The proprietor of the Web-based City Lights would like to announce that the blog, which has been shining damn near continuously for just under five years, is going dark today, for at least a year. I’m doing it as an energy-saving initiative, trying to do my part to stave off climate change.

Well, OK, that’s not the reason. The real reason is a bit more complicated, but it boils down to this: About two weeks ago I just flat-out got tired of blogging, of always having an opinion, a point of view, an observation or something funny—something that I hoped was funny—to say. At first, I thought maybe I’d give up the dead-tree City Lights, too, and see what it would be like to be purely a reporter again. After considering all my options and consulting with various colleagues, family members and my trusted assistant blogger, Josie, I decided to give only the blogging a break, and to see if that makes the business of writing the dead-tree column any easier or more enjoyable. I guess I’ll find out.

Once I decided to quit, I thought June 1 would be a good date, being the start of the month and in some sense the start of a new season. I didn’t think then how important the date would be here at the Kemmick household. My youngest daughter turned 18 yesterday and graduates from Billings Senior High today. Talk about the start of a new season. Her future is lying at her feet like the Yellow Brick Road, and for me, with the prospect of empty nesthood right around the corner, the future seems like something I ought to be thinking about again.

You don’t do much thinking about the future when you’re blogging. This is a relentlessly topical medium, driven mostly by the news, and a blogger by necessity writes quickly, in one draft. That can be a hell of a lot of fun, and a nice relief from the more grinding chores associated with being a reporter, but it gets old, too. And it can be a large distraction, especially on days when I’m working on a complicated story and am constantly interrupting myself to read new comments as they fall into the queue, and then responding to comments or following links provided by the latest person to join the discussion.

I have to admit that another reason June 1 was an attractive end date was that it would mean quitting before getting into another presidential campaign. I have never been all that excited about politics, but politics is the lifeblood of the blogosphere and I found myself being drawn into the vortex much more often than was good for my mental health. Any campaign gets ugly, but a presidential race inevitably raises passions to an almost unbearable pitch, and too often during the last go-round I felt less like a blogger than a hapless teacher standing in the middle of a cafeteria-wide food fight. It will give me great pleasure to observe this campaign from the sidelines, as it were.

I’m sure it will pain me some mornings to wake up rarin’ to throw out my 2 cents on some pressing issue of the day … only to remember that I am blogless, a blowhard without a bully pulpit, a pundit without a podium. I hope it will also be a relief, knowing that I can tuck some stray thought away before it issues forth and embarrasses me. Maybe I’ll even go back to keeping a private journal, the late-Jurassic forerunner of the blog. The great thing about a journal is that your audience is no longer, potentially, the 2 billion people online every day, but only yourself. That is a more demanding audience in some ways, one that urges you to write with honesty and openness and to say something worth saying.

I’m sure I had a few dozen other things I meant to say, but to ramble on would seem to suggest an unwillingness to let go, and letting go is what I sat down this morning to do. So I’ll just go….

Did I say something about old-home week?  Half an hour after writing about John Potter, I received news of the death of Bert Gaskill, possibly the longest-serving editor in the history of the Montana Standard in Butte.  Gaskill gave me my first job in 1979, hiring me to work as a summer intern in the Standard’s Anaconda Bureau.

I think I had taken the last quarter of that year off from school, having run out of money or interest or something, but I was hanging around the journalism school one day and heard that a lot of people were interviewing for “internships.” I have to admit that I didn’t know what an internship was, but after the J-school secretary cleared that up for me, she also managed to squeeze me in, at the end of the day, for an interview with Gaskill and his city editor, Bill Walter.

They were in the small office of one of the professors and when I walked in I could hardly see them through the clouds of smoke they had been generating throughout the day, with unfiltered cigarettes, as I recall.  About 10 minutes into the interview, figuring I might as well at least have the pleasure of some firsthand smoke, I bummed a cigarette from Gaskill.  Oddly enough, I think he hired me partly because of that simple request.  I’m sure he was glad to find a fellow smoker, for one thing, and I think he figured if I had the gall to bum a smoke from a potential employer that maybe I’d make a decent reporter.

