things to our attention even if they did not really say much. Courier pages were clearly open to all. That was a good thing for a community newspaper. I was the new guy in town as well as on the Courier staff and wary of making sweeping changes to the paper too quickly. I had seen areas for improvement, of course. For example, there would be no red headlines on my watch.

The race for phony mayor was an indication of how things got done in Crestline. People pitched in and did much of the work themselves through churches, service clubs or other organizations. The drinkers did their share via the honorary mayor’s race, which  overlapped with the start of campaigns for official elections that autumn. That coverage was often high on the front page, ‘above the fold’ in newspaper lingo. This way it could be seen through windows of metal machines called news racks we had in commercial zones around the mountains or while stacked on the floor of groceries and other stores. News of lesser importance went below the fold or inside. We decided what was most likely to coax someone into spending fifty cents to pick up the Courier. Without Vee ever mentioning it, I understood that our goal was to make the paper such a compelling read that our subscriber base would remain solid or even grow, allowing us to charge enough for advertising in its pages to pay our salaries and hopefully result in a profit for the owner, a valley publisher who was mainly focused on a larger paper he owned down toward Los Angeles but had a vacation cabin in Crestline.

Votes for honorary mayor were tallied in early September. The victor was Willie Martinez, manager of the Village Inn. The LA native was a former construction worker and Vietnam War veteran who moved to the mountains on a whim after a weekend visit eight years earlier. His ‘Let’s Be Neighbours’ campaign slogan summed up his love of smalltown life.

‘If the bar runs out of beer, I can count on any competitor to loan me enough to keep the doors open until a delivery is made,’ he said. ‘That won’t happen in a city.’The campaign raised thirty-four-hundred dollars for a disabled children’s charity, a local private ambulance service and the sheriff’s department’s volunteer search-and-rescue team. The Village Inn was the bar closest to the Courier office but I had not yet been in it, so I strolled up to take a look inside and maybe meet the new mayor. A makeshift ‘City Hall’ sign was posted on its door next to a poster announcing the particulars of a victory party to be held there. A bartender told me his honor was away until evening so I skipped on ordering a beer and wandered back down the street to my editing pile.