Modern incognito

You might not expect to find high design on a strip of highway known more
for body shops and thrift stores, and you certainly wouldn’t expect to find

it hidden in the back of a warehouse antique mall. But Modernicus is that kind of jewel in the rough: It bills itself as a purveyor of vintage mid-century furniture, and as a source for the funky and functional, it certainly hits the mark.

But what makes this place such a great find is the unusually high quality of home furnishings from big-name Danish designers — like Hans Wegner and Finn Juhl — all in a neighborhood that is, well, decidedly small-name.

Surrounded by a cacophony of shopettes slinging their own wares inside the dank, dense Alexandria warehouse — think “Antiques Road Show” plus a flea market and multiply it by a wall at TGIFridays — hides a haven for the sparse, minimalist offerings of Robert Chapman, the impossibly tall curator of Modernicus, who believes less in overwhelming your senses and more in profiling a few quality pieces. Like the industrial wall-mounted lamp that casts light on a signed Warhol poster. Or the Cold War-era Sony broadcasting camera that looks more like a movie prop than the real thing. Or the minimalist pendant lamps with reproduction Edison bulbs hanging from the ceiling.

But what really stole my heart — and then tore it asunder — were the
giant, architectural-salvaged letters from the outside of the Grand Theater
in Baltimore. (They’re not for sale.)

Finding Modernicus in these parts is like finding your soul mate at a
monster truck rally. You didn’t go there looking for love, but you’re sure
glad you found it.

www.modernicus.com

Army-Navy Football Game

Army-Navy Football Game

more about "Military Videos: Videos, Army, Navy, …", posted with vodpod

Marine Corps Times

Marine Corps Times

From the Sept. 22, 2008, issue of the Marine Corps Times.

Wilderness Challenge

The 2008 All-Military Wilderness Challenge in West Virginia

more about "Wilderness Challenge", posted with vodpod

Making a Case for Nuclear Power

Regarding “Stuck in 1979/Foes keep distorting nuclear power’s record” (Editorial, March 21):

People are afraid of what they don’t understand. The generation of nuclear power could prove to be one of mankind’s greatest hopes for solving the global warming crisis. Critics and politicians like Assemblyman Lloyd Levine site Chernobyl and Three Mile Island as cases against nuclear power, but no one can argue that fossil fuels are the real threat: pollution and carbon emissions kill about 4.5 million people a year, 20,000 of those in the United States, while nuclear power mishaps have claimed less than 5,000 lives in the last 50 years.

The problem isn’t so much the safety of nuclear power plants — although politics and bureaucracy have made it too much trouble to build any new ones — but what to do with the spent fuel. Sites such as Yucca Mountain are so mired in political bureaucracy and misunderstanding that they may never serve their intended purpose: to store waste from the world’s 441 nuclear power plants, and do it as safely and permanently as humans can manage at this point in history. (European nations have an even better idea: reprocess the waste.)

Compared with the loss of life resulting from global warming, nuclear energy may be the answer we’ve been looking for all along. But how can we expect people to understand it when our own president can’t even pronounce it?

Signed,

Jason Watkins

The Green Fairy is Back

from the Army Times

By JASON WATKINS | The Military Times

Absinthe - once the elixir of artists, poets and ne’er-do-wells – is making an American comeback. Thanks to a law that went into effect last year, you no longer have to darken the door of a shady European pub while on liberty just to try the stuff.

It tastes either like a medley of aromatic herbs or like licorice and gasoline, depending on whom you ask, and was banned in the U.S. for the better part of a century because it contains trace amounts of thujone, an active compound in wormwood, one of absinthe’s key ingredients and the supposed cause of its psychotropic power. (Legend has it that artist Vincent Van Gogh was under its spell when he dispatched his ear.) But multiple studies showed the levels of thujone are too minimal to be classified as a drug – you’d die from alcohol poisoning long before you’d ride the yellow submarine – so the ban was lifted in 2007.

Still, the stuff packs a Chuck Liddell-like punch.

“It does hit you very differently and much more quickly than other spirits because of the alcohol content, but it’s a far cry from a hallucinogenic effect,” says distiller Lance Winters, who has spent more than a decade perfecting a recipe for St. George Spirits in California. He also spent nearly eight years in the Navy, much of it aboard the carrier Enterprise as a machinist’s mate second class.