At any rate, toward the end of the interview, Gaskill said, “Well, we’ve already picked somebody for the Butte internship, but what would you think of working for the summer in Anaconda?”  I vaguely remembered seeing “Anaconda” on road signs, and even more vaguely recalled seeing a giant smokestack somewhere in the distance off the highway, but I had never been there.  Still, I summoned up some confidence and said, “Anaconda?  Sure!  That would be great!”

So Anaconda it was, and after I left school for good the following year, Gaskill hired me to work full-time in Anaconda, where I remained for two years until transferring over to Butte to work as an assistant city editor.  I soon found out that working in the office with Gaskill was quite different from being marooned off in the Anaconda Bureau.  He could be a gruff, exacting boss, an old-school type who demanded little of his employees except that they do everything extremely fast and absolutely right.  But I also learned that he had a good sense of humor and a real love for the business, and on occasion you could even wring a compliment out of him.

After a year and a half on the desk, I was pining to be a reporter again, so I engineered a job switch with Gerry O’Brien, who was then the cops and courts reporter and who is now, after an extended stint here in Billings, occupying Gaskill’s old chair in Butte.  I hadn’t been the cops and courts reporter too long before I made a couple of stupid blunders, one of which was reporting that a certain defendant had pleaded not guilty, when he had actually pleaded guilty.  After the second mistake, Gaskill left me a simple note saying: “Kemmick, if you make another mistake in the next six months, you’re going back to the desk.”  That was some fairly direct direction, don’t you think?

The obit mentions how Gaskill would leave “Bert grams” on the bulletin board.  I remember one aimed squarely at me, though he didn’t mention my name.  I got lazy for a few days and didn’t shave, meaning I was working my beat with a rather disreputable-looking Fred Flintstone five o’clock shadow.  Then I saw the Bert gram: “All male employees are expected to maintain a professional, respectable appearance.  That means being clean-shaven every day, unless you wear a beard or a mustache.”

 It was good to see that Gaskill was his old no-nonsense self right to the end.  According to his obit, he “requested there be no funeral or memorial services and that his body be donated to the WAMI medical educational program.” 

                                                         —30—

It feels like old-home week around here.  First we had a former reporter in the news, and today we have a story about John Potter, for many years the Gazette’s illustrator and now a successful artist.  Somebody was asking me just yesterday about John and I said how much we all missed his presence in the newsroom.  He might be the happiest guy I’ve ever met, and he had a way of radiating his good cheer to anybody within 100 feet or so.

When Potter was in the room, in other words, it was difficult to be anything but in good cheer yourself.  Years ago (too long ago for archival retrieval), I wrote a column expressing my admiration for (and jealousy of) Potter, in the course of which I said:

And he was so good! If you needed a picture of a monkey in a straw hat smoking a corncob pipe, Potter was your man.

You’d put your request in and then, before you’d reached the other end of the room—voila!—there was your monkey in a straw hat smoking a corncob pipe.

The day after the column appeared, Potter drew me a picture of a monkey in a straw hat smoking a corncob pipe, and damn me if it wasn’t even better than I had imagined it would be, quite possibly the best picture of a monkey in a straw hat smoking a corncob pipe ever executed.  I lost the drawing, I hate to admit, but I cherish the memory.

As much fun as it was to work with Potter, I used to wonder when he’d take his considerable talents elsewhere.  I was amazed he stuck around here as long as he did, and it is no surprise that he is doing so well in his post-Gazette life.  Keep up the good work, John!

Against all odds, a couple of business partners have launched a dead-tree-only newspaper in Palo Alto, Calif.  I’ve grown to appreciate all the advantages of having an online component to the newspaper, but there is something powerfully appealing about this bold move.

At a time when most newspaper owners are looking to the Internet to revive their struggling industry, the new paper’s owners, James Pavelich and David Price, brusquely dismiss the need for an online presence.

“We’re a newspaper,” Mr. Pavelich said in an interview yesterday as he returned from shuttling his inaugural edition to newsboxes around town. “The Internet is a form of broadcast to me. We’re not broadcasters. We just don’t have the time to run two businesses.”

