These Times

Every edition of the Shelton-Mason County Journal dating to 1902 is preserved in hardcover volumes on shelves in the newspaper's back shop on Cota Street. Each thick and weighty collection, most pressed between sturdy, forest-green covers, contains six months of papers.

A volume from 1988 was lying the other day on the desk of Dave Pierik, the newpaper's office administrator. I flipped it open and landed on a page 4, where then-publisher and owner Henry Gay's column ran every week. His column that week featured a series of items laid out in a classified ad format, under headers including "FOR SALE," "REAL ESTATE" and "GARAGE & BASEMENT SALES"

FOR SALE: Appointment book – Special edition produced for Iran-Contra meetings in White House. Never used. Perfect gift for a vice president or pillar saint. Write: George Bush, Kennebunkport, Maine. If no response, write: George Bush, Houston, Texas. If no response, write: George Bush, Washington, D.C.

REAL ESTATE: Twelve-sided house in Bel-Air, California, next to Reagan's retirement home. Zoned for palm-readers, mediums, veterinarians, and sale of hay, oats, brush hooks, crystals and zodiac trinkets. New Age Realty, Los Angeles, CA.

GARAGE & BASEMENT SALES: Basement sale - bargains galore - paper shredders, neat ideas, cooked books, perjury manuals, Swiss bank books, national hero molds, secret-pocket pantyhose. Proceeds go to humanitarian weapons for Nicaragua Contras. Friday-Saturday, all day, at White House, Washington, D.C.

"Secret-pocket pantyhose?"

I had no idea Henry Gay could be that silly. Silliness is a treacherous attribute in grownups, and few can do it well, but Henry could. Much of the little I knew about Henry before flipping open those memories from 1988 came from the tumult caused by the Journal's then-policy to report the names of all sides in criminal court cases, including the names of accusers in rape cases. It's harder to imagine something further removed from silliness.

Henry's renegade position drew national attention, including from network television's Maria Shriver - she of the Hyannis Port Kennedy clan - who came to Shelton to report the story. While Shriver was here, the story goes, she used the Journal's bathroom, which was not the shrine to evacuation that it is today. That bathroom remains, sometimes referred by us as the "Maria Shriver Memorial Bathroom."

Donna Kinnaird started at the Journal as a bookkeeper in 1988, and her recollections capture the roil that Henry's court policy created. Donna retired a few years ago.

"It didn't take me long to find out about the controversy," Donna wrote in an email. "My friends began to question how I could work for a newspaper that would print the names of rape victims. I had always been a private person and I would have hated to have my name in the newspaper for anything - much less a rape victim. Henry felt the victim should not be shamed, she was a victim who did not 'ask for' what happened. The victim should not have to live a life of secrecy and shame.

"I could understand his reasoning," Donna wrote. "However, I couldn't change my personal opinion. After all, society wasn't going to change its opinion."

Henry's want-ad column made me want to learn more about this uncommon common man. I contacted three people who worked with him, read many of his columns and got my hands on a long tract written by his son Charlie that was distributed at Henry's memorial after he died in January 1999.

After spending a week with Henry, one realizes no amount of newspaper space could capture the width, depth and height (he was 6-foot-5) of this man's life, which started in Wheatland, Wyoming. His steps included a youth spent in Monterey, California, WWII duty on a mine sweeper in the Pacific, stops running newspapers in Buckley and Silverdale, and finally Shelton, starting in 1966.

"Henry was an iconic editor," Carolyn Maddux wrote me in an email. Carolyn started full time at the Journal in 1983, covered several beats, including courts and cops, and was the managing editor from 1998 through 2002. She also was Henry's next-door neighbor when her family moved to Shelton in 1970. Carolyn spent many long production days working with Henry Gay, which seems, to this newspaperman, a most precious gift bestowed.

"Tuesday nights were deadline nights, and we often worked late," Carolyn wrote me. "He'd be working late, too, finishing his column; sometimes we'd hear him chuckling as he clacked away on his big old manual typewriter. And although he was usually pretty quiet in group situations, sometimes when the last stories were tucked away, there'd be great midnight conversations about politics and the state of the world."

Here are some excerpts from some of Henry's columns (he wrote more than 1,600 of them):

"America is a land of rugged individualism where the highest accolade you can bestow on a man is, 'He's a good organization man,' and where the mark of a perfect student is conformity. America is a country of united states, which the multinational corporations are attempting to divide - among themselves." – July 1, 1976

And: A short poem titled "Twinkle, Twinkle, Movie Star":

"Twinkle, twinkle, movie star.

How we wonder what you are.

Are you now our president

Or an ad for Pepsodent?

Twinkle, twinkle, movie star.

How we wonder what you are." - Sept. 30, 1982

And this:

"Richard M. Nixon is a liar, a chiseler, a cheat and a fraud. He should not occupy the highest office in the land one minute longer than it takes to get rid of him. It is time for the craven cowards of the Congress to gird their quivering, incumbent loins and throw out the bum." -Aug. 8, 1974.

"Henry Gay was loved by many he knew, hated by many he did not know," office administrator Pierik wrote me. "There were also those who loved to hate him and others who hated to love him. ... I liked and respected Henry, though I did not always agree with him. A brilliant, well-read maverick, he had strong opinions and a cutting sense of humor. When he looked at me, I could feel that powerful presence, but even if we were discussing something serious, there was a kindness there, a smile and usually a joke. He had genuine, deep empathy for others."

Henry Gay died Jan. 3, 1999.

"Whatever people's opinions may be about Henry and his policies, when I was at his funeral it was wall-to-wall people who loved and respected him," Dave wrote. "If I had to guess, there were well over 200 people in attendance. Among those paying their respects were people from the news industry, reporters, publishers and others from all of the country. They flew in, in many cases from other states, and converged on Shelton."

We needn't wonder what Henry Gay would think of the privateers who now have their mitts on the tiller of our ship of state. But let's take a shot at what he might write ...

"The news from the other Washington grows dimmer by the day. King Corpulent, fresh from his imperial mug's daily dusting of Tang, continues to press his idea of turning Gaza into the Rivera of the Middle East, complete with golf course traps filled with the ground-up bones of dead Palestinians, who have kindly produced a bumper crop this year. His Corpulent's bootlickers and lickspittles, meanwhile, are consumed by the demands of governance, ever busy shining his highness's pyrite into a substance sure to gull many of his minions into believing that his riches will soon be theirs too."

Author Bio

Kirk Ericson, Columnist / Proofreader

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
email: kirk@masoncounty.com