Packing a 120-proof wallop, the stuff is a distilled liquor that’s best served watered down or in cocktails. Specially made kits and slotted spoons for dissolving sugar are hitting the market, and a variety of distilleries are reviving centuries-old recipes. Even rocker Marilyn Manson has thrown his hat into the absinthe ring with his own formula, called Mansinthe.

So does a visit with “the green fairy” live up to the legend?

“No, I think it’s hyped up a little bit,” says Army Sgt. 1st Class Michael Hawks, who encountered it while on vacation earlier this year in Prague, Czech Republic. “I’d always heard that it was a mildly hallucinogenic alcohol, but I’d never seen it.”

His drink was set on fire by the bartender (a no-no among absinthe purists) and downed like a shot (another no-no).

“I threw up and then I went home,” he says.

“The typical, legendary absinthe-induced hallucinations are all complete fabrications,” Winters says.

With all of its theatrics and lore, absinthe might be the new trendy drink, but it shouldn’t drive you to self-mutilation anytime soon.

The Dogs of War

from San Diego Downtown

 

One Marine’s journey back from Iraq

By JASON WATKINS | San Diego Downtown Magazine

 

JASON LILLEY IS torn between two people: the old him and the new him.

The old Jason Lilley served two tours in Iraq as a Marine with the First Recon Batallion and was part of the first group of Americans to breach the southern border of Iraq at the beginning of the war. At some points, he was among the northern-most Marines in enemy land.

During his second tour, the old Jason Lilley saved six of his fellow Marines in a roadside ambush, an action that earned him a Silver Star, the third-highest honor in the military. His story has been told in Rolling Stone magazine, in a recently released book called “Generation Kill” and on evening news broadcasts, each of which call him a war hero. The old Jason Lilley was a hardened warrior, a Devil Dog, a member of the Corps’ most elite group of fighters similar to Navy SEALs, of which there are less than a thousand. 

But that’s the old Jason Lilley. The new Jason Lilley is a damn mess.

I MET THE NEW Jason Lilley at Pizza Port in Carlsbad. He was a colleague of my roommate, Carlos, who was also in First Recon. The two served together in Iraq. 

Wearing sandles, a sleeveless black shirt and long, spiky hair, the new Jason Lilley looked like a frat boy. He stood six foot two (not counting the hair) and had sideburns and a lip ring. He had just been released from the Marine Corps, and his sudden change in appearance was common among newly separated troops. 

The new Jason Lilley needed a place to crash after getting out, so my roommate and I invited him to stay with us. What was supposed to be a couple of weeks ended up being five months, during which time the old and the new made a desperate attempt to reconcile their differences.

The new Jason Lilley was confident and spoke with a faint southern drawl, his voice littered with gravel and abrupt starts and stops. He would study his arms and chest in the mirror, surprised they belonged to him. He looked like twisted steel.

“I applied at the post office today,” he said after a month of surfing and playing video games. “A buddy of mine works there and told me to apply. Pay’s pretty good.”

I helped him write his resume, culling anything useful that might translate into employability, but his method of service didn’t offer much. The real world has little use for combat skills.

The new Jason Lilley would spend hours playing video games, each one a variation of the same war game, each one more cathartic. The new Jason Lilley could just press restart when he got hit by a bullet. They provided an escape from the white noise of battle which he said haunted him during some nights.

He had the power to change things, to be a leader of men, to take lives and save lives, but he didn’t have the power to secure a job at the post office or the power plant or anywhere else he applied.

He eventually took a job as a bouncer at a nightclub. On one particularly busy night, he spotted a guy dancing on a table where he wasn’t supposed to be. He told him to get down but the guy ignored him so Jason pulled him to the floor. Then Jason noticed the TV cameras in his face. The guy was the lead actor in an MTV reality show that was being filmed at the club.

Jason found other employment at a company that bought sold motorcycles. He would return from work on most days, cursing the place and the people who worked there.

“Man, I work with some idiots,” he’d say. “I can’t believe how stupid some people are.”

It’s hard to relate to your new co-workers when you’ve spent the last two years getting shot at by people who want to kill you, he’d say. It’s like everyone’s volume gets turned down.

