An old newspaper man at church yesterday joshed that he was glad to see so much of me in the papers because I was helping them stay in business.
Perhaps in response to the Sat. Budgeteer I got a little feedback:
While taking my grandson to the Great Lakes Aquarium on Saturday a young father, graduate of East High, handed me a twenty dollar bill for Let Duluth Vote.
A strong DFLer stopped me at Mt. Royal Supervalue to tell me that she had differed from me many times over the years (because I was a Republican) but that she was wholeheartedly for me now. Another fellow smiled broadly when he saw me and told me that my tiff with Ralph Doty was quite a donnybrook. He gave me a thumbs up.
A former teacher colleague left a message saying he was behind me 100%.
I got a call from another retired newspaper person who wanted to help. When we met at Perkins Sunday evening the Chairman of the infamous Citizens Committee stopped by my table to tell me among other things –
A. He supported me
B. During the entire Citizens Committee process the Committee wanted a referendum but was ignored by the Administration.
C. The Committee of 35 was rarely more than 16 sitting people.
D. That he was very discouraged by the limited community involvement or interest in the Committee’s activities especially its culminating community gathering at the DECC. I asked him how many people he thought attended the final presentation – 300 or 400? He said maybe 80. His wife interjected, “more like thirty.”
The newspaper man was appalled to hear me speculate that Ralph Doty had probably been shown my column before submitting his own. Ralph wrote that I was wrong when I claimed that instead of JCI collecting 2% of the Red Plan’s cost it would be closer to 18%. I asked the Budgeteer to send Ralph this bit of evidence.
I told the Newpaperman I’d grown used to leaks. An eariler column I’d written for the Budgeteer had been given to the District and Johnson Controls to rebut before it was printed. And when LDV paid for a full page ad in the Duluth Trib a year ago it was leaked to the School Administration. We could tell because we pulled one paragraph out of our ad before it was put in the paper. Yet a couple days later the nonexistant paragraph was rebutted in the District’s two-page reply also published in the Trib.
On that occassion I emailed publisher McLister about a leak and he replied vehemently that he would fire anyone in his paper who would have done such a thing. Well, he sure has fired a lot of people since then but I’ll bet the leaker is still collecting paychecks.
