Here Comes Trouble (35 page)

I loved these special days when we got to watch TV in school. It seemed like we were getting away with something. And I loved the science shows, especially when they would blow something up in a test tube.

As we were watching the lesson, the picture on the screen was abruptly interrupted and all of a sudden Chet Huntley, the anchorman on NBC News, broke in with a bulletin.

“We have just learned that President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas…”

Mrs. LaCombe let out a gasp and left to get the Mother Superior. She came in and watched the report with us. When they said he was still alive and had been taken to the hospital we were all instructed—and the other classrooms were alerted—to head directly over to the church, get on our knees, and pray, pray, pray that he would live.

Proving once again that either God has a great mysterious plan that none of us can alter, or he does indeed occasionally take a day off, Kennedy succumbed. We were all sent home early. When my dad got home from the factory, my mother went outside to greet him. It was raining. We ate fish silently that night.

Two days later, as I was sitting on the living room floor watching the live broadcast of the Dallas police transferring the alleged assassin, Lee Oswald, I saw Jack Ruby put a gun in Oswald’s abdomen and fire a shot. My mother was vacuuming.

I screamed at her, “Turn the vacuum off! They’ve shot Oswald!”

She couldn’t hear me so she kept vacuuming. I reached over and pulled the vacuum’s plug out of the wall.

“They shot Oswald! I just saw it.”

Not all nine-year-olds get to watch a real person being killed, live on TV. Over the weekend I decided I wanted to write about that. I asked my dad if I could start a newspaper.

“How exactly would you do that?” he asked me. We were a GM factory family. We didn’t start newspapers.

“I was thinking I could write it up on a piece of paper. You said you have a new machine where you work that will print pages of paper. So if I wrote something on a couple pieces of paper, could you make thirty pages of that?”

He thought about that for a minute.

“Well, it’s called a mimeograph. And it’s in the foreman’s office. I’d have to type it up for you and get permission. Let me see.”

The following Monday Dad came home and said he could make twenty-five copies of my two-page paper. Excited by the prospect, I sat down with my pencil and wrote up Page One: my thoughts on why we no longer had a seventh-and-eighth-grade football team, what our upcoming basketball season would look like, and my favorite baseball stats from the backs of my Topps bubblegum baseball cards.

Page Two was about how I felt about Kennedy’s death and what it was like to watch Oswald get shot.

The next day my dad made the twenty-five copies of the
St. John Eagle
at AC Spark Plug and brought them home from work. He had personally typed, printed, and stapled each copy together himself. It was like an early Christmas present, and I could see it made him happy to see me so happy to have in my hands my very first newspaper.

The following morning I took the
St. John Eagle
into my fourth-grade classroom and handed them out to the classmates I thought would read it. Mrs. LaCombe saw this and asked for a copy. A big smile came across her face.

“Why, look at you!” she said. “This looks quite good.”

Would that the Mother Superior felt the same way. For when Mrs. LaCombe showed her my paper, she requested my presence in her office.

“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked bluntly.

“It’s our new student paper—the
St. John Eagle!
” I said proudly, not expecting any blowback.

“We don’t have a student newspaper, Michael,” she said. “And we don’t need one. This is not authorized and we cannot approve it. So you will have to collect the copies you’ve passed out and hand them over to me.”

I was crushed. It made no sense to me. What did I do wrong? But I dared not object, so I offered up a “Yes, Mother,” and went back to my classroom to gather the contraband.

The following year, still wanting to publish a newspaper, I started a new one called the
Hill St. News,
this one intended not for school but for our neighborhood. Again, my dad made the copies for me at work on GM’s dime, and this periodical lasted a whole three issues before a neighborhood parent called my mom, furious that I had listed her house for sale in my Want Ads section.

“But they have a F
OR
S
ALE
sign in their yard,” I pleaded. “I was just trying to help.”

Of course I had no idea what houses cost, so I went ahead and listed theirs for $1,200—which, to a ten-year-old, is a
helluva lot of money!
No matter; the
Hill St. News
was shut down.

Two more times I would attempt to start a school paper at St. John’s – in sixth grade and eighth grade. And each time the plug was pulled. I got the message and retired from the newspaper business for the next nine years.

When you live in a company town like Flint, nearly all the media is bought and paid for and controlled by that company or its lackeys (aka the local elected officials). In the case of our one and only daily paper, the
Flint Journal,
it provided for a particularly pathetic situation. The
Journal
was so in love with General Motors, it never would turn a critical eye on its operations. It was a cheerleading newspaper:
the company could do no wrong!

The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the “Flint Urinal.” Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twentieth century—“the wrong side” meaning: whatever side the union workers were on, the Urinal took the opposite position. In the early years it attacked the socialist mayor whom the people of Flint had elected. It attacked the formation of the UAW and the Great Sitdown Strike of 1936–37 that forced General Motors into its first contract with the union. It endorsed the Republican candidate for president while the workers voted for the Democrat. It supported the Vietnam War. And it would become an unapologetic booster of boondoggle downtown developments that would leave the city devastated.

By 1976, my friends and I had complained enough to each other about the state of the newspaper in Flint that we decided to start one ourselves. At first, we called it
Free to Be,
but that sounded too hippie, so we changed it to the
Flint Voice
in honor of the great alternative weekly we received in the mail each week from New York, the
Village Voice.
There were seven of us, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, who founded the
Voice,
but only three of us had any journalism experience: Doug Cunningham, who had an underground paper in high school, the
Mt. Morris Voice;
Alan Hirvela, who helped run an alternative paper on the campus of Central Michigan University; and me, with my history of four failed grade-school newspapers. Only Al had a college education.