 

THE OLD JASON Lilley sat at the wheel of his Humvee as it drifted across the flat Iraqi desert. It was March 20, 2003, and the men of First Recon were leading a series of raids through southern Iraq in a push toward Baghdad. They were at this moment the northernmost Americans in that country.

First Recon, the ultra-elite fighting force responsible for leading the most daring missions during wartime, is a band of tightly-knit young men who take pride in being the Marine Corps’ “cowboys.” They’ve endured much of the same hell as Navy SEALs, but their numbers are far fewer; only the top one or two percent of Marines get to try out for First Recon, and more than half drop out. Once in, Recon Marines lead dangerous missions by foot to conduct surveillance, to take out enemy targets and to attack. Their motto is “swift, silent and deadly.”

This was First Recon’s first wartime mission since leaving Camp Pendleton a month before, a journey that would take them a thousand miles north, across the Tigres and Euphrates rivers, through the fabled city of Babylon, to the capital city of Baghdad. It lasted more than a month.

Jason Lilley was in charge of getting the men in his Humvee from point A to point B, usually amid heavy gunfire, the possibility of roadside bombings, through foreign terrain and across mine fields. If their caravan was attacked, he was expected to have the wherewithall to stay alive to get the rest of the guys to safety. By the time he reached Baghdad, he had seen hundreds, maybe thousands, of lives ended, including women and children and civilians.

He was 6,967 miles away from his home in Rose Hill, Kansas.

The old Jason Lilley hadn’t taken a shower in a month, his feet were swollen inside his boots and the smell was like death itself. His Humvee passed through dozens of towns on their way to Baghdad, each one more pathetic than the last, each covered in wreckage and ruin. Electricity had long been cut, and most of the villages were steeped in raw sewage from busted pipes. The people who inhabited the villages, though torn by war and circumstance, were usually happy to see Americans, whom they were certain would bring an end to the chaos.

Jason Lilley was almost seven thousand miles away from home, but he might as well been on the moon. He was now just skin and sinew and bones, existing on fewer than two MREs a day, living beside other young men who equally missed their homes and their girlfriends and who, besides doing what they’re doing, could think of nothing more important than singing, shouting, Avril Lavigne’s “I’m With You.”

It’s at this moment that the old Jason Lilley has found his home, a man among men, careening down a dusty road through the open gates of fate.

 

THE NEW JASON Lilley is sleeping on the couch, his arm covering his eyes, as I quietly walk to the door on my way to work. When I return, he’s in the same position, but in the space between he has made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, slipped on his wetsuit, caught a few decent waves, made another sandwich, checked the mail, checked his e-mail, picked up a job application, called his brother, made another sandwich, played a video game and taken a nap. This is the sum total of most days.

The job at the motorcycle place didn’t work out. Seems the main boss decided to fire Jason’s boss, his friend, the one who gave Jason the job. Both the new and the old Jason Lilley are nothing if not loyal, like bad wallpaper, so he walked out of the place too.

The new Jason Lilley is, of course, broke and broken and bored and wants nothing more than to be a part of something that carries a fraction of the weight of being a Marine. He’s told to come back tomorrow to speak to the boss, then told there’s nothing open, but maybe next month, we just hired someone and we’ve got a full house, but good luck to you. He’s told he’ll need to take a class first, but that costs $800 and doesn’t start until next month. He’s told he’s overqualified, underqualified, appropriately qualified, but nothing.

During all this, my roommate, Carlos, and I supported his growing sandwich addiction. We helped him buy a car so he could widen his search area — his old car caught fire on the side of the road and he left it there — but there was something with his license or his registration so he didn’t drive it much. He borrowed my vehicle whenever he wanted to go on a date.

I found something noble in his ability to sit for days on end, producing little more than a fascination with war games and a five o’clock shadow. I couldn’t fathom the horrors that haunted him some nights, the image of Iraqi children being maimed by RPGs, his fellow Marines taking shrapnel in the head, and I certainly couldn’t help him. Close though we were, I could never relate to him on that level.

I was also fascinated by the old Jason Lilley. He was twelve times the man I was, ever hoped to be. He accepted duty with grace, death with respect and fate with open eyes and a wide smile. His body endured daily what would have surely killed me. In fact, the only thing we shared in common was our first name, but despite that we were fast friends. His sense of humor was always on, a joke slipping from his tongue the instant he fell asleep and a continuation of the same joke the minute he woke up in the morning.

