It's the 10-year anniversary of the column that ended my newspaper career

Monday, July 21, marked the 10th anniversary of the column I wrote that eventually led to my firing at The Carthage Press 10 months later.

I have been amused at the comments, always anonymous, of course, from people who claim that I did all sorts of horrible things to get fired, with all of the allegations simply ridiculous. (And people get angry and claim I am depriving them of their First Amendment rights when I don't publish their libel on my own blog.)

To set the stage for the column, an event somewhat erroneously named the American Heritage Festival was held the weekend of July 17, 18, and 19, at Red Oak II and the Precious Moments Convention Center in Carthage.

Despite its title, the event consisted mostly of speakers who were anti-government or attempting to sell books and supplies to deal with the upcoming Y2K crisis. (And we all remember how much of a crisis it turned out to be.) One speaker claimed it was the American government that created the AIDS epidemic. Another claimed the CIA was responsible for distributing crack cocaine in inner-city areas in California. Oklahoma State Representative Charles Key accused the federal government of having prior knowledge of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Some booths at the festival sold racist literature, and how-to books on killing.

Most of the people who attended the American Heritage Festival were from the Kansas City/Liberty/Independence area, drawn to Carthage through bulk advertising to people who listened to shortwave radio programs originating from that area. At the time, Carthage native Terry Reed was looking for investors to help in the purchase of Red Oak II from artist Lowell Davis.

These were the people who made up the audience at the festival. Most of the crowd did not come from Joplin and Carthage, and it was not quite the crowd Reed had anticipated.

On Saturday, July 18, speaker Bo Gritz, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran, who later ran as a vice presidential candidate on a ticket with former Ku Klux Klan bigwig David Duke as the presidential candidate, closed his presentation with a dramatic flourish.

Gritz asked if anyone in the audience had a lighter. When one was brought to him, Gritz set a United Nations flag on fire, saying, "You embrace an unrighteous system, and you're going to end up a crispy critter."

The image of Gritz setting fire to the U. N. flag was captured for posterity by a Kansas City Star photographer who ran it, full color, on page one of the Star's Sunday edition. The article accompanying the photo featured glib commentary from a so-called expert who noted that southwest Missouri was full of racists.

I ran my response to that article on the opinion page of the Tuesday, July 21, Carthage Press, under the headline "Many appear to be excluded from our American heritage." This is what the column said:

A blanket of white descended last weekend over the rainbow quilt that is Carthage.

The American Heritage Festival brought with it many people who had well-considered, thought-provoking ideas. It also brought with it fringe elements who want to teach patriotic Americans the most efficient way to kill and who believe everything that happened in this country from the Oklahoma City bombing to Bill Buckner's error in the 1986 World Series is a result of a government conspiracy.

There were the Nazi sympathizers and other white supremacists. There were people who believe Armageddon is just around the corner.

They were here Friday; they were here Saturday; and the nuts were also sprinkled on our Sunday.

Carthage has its problems, just like any other city its size. Sometimes those problems involve racism.

But this is a community that has welcomed the Vietnamese, including the more than 40,000 who come each year for the annual Marian Days observance.

This is a community that has welcomed a large influx of Hispanics who have come here trying to capture the American dream.

This is a community that has made giant strides in overcoming the problems that have existed between blacks and whites.

When racial incidents have occurred in Carthage, such as the infamous mistaken identity situation last year in which eight Carthage whites beat a Hispanic man they believed had raped a friend of theirs, even though the man believed to be the actual culprit was already in custody- it wasn't just the Hispanic community that was appalled by the overt racism. We were all appalled.

When there is so much to celebrate in Carthage...and in the country...it is hard to understand how an event that calls itself the American Heritage Festival can be so blatantly one-sided in the part of the American Heritage it celebrates.

There are many, many problems with the United States government today, but let's face it, just how many governments allow the freedoms that permit an American Heritage Festival to take place?