There are special circumstances in Palo Alto, as you’ll see in the story, and we don’t know whether this venture will be successful, but here’s hoping these guys all the best.

Even after they get out of the journalism business, reporters are Johnnies-on-the-spot, apparently.  The early-morning bicyclist who came upon a bound man on the banks of the Yellowstone River today was Dennis Gaub, who was the City Hall reporter when I started at the Gazette in 1989.  (He’s is also an occasional commenter here at City Lights.)

He’s been out of the biz for at least 10 years and whenever I see him he appears to be extremely happy.  And he’s fit, too, what with biking all over town at the crack of dawn.  Anyway, nice work, Dennis.

I have mixed feelings about the news that Anheuser-Busch Cos. may be purchased by Belgium-based brewer InBev SA.  The makers of Budweiser beer have spent hundreds of millions of dollars persuading the masses that their swill is worth drinking, so maybe they don’t deserve any pity.  But as this article points out, the company has been good to St. Louis, and the good people of that city look with dread at the prospect of having their hometown corporation sold to foreigners.

I should point out that the story mentions other companies whose corporate headquarters have moved out of town—including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was sold by Pulitzer Inc. to Iowa-based Lee Enterprises Inc., which also owns the Gazette.  But at least we’re not Belgian.

Meanwhile, a St. Louis beer distributor said, apparently in jest, that he was afraid Busch Stadium, home of the Cardinals, could end up being named InBev Stadium.  That doesn’t sound like a joke to me.  I predict it will happen within five years if the Belgium company swallows Bud.  

It has come to my attention that U. Utah Phillips, folksinger, hobo, humorist and anarchist, is dead. I happened to have written about Phillips about five weeks ago, when some friends of his in Missoula were planning a fund-raiser to help him with his medical expenses. I knew he had been ailing for a long time, so I suppose it’s good that he is at rest.

I first saw Phillips in about 1988, when he and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Spider John Koerner recorded a live album at the World Theater in St. Paul, now the Fitzgerald Theater, home base for “A Prairie Home Companion.” Spider John was and is a great musician and amazing presence live, and Ramblin’ Jack was a crackerjack guitarist and folk music legend for more than 40 years when I saw them at the World. Nobody would have said that Utah Phillips was in their league as a musician—he was forever deprecating his own abilities, saying he was just just a simple man who liked simple songs—but he was the natural emcee of the evening, what with his avuncular style, his endless stream of stories and his bottomless well of corny jokes.

I saw him one more time on the EMC campus, when he performed with Mark Ross, formerly of Missoula and Butte, six or seven years ago. It wasn’t too long after that, I think, when Utah had to stop touring because of his health. He was definitely one of a kind. Here was his best joke. I heard him say he had to leave Utah because of religious intolerance—the Unitarians had burned a question mark on his lawn.

I didn’t know until reading his obit that he had run for president. I might have voted for him had I known. Here’s what Utah had to say about that:

He ran for president in 1976 as an anarchist with a do-nothing platform, and told Bee reporter Blair Anthony Robertson, “I guarantee that if I took over the White House I would not do anything. I would scratch my butt and shoot pool.”

George Will is an awfully smart guy, so I was surprised to see him using one of the dumbest arguments of all to counter forecasts of climate change. He says that even if there is global warming, polar bears will adapt, as they always have. Then he quotes a “former British Cabinet member”:

“Over the past two-and-a-half-million years, a period during which the planet’s climate fluctuated substantially, remarkably few of the earth’s millions of plant and animal species became extinct. This applies not least, incidentally, to polar bears, which have been around for millennia, during which there is ample evidence that polar temperatures have varied considerably.”

Well, yeah, that’s how adaptation works—over very long periods of time. But if the habitat change occurs suddenly, over years and decades rather than centuries and millennia, there is no time for adaptation. Will might as well argue that because a certain driver survived 20 crashes into a brick wall while traveling 5 mph, he ought to be able to survive one such collision while traveling at 100 mph.