But underneath, the new Jason Lilley was unraveling.

“I don’t know what to do,” he would say. “I don’t know why I can’t find a job.”

Keep at it, I’d tell him, offering him advice or job leads or just blind encouragement. The truth was, I couldn’t figure out either why no one would hire him, a decorated war hero with discipline, respect and a golden work ethic.

“Marines have a pretty bad reputation,” he said. “They’re not very well liked around here.” I could see that. Businesses didn’t want a bunch of rough and rowdy “jarheads” at their place, but the Marines I knew — mostly members of the First Recon who were friends of my roommate — were the most stand-up guys I’d ever met. Jason had the misfortune of being a great guy in the midst of a lot of punks.

Sometimes, and without warning, the new Jason would share his old war stories, like the time they killed an Iraqi soldier and had put him into the back of their transport vehicle to be identified later. Halfway down the road, Jason noticed his seat was unsually soft; when he looked down, he realized he was sitting on the dead soldier. It was these moments that stay with him.

Jason rarely spoke about the truly terrifying moments — days when he was certain he was going to die and thought that maybe he already had. Occasionally I would ask about some detail and he’d answer my questions but say little more. It’s a heavy feeling to be a part of someone’s life after they’ve gone through war. Sometimes, though, when it was just us, Jason would share some story or some funny moment he’d hidden away, the telling of which sounded forced and unrehearsed like he hadn’t ever put it into words.

One night, I joined Jason, Carlos and our newest roommate, Bryan “Trip” Thurmond, who was a distant relative of Senator Strom Thurmond, at our computer so we could look at pictures they’d taken in Iraq. Most were candid shots of nameless, smiling Marines gripping their weapons or playing cards. Some were graphic shots of dead Jihadists, their heads blown away by Mark 19 bullets. Marines posed by the bodies, proud of their kills — and maybe proud that they were the ones smiling and not the ones who were dead. I realized I was looking at first-hand relics from a war we still don’t understand taken by people who were there.

Historians tell us we have to wait twenty years before looking back at a war with any kind of reasonable understanding. I think that’s probably true. But on that night, surrounded by these three men, I was a part of the story, looking at the pictures that will one day become testament to who we were and how we lived. Whatever my view of the war — which is constantly evolving — I’m thankful these men aren’t cowards. 

 

THE OLD JASON Lilley returned to Iraq for a second time during this war. It was April 7, 2004, and Lilley’s platoon was crossing the desert when a group of sixty Iraqi insurgents started firing on their convoy. Five Marines were injured in the gun battle, which lasted just a few minutes.

“Anybody who tells you they were in combat and weren’t scared is lying,” he later told his hometown newspaper. “Every day, every one of us was scared.”

Seven thousand miles away, Jason’s mom, Janis South, is teaching a classroom full of students about music and wondering where her son is. “It was very, very hard to get up in front of the kids and be happy and act like everything was great,” she said later. Sometimes she’d recognize the name of a Marine who served in her son’s batallion and she’d slip away to a quiet place and “fall apart for a while.”

According to the official paperwork, Jason Lilley crossed the shallow waters of a canal and onto a berm where, against heavy enemy fire, he began shooting. This allowed the remaining Marines, who were far outnumbered, to retreat with their lives. By the end, Jason had killed five Iraqi soldiers and had saved six of his friends.

Because of Jason Lilley, six Marines got to go home to their moms. 

 

THE NEW JASON Lilley is standing in his dress blues in front of 125 people in Wichita, Kan., flanked by other Marines and community leaders.

“It is our nation’s third highest combat metal and I’m proud to honor Corporal Lilley and to say thank you for your service over and above the call of duty,” the city’s mayor, Carlos Mayans, says. “You are an American hero and I salute you.”

A Marine captain is in the crowd to pay his respects. It’s the first time in the captain’s twenty-two years in the service he’s seen the Silver Star awarded. 

“It’s an honor to receive it,” Jason says later during an interview with the local news. “I just did my job, did was was asked of me, what anyone else would have done in the same situation.” He’s right and he’s wrong, for courage isn’t learned. It’s moments like those that create heroes and heroes become future leaders of America.