We have freedom of speech. The First Amendment protects not only those who have a slight disagreement with our leaders, but those who advocate their violent overthrow. It also protects those who print manuals that give step-by-step instructions on how to maim, dismember, and kill.

This is a country that has always prided itself in allowing diverse viewpoints to be tolerated, heard, and on occasion transformed into movements that have changed the nation.

Thankfully, those ideas that have changed the nation have seldom been based on hate. The Susan B. Anthonys brought women the right to vote. A woman named Rosa Parks, by refusing to be shoved to the back of the bus, helped propel the civil rights movement. A convict named Clarence Gideon helped earn indigent defendants the right to counsel. The history books are filled with name after name of people whose ideas helped move the nation forward.

A number of people who participated in the American Heritage Festival in Carthage over the weekend have good ideas, ideas that could move this nation forward, but it's never going to happen as long as they align themselves with hate-filled profiteers who are willing to fan the flames of our greatest fears just to earn a few bucks.

The Nazi sympathizers and the white supremacists were here, side by side with the survivalists and those who see conspiracies behind every corner.

Those people were in Carthage.

Don't believe for one second that these people are Carthage.

Ten days after that column ran, Terry Reed, his wife, and a woman named Ann Funk from Liberty, one of those who attended the festival filed a $750 million libel suit against me in U. S. District Court. Another $750 million libel suit was filed against The Carthage Press itself, making it a grand total of $1.5 billion.

We weren't the only ones who were sued. The Reeds and Ms. Funk also sued the Kansas City Star, Jasper County Sheriff Bill Pierce, 127th District State Rep. T. Mark Elliott, Recorder of Deeds Edie Swingle Neil, Presiding Commissioner Danny Hensley, Chief Deputy Jerry Neil, Captain Steve Weston of the Jasper County Sheriff's Department, reporters from the Star and KMBZ Radio in Kansas City and "other unnamed defendants."

I was the only one who lost my job because of the lawsuit. I was also the only one who had a judge toss out the lawsuit because everything I had written was clearly constitutionally-protected opinion, was labeled as such, and ran on The Press opinion page.

The Reeds claimed Mark Elliott began the problems because of Reed's association with Elliott's primary opponent, Steve Hunter and that after that Elliott and the Jasper County officials conspired to label the American Heritage Festival as "a breeding ground of terrorism, a Ku Klux Klan meeting, a convention of Christian Identity wackos, a collection of Nazi sympathizers, and in general, a party for white supremacists and separatists."

The petition ignored nearly all of the column I wrote printing only three paragraphs that were critical, though none were critical of Reed.

You would expect that with a $1.5 billion legal action filed against The Carthage Press that The Press would have contacted a lawyer. Naturally, you would be wrong. I did speak by telephone two times to Bernie Rhodes, the Kansas City Star's attorney, who kept me advised about his approach to the lawsuit. After I received a letter with service papers, I asked Rhodes what my options were. He told me I could either return the documents or wait for Reed to serve me. If that happened, he added, The Press would have to pay a couple of hundred dollars.

I talked with Carthage Press Publisher Ralph Bush, and asked him what I should do. He said he would get back to me. Several days passed and the deadline was rapidly approaching to return the papers. On the last day, I walked into Ralph's office and again asked him what I should do. The Press still had not contacted a lawyer. Ralph told me to return the papers so we would not have to pay the money. That is what I did...and that cost me my job.

Thirty days passed, and The Press, which still had not bothered to contact a lawyer about a $1.5 billion lawsuit, even though Liberty Group Publishing CEO Kenneth Serota was a lawyer, did not file a response to the lawsuit.

At that time, I had no idea what was going on with the lawsuit. Ralph Bush wrote a rate publisher's column supporting me and the way The Press news staff had handled the American Heritage Festival. But something had changed by the next time Ralph called me into his office.

By not filing a response, we had left ourselves open to a summary judgment. Fortunately, it did not work out that way, but the judge in charge of the case gave Ken Serota a stern lecture about the stupidity of not consulting a lawyer. Serota ripped into Ralph Bush, and somehow during that conversation, Ralph never mentioned that he was the one who told me to send in the papers.

