In the Evil Day

by Richard Adams Carey

  Shalhoup’s stray-cat new hire soon learned how to find a lot of photos, and develop them. John began working the police, fire, and courtroom beats and, at last, writing a humor column that was a little edgy for a conservative paper like the Telegraph. In 1971 the New Hampshire Sunday News, which was associated with Manchester’s Union Leader daily but had its own editorial staff, called to offer John a position.

  “That was a kick-ass job,” he said. “I did news, photography, feature-writing, covering the whole state, but most of all I got to cover the outdoors. And no one else was doing outdoors writing at the time—there was a tremendous hunger for it in the marketplace. It’s TV without the script and the set. Nature provides the storyline.”

  John contrived to do what he wanted, mostly, by being sure to arrive at each Wednesday editorial meeting with a list of his own ideas for articles. It was a way to get paid for hiking the Appalachian Trail, or going out on logging jobs, or tagging along on border surveys. By then he and Belinda were living in Nashua, but even around there he found places where he could fish and hunt for birds on his own time. “I was young and stupid. It was all an adventure, all a party. People told us that these were the happiest years of our lives, and sad to say, it’s true. You’re not staring death in the face, you’re not visiting friends with ravaging ailments. It’s all an open road.”

  Meanwhile Fred Harrigan’s News and Sentinel had attained the dubious distinction of being the only newspaper in New Hampshire still printed in-house on an ancient web press—specifically, a 1929 Duplex Model A, already an outmoded machine when it arrived to replace the Whitlock flatbed press in the late 1960s. Nonetheless, it was a sensation in Colebrook.

  “The Duplex was a gigantic, black, cast-iron monstrosity, with big solid-brass oil cups and a huge fly-wheel driven by an equally huge electric motor ensconced in a pit below,” John wrote in a local history of the paper. “The whole affair was engaged by a hand-clutch, which sort of reminded me of the hand-clutch on Lyman Forbes’s huge old John Deere tractor. When the big clutch was eased forward, the Duplex clanged and clattered into life, its massive motor drawing so much current that the lights in the whole building dimmed. People came from all over to watch that press, standing agog as gears and pistons and carriages flew back and forth and paper streamed off the three-quarter-ton roll and through the maze of machinery to appear as the finished product. Entire generations of schoolchildren were spellbound.”

  By 1976, however, the Sentinel’s Duplex was one of only two such machines still in operating condition, and Fred had decided—reluctantly—that it was time to retire both that and his old Linotype machines and to start sending negatives of his pasted-up pages to a modern offset printer, where those page photos could be burned onto an aluminum drum and then run more cheaply off that drum. He asked his stray-cat older son—who somehow, in one of life’s little accidents, had become a newspaperman—to come home to help with that conversion. And John did so, reluctantly quitting that kick-ass job at the Sunday News.

  “It bears noting here that I had no technological experience concerning newspapers,” John would write later. “So it was that when I walked into the Sentinel in 1976, having had no experience at my parents’ paper and having known only the reporting end of things, I was totally unprepared to take over the production of a weekly newspaper. As I stood there in the front office contemplating the near-museum pieces that were rattling and cranking and grinding on a busy Monday morning, and the sheer pandemonium of it all, I was tempted to get back into the truck and head for Manchester.”

  Of course “near-museum” applied literally to the Duplex. “Chief pressman Calvin Crawford and I drew the sad duty of making the Duplex’s final press run,” John wrote. “Across the web, where the slitted sheets of printed paper came down across the former to be folded and cut, we scrawled ‘30,’ the age-old printing lingo for ‘The end.’ For several years my Dad and I tried to get someone, anyone, even the Smithsonian, to take the old press. . . . In the end, unwanted and too expensive to move, it went to the scrap heap.”

  John kept thinking about heading back to Manchester, but finally it was the poignant wonder of the old machines he was helping to discard, and also this crash course in the production side of the news, that kept him at the Sentinel. Otherwise, he wrote, without the Linotype machines and other odd gizmos there, and particularly that Duplex, he would never have known the direct gratification of “the sweet smell of newsprint, ink, and success at seeing that week’s issue coming out of the business end of the press and into the hands of waiting readers.”