He lives in Kansas now, surrounded by family and friends who know both versions of Jason Lilley, the old and the new. He’s starting a life as a civilian after living the tumultous existence that is southern California, but he still misses it here. Now, the only physical remnants of the old  Jason Lilley is a hardened gaze, a bright silver medal and a tattoo across his chest that reads “today is a gift.”

I spoke with him by phone recently, the day before he started a new job in construction making ten dollars an hour.

“I’m nervous,” he says. “I know I’m going to hate it. I know I’ll be bored. I know it won’t be challenging. But I need to give this a shot, living as a civilian.”

I encourage him, even though he’s probably right.

“I’ve only given being a civilian nine months,” he says. “That’s not very long.”

“How long is it supposed to take?” I say.

“Exactly,” he says. “That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

Tonight he was supposed to take his little sister to the movies but he’ll have to call and cancel so he can get ready for work in the morning. He says all he wants right now is to own a brand-new car, and not even an expensive one, just one he can drive without worrying about it catching fire.

“I just want something that’s nice,” he says. Then he tells me he’s been thinking about joining the Navy and becoming a SEAL. If I had a dollar everytime I heard someone say they were going to become a Navy SEAL I could buy him a car, but when Jason Lilley says it, it doesn’t seem all that unreasonable.

“I like serving my country, man,” he says. “I really do.”

 

THE NEW JASON Lilley is making a final dive into the cold water off the Carlsbad coast.

It’s been six months since leaving the Marine Corps and leaving the best group of guys he’ll ever know. He’ll soon return home to Kansas to start over and to accept the praise of a grateful nation, but right now he’s using the last light of the day to ride the waves, paddling into them, then diving under, then paddling farther. 

I watch from the shore and realize that in these fleeting moments, when the orange sliver of the sun sinks below the horizon and all light fades into a soupy gray, Jason Lilley is disappearing into a void created by war and peace and this business of growing up. 

It’s then that he begins to make peace with the old and the new and starts to become whole again.

My Dog Cody

from San Diego Pets

One day, we’ll all be judged by the dogs we loved and the dogs who loved us.

By JASON WATKINS | San Diego Pets Magazine

 

He was my best friend, my trusted sidekick, my unfailing partner in crime and my most loyal confidant. He was, of course, just a dog, but puppy love is perhaps the purest of the form because it is unburdened by the bonds of obligation and human interraction. The love of a dog is like the love of an infant, albeit a mute and abundantly hairy one.

I got him when I was thirteen. For months I had begged my mom for a golden retriever puppy, had cut out pictures from pet catalogs to soften her. I even picked out a name—Cody, strong but sensitive—all in support of the universal truth that all boys should have a dog. But she would have none of it, claiming that I would lose interest in a dog, that I lacked the requisite commitment to care for a living creature. She said any dog of mine would suffer a miserable existence, a fair point considering my spotty record. In the nearly dozen years I had been alive, I had either lost or misplaced a kitten, two goldfish, a snake named Spanky, another snake without a name, a turtle, a box full of horny toads, more than a dozen stuffed animals and a horse. (The horse, I later learned, was shipped off to a happier place after my brother and I lost interest in him, but I always carried around a secret suspicion that my neglect caused his demise.) In fact, the only creature that hadn’t hastily fled my company was an alley cat named Tigger who, loyal to his core, could not be driven away.

Because I had an older brother who showed no interest in my suitability as a playmate (or in my existence), I grew up believing I was an only child. On top of that, I grew up in the rural southwest, ten miles from the nearest town and surrounded by cows and coyotes, so my need for a true friend ran deep. This time would be different, I told my mother. I will not lose or neglect or somehow snuff this puppy.

MY MOTHER PICKED me up from school on the day I turned thirteen. Because junior high was particularly hard on me, having introduced me to a world of playground bullies and minor injustices, my ride home was always a quiet affair. But this day was different; sitting on the seat next to mine was a small box, wrapped neatly in paper, the four sides folded one over the top of the other to hide the contents but to keep them accessible. I put the box on my lap and said that I would open it later. Then the box began to move. When I opened one of the flaps, then another, a knowing grin stretched across my face. There, staring back at me with two pinpoint, black eyes was Cody, a month-old butterscotch ball of fur. My mother had driven four hours roundtrip to pick him up from a breeder. He was registered with the American Kennel Club as Cody Watkins, the first thing in my life over which I possessed official ownership.