The best headline today over at the MNA:

Local Pilot Allegedy Found Naked Behind Shed

“Local,” in this case, being Harrisburg, Pa., but never mind, just enjoy.  In related news, over at the Devil’s Workshop, David Crisp links to a very mean Web site.

Political humorists, according to political humorist Bruce McCall, are suffering this election season, having so much material to work from that they are being sorely strained.  An example:

Observers point to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s recent record-setting spate. Over one dizzying weekend she generated so much chuckle-fare about guzzling beer, shooting off guns, pining away for her cabin in rural western Pennsylvania and loving hubby Bill to death that one humor maven went back to writing Dennis Kucinich jokes rather than even try catching up with this mother lode of political mirth. Another begged for reassignment to the Vice President Dick Cheney beat—where nothing funny has ever been known to happen.

I wish them all well.

Rob Elder, a Billings native and Chicago Tribune reporter who was featured in the Gazette a few years ago after publishing his first book, has written a compelling story for the Tribune about the relationship between Ted and Dave Kaczynski and between Dave and his brother’s last victim, Gary Wright.

There are a lot of insights into the troubled mind of the man who became known as the Unabomber, as well as moving passages about some of the aftermath of his violent spree, including this:

On the night before Sept. 11, 2001, Dave was across the street from the World Trade Center for a business meeting. The next day, after the attacks, Dave went home to an empty house. (Linda was visiting family in Chicago.) He could stand neither the TV images nor the silence. The personal echoes—terrorism to advance a warped ideology—were too much.

Then the phone rang. It was Gary. He knew Dave went into New York City for his job and wanted to make sure he was safe.

“My God, he was almost killed by my brother … and here he is calling me,” Dave recalled. “It meant the world to me.”

There are all kinds of good online extras, too. Warning: It is rather long. I printed it out and read it at home.

If you’ve been reading the Gazette’s stories on Barack Obama’s visit, and all the hundreds of comments attached to them (and I don’t think you need any links, do you?), you might be ready for a change of pace.  I would direct your attention to the main story about President Bush’s visit to Billings on Nov. 2, 2006, which I believe is the last time a high-profile politician touched down here.

And believe me, though it says “0 comments,” there are many, many dozens attached to the story.  And naturally they are opposite of what you’ve been reading today, but just as impassioned and vitriolic.  So it goes.  We did have one story about those protesting Bush’s visit, but that was only because there were protesters.  As for overall coverage, we gave Bush most of Page 1, all of two inside pages (as we did with Obama) and most of the jump page.  The only reason Obama got more of the jump page today was that he swung through Crow Agency after Billings, so we had two events to cover.

Every time a politician comes to town we are accused of bias.  That’s because we cover the event in all its gaudy glory and it comes out looking like we support the candidate in question.  We did it for Bush and Bush Senior and we did it for Bill Clinton and each time we were accused of cheerleading and pandering.  Oh, well.

The truth is, when I was sent out to contribute to a “color” sidebar to the main story yesterday, I looked forward to interviewing people opposed to Obama.  I just assumed there would be some Eric Coobs-like protesters out there reminding people that Obama’s middle name is Hussein and that he refuses to salute the flag.  You know, all those issues ignored by the mainstream media.

But no, I couldn’t find a soul out there who wasn’t thumping for Obama.  I’m sure opponents of Obama will say they were too busy working to attend this “town hall for working families,” and that may well be true.  The fact remains that if there is no one to speak for the opposition, we can’t insert criticism in hopes of achieving “balance.”

In fact, as I was stitching together the fragments our jointly written sidebar, as well as all the little vignettes and comments collected on either side of the two-page spread, I briefly considered editing out some of the references to Robert F. and John F. Kennedy.  It seemed to be overkill.  But then I thought, “Well, this is what people were telling us, with no prompting, and editing out some of those references would be trying to spin the story.”  So I left them all in.  Does that make the Gazette biased in Obama’s favor?  I don’t think so.  I think it makes us reporters describing exactly what we saw and heard. 