  The conversion took two years, but one aspect of it didn’t go as far as John wanted. “As far as we are concerned,” Fred had written in his first editorial as publisher in 1960, “local misfortunes, such as court convictions and family scandals, will simply not be in our columns, unless criminal offenses of real seriousness are involved. Instead, we will try to represent the North Country as the rugged, happy-go-lucky area it is, and anything which is good for the region is good for us and vice versa.”

  John had no more interest in gossip than his father had, but he believed the paper needed a stiffer dose of hard news in its happy-go-lucky mix if it was to speak to the real nature of North Country life—and if it was to pay its way.

  The Harrigans hired Bud Hulse to carry the page negatives of each issue to an offset printer in Vermont, wait while it was being printed, and then drop off bundles at distribution points on the way back to Colebrook. Hulse was a retired CIA officer who had come to Colebrook to be the vicar of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church and who had also succeeded Doc Gifford as the town’s unofficial historian.

  Meanwhile John and his father were at loggerheads about changing the Sentinel’s content. John got to thinking about working in the Pacific Northwest, in the big woods out there, and set about coaxing job offers from newspapers in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. At the same time Fred heard that the next-nearest weekly and the Sentinel’s chief competitor, the Coös County Democrat in Lancaster, was up for sale. He decided to buy that and install John as its editor.

  But John refused. “If I was going to run the newspaper, I wanted to be able to run it my way,” he said. “In other words, I’d have to own it. Dad didn’t like that idea at all. It made for quite a tussle between us.”

  Fellow journalist Charlie Jordan would serve for three years as editor of the News and Sentinel, succeeding Dennis Joos, but he was a freelance magazine writer in those days. One afternoon in January 1978, Charlie came into the Sentinel Building to pick up a copy of a photograph John had made for him. John was taking a telephone call in the building’s corner office. After a moment John came out of that office, Charlie remembers, with his face lit up like a birthday candle. “Charlie,” he said, “I just bought myself a newspaper.”

  3

  DEATH OR HIGH WATER

  JANA RILEY, in a black skirt and short-sleeved sweater, arrived at the News and Sentinel on August 19 at 7:30 a.m.

  She parked in the municipal lot behind the building, then walked by the back entrances of Ducret’s Sporting Goods and an apartment house, both of which lined the eastern side of the lot. To her right, a granite Civil War soldier—standing high atop a pedestal rising from the grass of Monument Park, his musket at rest—stared down the river where the log drives used to go. On the other side of the park, and the far side of Bridge Street, the belfried white clapboard building that housed both town hall and the police department was streaked in shadow.

  Jana went in through the back of the Sentinel Building, fiddling skillfully enough with the balky handle on its wooden screen door that it yielded quickly. A breeze whispered through the tops of the spruce trees that lined the back of the park, and in the early chill, the olive skin of her forearms was stippled in goose bumps.

  She went without stopping through the newsroom, past the empty desks of coeditor Susan Zizza, typesetter Vivian Towle, reporter Claire Lynch, and finally Dennis Joos, the other editor. Opposite
these, on her left, loomed the pasteup board, which walled the newsroom off from the pressroom, where lurked the machinery used in the Sentinel’s side business—printing small runs of business cards, envelopes, certificates, and the like. The pasteup board was already hung in Scrabble-like columns with yesterday’s work, early proofs of the advertisements and back-page contents of the August 20 issue.

  A short corridor running past the door to Vickie Bunnell’s office also accommodated the desk of Chandra Coviello, the young woman who did advertising design. Jana’s desk was up front, behind the vinyl-topped counter that met whoever came in through the front door and turned right. A left turn would take the caller into the office of Susie Sambito, Vickie Bunnell’s secretary.

  Jana saw that the door to John Harrigan’s corner office was open, and she guessed that the owner had already come and gone. Had she been there an hour earlier, she would have seen John park on Bridge Street in the big 1988 Lincoln Town Car that once belonged to his father. He spent twenty minutes catching up on his messages, until Bunny drove up Bridge and flashed his lights outside. John hopped into Bunny’s car, and they rode around the corner to their Kiwanis meeting at the Wilderness Restaurant. The Lincoln was still parked in front.