He slept in a makeshift kennel beside my bed for those first few, sleepless months. After learning the rhythms and rules of our home, he earned a place atop my bed. Even then, he required constant care—frequent trips outside, food, water, petting, love—all at the risk of ceaseless and pitiful whimpering. It’s said that the bonds of love are cemented at first sight, but I believe they begin in moments like these when the happiness and survival of another creature rests squarely on your shoulders and comes at some small or imagined sacrifice.

As Cody grew, my family laughed at his awkward progression from fur ball to disproportionate puppy, his limbs and paws too big for his body and his movements a mixture of aloofness and marginal dexterity. But he, like most golden retrievers, was blessed by a quiet affection for his newly adopted family and he showed us patience and grace in our endeavor to mold him into a well-trained, disciplined member of the clan. His body soon filled out, his movements gaining agility and his coat becoming a thick, brilliant blanket of orange velvet. 

One of the few amenities we enjoyed growing up was a swimming pool in our backyard. Cody took to it like, well, a bird dog to water, eventually jumping off the diving board and dog-paddling to the other side where the steps were. We called it the Cody Crawl. Friends loved it. My mother hated it because she was the one left with the task of cleaning out the pool filter. His favorite activity, though, was playing fetch. Every year for Christmas, Cody got a new package of bright yellow tennis balls which we would through endlessly as he bounded across the yard (or pasture, or through the house), returning a few seconds later with the ball. He insisted that we throw it again, and again (and again) until one of us exhausted, and he never exhausted. He held onto each ball until its integrity was compromised by doggy slobber and dirt, and then he’d go find a stick or cow patty until we could produce another ball. It was in those moments, from the point of separation of the ball from our hand until he clutched it again in his mouth, as the ball began and maintained its arch and then fell back to earth, that Cody was happiest. I sometimes wondered if we facilitated this meaningless act for his benefit or if he was just keeping us busy so we’d stay around a little longer. 

During my sophomore year of high school, my friend Tammy and I were to present a fictitious product in our speech class. Our visual aide was Cody, outfitted in a device we claimed could serve as a contraceptive for dogs to spare them the indigity of, you know, being neutered. Cody, not our concept, was a hit. And because his attention could only be held by the round, yellow ball in front of him, one of our classmates thought it might be funny to see him fetch, so he threw the ball fifty yards down the hallway as Cody, with the grace of a train wreck, slipped and slided from one end to the other. Students in other classrooms stared in confusion as an orange bullet blew past their door, then again on the return trip.

Partly because of this and partly because of his beauty and charm, Cody became something of a celebrity in my hometown. He was featured occasionally in my high school and community newspapers (I was on staff at both) and made appearances at social events. People asked about him not in the way one might ask about a pet but in a truly interested way. He was like my considerably more handsome and more popular brother, and I found myself, deep in throes of my own teen angst and longing for attention, acutely jealous of him.

MY FAMILY LOVED Cody and in turn he loved each one of us, particularly our other pets, who approached all newcomers with a mix of trepidation and disgust. Soon, he and Tigger were fast friends and he and Misty, my brother’s dog, were soulmates. On many days, the four of us would set out armed with a pellet gun into the fields of a neighboring ranch to hunt small game, Tigger trotting along to keep pace while Cody and Misty ferretted out rabbits and sparrows or the occasional skunk. I was base camp, dispatching the troops to every near and distant landmark within our slowly expanding world. There, in the august light of summer, a boy and his dog (and his cat and his brother’s dog) held court over a postage stamp of land, the only world those three would ever know. Sometimes the existence of a loyal pet in the life of a child is his first sign that the world may not be such a bad place, that perfection, though fleeting, is possible.