By hiring the lawyer, Liberty Group Publishing had to pay $10,000, the deductible on our libel insurance policy.

And after that, I knew my days were numbered. Despite the fact that our circulation was strong, and our newspaper consistently finished in the top 5 in the Missouri Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest, usually finishing behind only the three biggest newspapers in the state, the Kansas City Star, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the Springfield News-Leader, I suddenly began to receive all kinds of criticism, and calls into Ralph's office, in which I was accused of not cooperating with the advertising department (something that the advertising department was unaware of) and I was also criticized for running too much local news on page one. I still have the letter that Ralph wrote me about that one. Of course, it was written so it could be put in my file to show documentation when I was fired.

In that April 28, 1999, letter, in which I was placed on probation, Ralph wrote, "It would be great if had local "hard news" stories every day---but we do not. We are taking stories and blowing them way out of proportion in an effort to make a story out of it."

Ralph only listed one example and it was one which had caused him to have a run-in with an advertiser, who had also gone over Ralph's head. "The recent Consumers disaster is a good example." In that story, John Hacker discovered that the same Consumers ad we were running ran in another newspaper right before the grocery closed its doors in that town. Since Consumers had already made its intentions known, publishing the story was a no-brainer and John had it nailed, right down to getting quotes from Consumers.

In his letter to me, Ralph wrote, "The most recent story did not have anything in it except more speculation about the store closing. We have already run that same story several times without telling the readers anything new."

The Consumers people had thrown a fit because people began waiting for their closing sale and the drastically-reduced prices.

Ralph fired John Hacker over that story. I should have walked out the same day.

In the letter, Ralph wrote something that still amuses me to this day, "If we have a significant national story, I want to see it on our front page. I do not want to force someone to go buy the Globe in order to find out what is going on in the world."

As if that was going to happen.

By the time I was placed on 30-day probation, I had already moved nearly all of my personal items out of the Press building. I still hoped I was wrong, but I did not plan to be caught off guard. I only made it through 18 days of the probationary period.

I was fired on May 15, 1999. I asked Ralph during the exit interview if the American Heritage Festival lawsuit played any part in my firing. He indicated it had, but "there were other things."

At the time and for a long time after that, I thought I had mainly been replaced because I was getting older and making too much money. I later found out from sources at The Press, who heard it directly from Ralph, that my firing was directly because of the American Heritage Festival for no other reason.

Ironically, that fall The Carthage Press had it best finish ever in the Missouri Press Association contest, placing third in the Gold Cup competition, behind only the Star and the Post-Dispatch.

We received first place awards for:

-Investigative reporting, for a series by Jo Ellis, Rick Rogers, John Hacker, Cait Purinton and me on drunk driving

-Community service, for the same series

-Best Feature Story- for Stacy Rector's story on a teen mother

-Best Sports Coverage- Rick Rogers

-Best Design

We received second places in Best Young People's Coverage for Stacy Rector's Teen Tuesday page, sports feature for Rick Rogers, and feature story for my piece on the effect a drunk driver had on the Phipps family of Lamar.

Ron Graber, Brooke Pyle and I received third place in best news story for our coverage of Carthage Senior High School graduate Janet Kavandi's space shuttle flight, and third in Best News Content.

Rick and Ron also had third places in photo categories and we received honorable mention for Jo Ellis in best news story for her coverage of Jasper County officials double dipping on salaries.

In all, the newspaper received 15 awards. Obviously, we were doing more than just filling our page one with useless local stories.

By the time my newspaper was recognized as the third best in the state, I had been out of the business for six months.

Because of the column I wrote 10 years ago this week, I was able to go back into teaching, write books, sing with a band, and write about what I want to write about and not worry about who was being offended.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me. With the passing of 10 years, it is obvious the same cannot be said for The Carthage Press.