  Jana’s job was to sell advertising space—and while she was at it, to answer the phone, attend to the front door, and help Chandra as needed with ad design. “Wired” is how she describes herself, and production days like Monday and Tuesday accommodated themselves well to her levels of nervous energy. On Tuesdays she got a jump on selling next week’s space and joined the rest of the staff in proofreading ads and news copy for the next day’s issue.

  Jana flicked on the lights, unlocked the front door, powered up her first-generation Macintosh computer, and opened the locked file cabinet next to her desk. She took out a zippered pouch of cash, sifted the bills into the cash register on the front counter, and pushed its drawer shut. She went back to the newsroom to start the coffeemaker, which rested on a counter behind the pasteup board, and returned to the front office to switch on the copier.

  The east side of the building—bookkeeper Gil Short’s office space and photographer Leith Jones’s darkroom area—was entirely still. Jana went there to check the police scanner, which rested on a windowsill facing the abandoned gas station on the corner of Bridge and Main. She wanted to make sure that the device was on, as it usually was.

  The scanner was quiet that morning—no fires anywhere, no police activity—and Jana settled in to her email. The gurgle of the coffeemaker, the faint hum of the copier and the fluorescent lights, and the whisper of an occasional car down Bridge barely displaced the silence.

  People in the Bunnell family, for generations, had tried to leave Colebrook—and had always come back. Among them was Sliver Bunnell, Vickie’s grandfather, whose first career as an assistant to an ill-tempered cook in a logging camp came to an end when he broke a five-pound sack of sugar over the cook’s head. Sliver went west to Saskatchewan, where he and some friends meant to follow the wheat harvest. “Then he looked at how big one of those wheat fields was, and he poked his nose into a barbershop instead,” Bunny said. “I suppose that’s where he learned how to do it.”

  Sliver ran his barbershop in Colebrook for sixty-one years, until Beatlemania and the winnowing of barbershops in the ’70s. Back in 1913, one of Sliver’s clients was Harry K. Thaw, the sadistic playboy husband of the showgirl Evelyn Nesbit and the murderer of Nesbit’s former lover, the architect Stanford White—an incident trumpeted as the twentieth’s first crime of the century. Thaw subsequently escaped from an upstate New York hospital for the criminally insane and was captured by Colebrook police. Then Thaw was put up comfortably at the Monadnock House hotel for several weeks while New York and New Hampshire wrangled about his extradition. He had become to the national media something of a romantic outlaw hero, and his strolls about town, accompanied by a deputy, soaked up column space in what was then the Colebrook Sentinel, while Sliver kept him clean-shaven and trimmed. Eventually Thaw was returned to New York, deemed sane, and set free—until he horsewhipped a teenage boy in 1924 and was recommitted.

  But cutting hair was just Sliver’s day job. Otherwise he was famous throughout the North Country as an outdoorsman, guide, and sled dog racer. He hunted deer, grouse, and rabbits; escorted convoys of flatlanders into the woods; won races throughout the Northeast with a fleet team of, yes, Irish setters; and contrived to go fly fishing every day of his life until he died in 1972. He and his wife, Henrietta—a waitress and the piano player for silent movies at the local cinema—lived in an apartment on Main Street but spent much of their time at the cabin on Fish Pond, where Sliver offered boats to rent.

  Bunny served in the Pacific during World War II, aboard a U.S. Navy cargo ship. In 1946 he came home to resume his courtship of Irene Roberts and begin on-the-job training with Sliver, a proud man who asked his son how long his government-funded apprentice program extended. “Six months?” Sliver cried. “You’ll be lucky if you know how to comb hair in six months.”

  Bunny well remembers the first customer he shaved, a man with craggy cheeks, a prominent Adam’s apple, and a rough beard. “Dad said he had to go out, and he didn’t come back,” Bunny says. “I kept lathering and lathering, and finally I had no choice but to get started. I nearly got into the chair with the poor devil before I was done. But he was easier to shave than some of those loggers who came out of the woods in spring with their beards full of tobacco juice. Sometimes I nearly had to throw up.”

