They Never Ran Out Of Ammunition

Funny, ain’t it, when we consider all the people dreaming of adulation, recognition and maybe even a standing ovation, that the parade, trophy and star embedded in the sidewalk in front of the new courthouse will instead honor Bruce Anderson. 

Hilarious, really. I can only stop laughing when I remind myself I’ll have to attend his testimonial dinner. Then I laugh again knowing the only person in the room having a worse time of it than me will be Bruce himself. 

Think of it: A speech by Dan Hauser, a plaque from Mike Sweeney and a key from Commander Joyce Spears to the county jail. I’ll laugh from cocktail hour through my dessert: Yo! One more Martini over here, please! 

Given his present medical condition Bruce may be incapable of laughing, but that’s also funny, at least to me. What’s my old trope about the Olympic sprinter having a leg amputated, the painter going blind, the musician turning deaf, the funniest guy I ever met getting a throatectomy and unable to laugh? 

Har de har har. Yeah I know: That’s not funny. How about this one: A million bowls of granola, twice that many pushups and Henry Kissinger outlives you by 40 years. 

Bruce Anderson and I met as teammates playing fast pitch softball in Cloverdale about 50 years ago. The league was tough, our team wasn’t very, but he stood out, hitting bullets into the furthest reaches of the park, just as we’d expect from a guy who could surely have played professional ball. 

In the mid-80s Bruce arrived at my shabby house on North Oak Street to discuss a percolating plan to buy the Anderson Valley Advertiser from Homer Mannix. My newspaper pedigree included work on big city dailies, editing a string of weeklies, and enough sense to not allow a friend to take a flying leap into the murky swamp of late 20th century journalism. 

Instead I laughed, lied, and said, “Come on in Bruce, the water’s fine!” and carefully sidestepped the messy details. Examples? 

I avoided mentioning that running a newspaper was mostly hard work interspersed with angry phone calls and deadbeat advertisers. And those advertisers, I also didn’t tell him, would immediately panic once the new and improved AVA hit the newsstands. I also failed to point out they’d soon be ex-advertisers. 

And I probably should have hinted there’d be no pay other than what he could squeeze from subscribers, another soon-to-vanish breed once the new and improved AVA hit the newsstands. 

I glossed over these pitfalls and potholes during my pep talk because I was giddy at the notion he might take over a newspaper. By now I’d known him more than a decade and found him tough, incorrigible, articulate, shockingly funny, scholarly and probably housebroken. Intellectually he towered over anyone I’d ever met in a newsroom. 

And yet. Could it be? Weren’t federal regulations in place to prevent newspapers being acquired by the demonstrably unfit? Shrug. Not my worry. 

So he bought the AVA. The paper’s earliest days and years were its wildest, most reckless, most eye-poppingly funny, and chockfull of libel. 

Insults? The word itself had to be redefined when he began skewering locals on the Do Not Skewer list, including Buddy Eller, Norm Vroman, the Mendocino Grapevine, and the Most High & Untouchable of all: Dan Hamburg. The paper took special delight harassing liberal Democrats and Ukiah’s fashionable west side, the latter considered a target deserving of weekly carpet bombings. All this and more crammed into every edition. 

Nor was the AVA above inventing semi-plausible outrages, as when he reported, straight-faced, that local therapist Gregory Sims was conducting nude group masturbation ceremonies, followed by a 100% imaginary interview with Congressman Doug Bosco. 

(Note: The better academies of journalism frown upon such practices.) 

And the AVA never stopped, never ran out of ammunition, never quit picking fights and inviting return fire, cackling all the way. The paper astonished even journalists, even those working at “alternative” papers. 

No one had ever seen or read anything similar, as if some week we might find a suicide note on the front page, an announcement of bankruptcy proceedings on page two, and somewhere else a paragraph suggesting the editor had entered an FBI witness protection program. 

FBI? Ha! Nothing he would have enjoyed more than being tucked away on a quiet cul de sac outside Provo under the name Eric Blair and told to shut up and live anonymously. In a month he’d have a book. 

The years went by, and the years were good. And in the same way we’ve all grown numb to the horrors of our times (architecture, Walmart, Joe Biden, local government, Hollywood) readers of the AVA grew accustomed to shock and awe rumbling 52 times a year out of Boonville, California, a town no bigger than your average parking lot. 

And it wasn’t just locals getting blown away, because soon enough and far more than often enough bigshot journalists, running in packs as they do, began treks to central Mendocino County. They arrived singly to do multiple versions of the same story about an irascible small town editor with the quiet, polite demeanor, spiced with quotes and outrages only Bruce Anderson could deliver endlessly and at will. 

Through all the years and controversy Bruce was the megawatt beacon overshadowing other writers for a hundred miles. Yet on the same pages, within the penumbra of that enormous shadow, were unsung heroes. Foremost was the unheralded star that kept the paper full of news, great reporting and wide coverage. We speak of course of the irreplaceable Mark Scaramella. 

The Major, brilliant, relentless and able to churn out acres of insightful and amusing copy every single week, was the rock in the middle of the lineup. It would have been a different, and worse, newspaper without Scaramella’s deep, wide and skilled reporting, backed as it was with an historic perspective (third generation Mendocino County) and his gimlet-eyed take on every subject. 

And while it lasted, the magnificent courtroom reporting of Bruce McEwen. Each dispatch was filled with humor and deadly accurate depictions of lawyers, judges, cops, prisoners and jurors. During those years, McEwen was the best court reporter in the nation. Go ahead, read that sentence again. 

Among other contributors to what became the Mighty AVA were bylines familiar to readers of esteemed publications around the globe. How were they paid? Maybe Editor Bruce instead charged fees to Alexander Cockburn, Paul Theroux, William Shakespeare, Cicero, TWK [sic], Herodotus and Christopher Hitchens for the honor of appearing in his most excellent rag. 

Beyond the star bylines remained local content: school news, Panther sports coverage, features on loggers, hippies, pot growers, criminals and our ever-admirable political leaders servicing local citizens good, hard and often. 

And so much more. But it comes down to what it always comes down to, unless it comes down to something else for America’s newspapers. The end has arrived. The reaper is here. The paper-and-ink AVA dies today. 

And Bruce Anderson, its voluble editor, stands mute for the only time of his long, loud life, his always precise, abusive voice having failed him. 

But what the hell; he had it when he needed it. 

And he’ll listen and read the nonstop praise and adulation from the multitudes who until a few weeks ago grumbled and groaned about his newspaper, forever refusing to subscribe. 

It all might make him laugh, but we’ve already addressed the affliction. He’ll settle for a sardonic grin and, shaking his head in disbelief, request another belt of Maker’s Mark, poured right down the hole.