Our first issues came flying out of the gate pointed directly at the established order in Flint. There were stories of Flint’s hangin’ judge, who gave blacks longer sentences than whites, county commissioners fleecing the treasury, Buick rigging the test cars they sent to the EPA in order to show better gas mileage, and some other issues that rang familiar to me:
another
school board in Flint holding secret meetings, students in Flint being paddled 8,264 times in one school year, and a poll showing the majority of Catholics no longer believing in hell. There were also stories that seemed ahead of their time: an op-ed from a local Palestinian entitled “Where Is
My
Promised Land,” a story on how processed sugar was poison (with an accompanying recipe for a “natural food” snack), and a warning that GM, then employing eighty thousand people in Flint, had a master plan to leave the city bone dry. That last story established me firmly as the local crazy guy.

The paper quickly became a must-read for those who paid attention to the politics of Flint. The
Flint Voice
was a true muckraking paper that didn’t care who it pissed off. We did not do cover stories on the “Ten Best Ice Cream Places in Town” or “Twenty Day Trips You’ll Want to Take.” Our journalism was hard-hitting and relentless. We did sting operations on establishments that would not hire black employees. We chronicled how General Motors was taking tax abatement money and using it to build factories in Mexico. One night, we caught them literally dismantling an entire GM assembly line, loading it on a train, and sending it off to be shipped to a place called China. Many could not believe a story like that—“What on earth would China do with an automobile assembly line?! Michael Moore is nuts!” I suffered much derision for exposing such goings-on.

We also offered a place where brilliant Michigan writers could find an outlet. Many, such as Ben Hamper, Alex Kotlowitz, James Hynes, and the cartoonist Lloyd Dangle would go on to become best-selling authors and syndicated journalists. We never missed an opportunity to go after the
Flint Journal
and, in 1985, I wrote an investigative piece on this miserable daily paper for the
Columbia Journalism Review.

Other than the plan by General Motors to destroy Flint (a story that only we would cover in the late ’70s and early ’80s), nothing consumed our attention more than the mayor of Flint, James P. Rutherford. He was also the ex–police chief of Flint. He left behind a number of disgruntled officers who were more than happy to slip us documents and evidence of his controversial activities. One of our first front-page stories on him was entitled, “Did Mayor Rutherford Receive $30,000 ‘Gift’ from Convicted Gambler?” We scooped the
Journal
time after time (not that that was hard), but one day they got tired of us beating them to the story, so one of their columnists simply lifted our investigative piece and ran it as if they had done the legwork themselves. When things like this happened, we had ways of dealing with it. As we were not educated and did not run in the circles of polite society, we didn’t tolerate the actions of thieves very well, especially if the thief was the
Flint Journal.
The day after their plagiarism, we paid a visit to their newsroom. We brought with us a pie to give to the editor. No, we were not pie throwers, we were more like re-gifters. The pie tin was filled entirely with dog shit. On top of the pile of steaming poo was a big copyright insignia made from Reddi-wip.

The editor wasn’t in, so we hung around for a while waiting for him to come back. Someone must have tipped him off ’cause he never showed up, so we eventually got bored waiting and just placed it on his desk and left. The next day they ran a correction/acknowledgment that the story that they had published was originally ours.

We did not let up on the mayor and his dealings with developers, General Motors, the Chamber of Commerce, or the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. In September 1979 we ran a front-page story outlining how public employees had contributed to his reelection campaign and done door-to-door canvassing for him on city time.

The mayor was furious and threatened to sue us for libel. He didn’t. We kept at it. He was not happy.

The city ombudsman took our findings and did his own investigation of the mayor. The city charter required him to present his findings to the mayor four days before he could release it to the public. Our sources got a copy of the confidential report—which found 100 percent of our accusations against the mayor to be correct—and we published a story in the
Flint Voice
saying the ombudsman had backed up our story.

The mayor accused the ombudsman of violating the city charter and asked the police department to investigate how we at the
Voice
got ahold of the report. We refused to cooperate and continued publishing stories about them as we entered the new year of 1980.

In May 1978, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that it was OK for police to raid a newsroom and take materials from that newsroom, with certain restrictions.
Zurcher v. Stanford Daily
involved a student newspaper, the
Stanford Daily,
and the photographs it had taken at a student demonstration where nine police officers were injured while the students occupied the campus hospital. The police wanted to see all the photos the
Daily
had taken in order to help them identify the students involved in the fracas. The students sued, claiming their constitutional rights were violated. The Supreme Court disagreed and said the police had the right to conduct such a search, just as long as they weren’t going on a fishing expedition.

The court’s ruling was hailed by both law enforcement and haters of the media everywhere. Journalists were appalled by it and warned that there would be abuses. They pointed out that sources would be afraid to trust newspapers if they knew that the cops could just waltz in and scoop up file cabinets full of confidential information.

Two years passed and there had been no further police raids of newsrooms anywhere across America.

Until the morning of May 15, 1980.

At 9:05 a.m., the Flint police, having obtained a search warrant from Judge Michael Dionise, raided the newspaper offices where the
Flint Voice
was printed and seized all materials relating to the November 1979 issue that contained the critical report of the mayor’s alleged lawbreaking—including the very printing plates used on the presses to print the
Voice.

The
Flint Voice
was printed at the
Lapeer County Press
(a weekly paper in the county that was settled, in part, by my family in the 1830s). This was not the first visit by the Flint police to our printer. They had called back in November asking to be given anything the
County Press
had on us. The publisher, citing the First Amendment, refused. Six months later, the police showed up in person. The publisher asked if they had a search warrant. No, said the cops. Then you can’t come in, said the publisher.