  Bunny and Irene married in 1948. By then Irene’s mother, Marge, and her second husband were running a drive-in restaurant and trailer park in Gary, Indiana, and Bunny and Irene went out there several times during slow winters at the barbershop in the ’50s. They might have stayed—they hoped to earn salaries in Marge’s husband’s businesses while Marge took care of Vickie and Earl, but Marge never followed through on promises to do that. “She was too busy learning how to bowl and enjoying herself,” Irene said. Eventually the family settled year-round and permanently into this native soil.

  Which is where Sliver and Bunny took both kids hunting and fishing. Vickie preferred fishing, Earl, Jr., the former, though Earl—three years younger and as good an all-around athlete as Sliver—could cast a fly so perfectly that Vickie despaired of ever living long enough to equal it. Earl never even thought about leaving the North Country, but Bunny and Irene knew that Vickie would go. They remember the winter of 1958, when they were out in Gary and Marge took the family to a steak house in Chicago. Vickie loved the skyscrapers and city streets, the restaurant, and her thick cut of steak. “Grammy,” the six-year-old girl beamed to Marge, “I think I was born for this.”

  Vickie built a good résumé for herself at Canaan Memorial High School. She performed in school plays, sang in the chorus, played clarinet in the band, served as scorekeeper at the basketball games, made the National Honor Society, was elected president of her class. After the school day, she did clerical work in Fred Harrigan’s law office at the News and Sentinel.

  Earl was content to go to work after starring in three sports at Canaan High—good enough in basketball to earn the nickname “Pearly,” after NBA star Earl “The Pearl” Washington—but Vickie had to go to college. She applied to Plymouth State, just an hour of so south of Franconia Notch down I-93, in a town where she had some relatives and could earn money babysitting. Meanwhile Sliver had passed the land he owned around Fish Pond—thirty-five acres—down to Bunny, who sold all but a three-and-a-half-acre lot around the cabin to pay Vickie’s tuition.

  Vickie returned after her freshman year in 1970 to intern at the News and Sentinel, but the next summer she went to live with Marge in Indiana and work as a bartender in the restaurant. Bunny drove to Gary to pick her up at the end of the season and was told to look for her out at the local airport. He got there in time to see a small plane floating down to a runway. “That’s Vickie right there,” someone said. Bunny learned that Marge had paid
for flying lessons for Vickie, and by then she was only a few hours short of soloing.

  She majored in history at Plymouth State and spent another summer as a groundskeeper and gravedigger at the Colebrook Village Cemetery. She came out of school determined not to go into nursing or teaching—in other words, not to follow the professions that might keep an educated woman in the North Country. “On the day she graduated,” Bunny said, “she saw an ad on a bulletin board for a paralegal program at a school in Pennsylvania—one that guaranteed a job in Pennsylvania when you were through. Well, we could have cried the day we left her there that summer of ’74. It looked like we were leaving her someplace in Africa.”

  That guarantee was a hollow one, but Vickie made do. She got a job as a secretary at a Boston law firm and then worked her way up to paralegal status. Finally she went to law school—not in Boston, but out West, at the University of Puget Sound in Seattle. Bunny and Irene flew out to see her graduate in 1978, and the grand meal Vickie once had with Grammy in Chicago was honored several times over in the Northwest. “She took us out to Chinese restaurants where we were the only non-Chinese,” Bunny recalled. “We had breakfast at Snoquomish Falls, where you need reservations six weeks in advance. Fancy restaurants in Vancouver—we lived it up.”

  Vickie liked the Northwest just fine, with its hiking trails and bike paths, not to mention its fine restaurants, and once she had passed the Washington bar, she got a job in the legal department of a Seattle bank. Then she found work that better suited her interests in Washington’s public defender’s office. When asked about setting up a practice in Colebrook, she cited the very cases that in their small-town banality had appealed to Fred Harrigan: “Cow cases, timber overcuts, and bar fights—no, I don’t want to spend my life doing that stuff.”