I’ve been back from Butte for a little less than 24 hours, but I didn’t feel up to writing anything yesterday about the annual meeting of the Butte Press Club.  I was very tired, having slept maybe five hours, after a very long night.  About 60 people came to the meeting—including 12 people from Billings, the largest contingent ever—and we did a respectable job of filling the banquet room at the Knights of Columbus Hall.  There was a good deal of drinking, it is true, partly because as reporters and editors we feel some obligation to live up to what is expected of us.   But Socrates rarely expounded before  taking on a bit of wine, and even Jesus and his disciples were not above taking a nip.

Not that there was any Socratic or Christ-like discourse taking place, but there were dozens of substantial conversations throughout the night, many of which I took part in, mainly as a listener.  For as often as reporters get out into the big world and meet lots of interesting people, we don’t take the trouble to gather often enough with one another.  The press club is always the best opportunity of the year to talk shop and trade war stories.

The novelist Tom McGuane spoke and his speech was everything a speech should be: eloquent, discursive, thoughtful, occasionally funny and relatively short.   You’ll have to take my word for it.   I was off the clock and not taking notes, and the rest of the evening was not conducive to committing anything to memory.   Other highlights of the evening:

At the New Irish Times, a bar located in a building that used to house the Butte Post (and apparently at one time also the Montana Standard), I was introduced to a gentleman who introduced himself to me as one of the Gazette’s frequent commenters, Tomas the The Philosopher King Thomas.  It was very strange to meet one of those near-mystical creatures in the flesh.  He was just as willing to share his opinions live as he is on the Net.

I bummed a cigarette from a priest, which was a first.

At the Pekin Noodle Parlor, the ever-gracious proprietor, Danny, at my urging, demonstrated his prowess with the giant wok, after which we had a quick beer in the attached bar, where Grubbs and I told stories about our last visit there.

At the Silver Dollar Bar, a  band from Missoula, with a female singer and band leader, tore it up pretty well for youngsters, after which we were treated to a set by the three-piece house band, including the bar owner, who’s a great bass player and singer, and a guitar player who looks like Neil Young and who seems to know just about every old rock lick worth knowing.

We ended the night, naturally, at the M&M, with platters of hot and greasy food all around.  I’m getting too old for this, but I couldn’t help myself.

And, as hoped for, it was actually warm in Butte, even at night, and Saturday as we drove home it was downright hot but quite beautiful and the Yellowstone River was starting to fill with fast, muddy water and the sky and the mountains and all just couldn’t have been lovelier.  I felt so lucky, as I have so many times in the past, to live here.

I’m sorry if I seem to have been competing with the dullest blog in the world lately, but I’ve been busy and preoccupied and now I’m getting ready to depart for the Butte Press Club (see this description of last year’s event) and probably won’t be near a computer again until tomorrow afternoon.  Our speaker this year will be the novelist Thomas McGuane.  And maybe, just maybe, it will even be warm in Butte.

But wait.  Before I go I have to relate one small yarn from our trip to Glendive, Ekalaka and Alzada over the past two days.  I was with photographer David Grubbs, who has had occasion to mention several times how much some of his colleagues hate it when a reporter introduces or refers to his colleague as “my photographer.”  I don’t do this (anymore), but it is something we talk about from time to time when we hear someone else say it.

Well, on our travels, the subject of a story we were working on was calling a few other people to see if they’d mind being interviewed as well.  She said to the first person she called, “Yeah, I’ve got a Gazette reporter and his photographer in my office and I was wondering…”  Grubbs and I looked at each other, smiled and shook our heads.  But she wasn’t through.  She called another person and this time she said: “I’ve got a gentleman and a photographer in my office and they’d like…”

This time it was all we could do not to burst out laughing, and I swore I could also see a trace of chagrin on Grubbs’ face.  The person who said this meant nothing by it, I’m sure, but it takes the cake.  Of course, she was right … but still.

I’m off to the far reaches of Eastern Montana this morning with photographer David Grubbs, with plans to return Thursday night.  I’ll be checking in and possibly posting news from the hinterlands, but I don’t know for sure.

Meanwhile, treat yourself to this video of an amazing young trio, and then watch them, a few years older, play this beautiful song.  These kids are my new heroes.

You think your boss is bad?  It could be worse.  You could work for Bill O’Reilly.