The day Misty died, Cody searched for her for hours, finally resting his head on the front porch as the gravity of the situation set in. During his formative years, she was the closest thing to a maternal figure in his life. Cody was just a dog, of course, but he was a smart dog and he knew that an unfillable void had been created by her passing. He mourned the death of Miss Watson, our bassett hound that lived through more presidential administrations that I have. He mourned the death of Gator, who didn’t die but whose ownership was reappropriated after eating ten two many of our shoes. And eventually, along with the rest of the family, he mourned the death of Tigger, who had finally succumbed to the predators of the desert. On the day Cody and I discovered his lifeless body in the middle of a cow pasture, the victim of a coyote or an owl, Cody stopped in front of his remains as if to pay his final respects. Then, as I placed the river rock at the head of Tigger’s grave in the southwest corner of our field, Cody genuflected again. So this is how it’s going to be, his eyes said. Get attached to something and then lose it. 

And so it went, for the remainer of his life was marked by the slow umooring of friendships and alliances in the name of time or progress. He sat on the front porch as my brother drove away to college, and he sat on the front porch the day I drove away to college, though by now he was no longer a puppy with an unfillable appetite for chasing tennis balls but had grown into a stalwart protector, a patriarchial sentry who watched over our family and home, quickly rising to greet every new visitor with a cold, wet nose and an appeal to play a little fetch.

When I came home on weekends and holidays, Cody would be waiting there on the front porch, now with a new playmate and hunting partner. Tip, my uncle’s puppy, had taken up residence at our house and trailed Cody wherever he went, sometimes invading too closely into Cody’s personal space. No longer a spring chicken, Cody did his best to tolerate the tightly wound pup but sometimes he would indulge Tip and set off on some journey to a distant ranch, both dogs returning at the end of the day thirsty and tired.

My relationship with Cody soon faded, though, as the existential crises of college and adulthood claimed most of my waking hours and I returned home less and less. As he got older, I suspected that each time I saw him would be my last and my farewells were usually short but poignant, like visits to a dying relative. But each time I returned, he was right there on the porch where I last saw him, sometimes with a tennis ball in his mouth, sometimes not.

Just before Christmas last year, I got a call from my mother telling me that Cody had taken a turn for the worse and she was forced to make the difficult decision to have him put to sleep. For a moment I said nothing, then sighed and told her it was for the best. “He shouldn’t have to suffer,” I told her. “You did the right thing.” I knew I couldn’t have made the decision myself, that I would have selfishly chosen to prolong his suffering in order to delay my own. And I thought about Tip, now friendless on the front step.

I regretted not being there, not holding Cody as he breathed his last breaths, not being able to say goodbye. I knew, we all knew, the day would come when we would be forced to accept Cody’s passing from our family but I always imagined the circumstances would be a little different, though how I’m not sure. The truth was, it had been years since Cody and I were close, and I doubt his last moments of clarity were filled with rememberances of me and of Tigger and all of our other friends during those halcyon days of my youth when nothing mattered, not even schoolyard bullies. The truth is, he wasn’t just a dog. He was my friend. And when he finally did slip the surly bonds of earth, I like to imagine him entering his next life the same way he first entered mine: with furry ears a-flopping and a furiously wagging tail. Because someday, we’ll all be called to our maker and we’ll be judged by the dogs we loved and the dogs who loved us. 

People ask me all the time what it was like growing up in the middle of nowhere, with no playmates and nothing to do. It must have been incredibly boring, they say, you must have led a lonely, solitary existence.

If they only knew.

Young Men & Fire

By Nathaniel Fick

 

Marine Lt. Nathaniel Fick leads a band of brothers in his memoir of the Iraq War

By JASON WATKINS | San DiegoDowntown News

The most striking evidence of Nathaniel Fick’s abilities as a world-class military mind comes not from his Dartmouth education nor his reverence for Marine Corps history nor even the bulk of the decisions he made in battle, but rather from the single fact that he returned home from war with the same number of men he left with.

Fick makes only passing mention of this in his newly published book, “One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer,” in which he recounts his journey from Ivy League upperclassman through Officer Candidate School to the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. Fick downplays the survival rate of his platoon so much, in fact, that one is left with the false impression that this is something less than a monumental achievement.

But Fick is no ordinary officer and his are no ordinary Marines. Midway through his military career, Fick was invited to join the elite First Reconnaissance Battalion, the Corps’ elite fighting group that played a vital role in the invasion of Iraq and seizure of Baghdad. No other group in the Marine Corps trains more and fights harder than First Recon, and their failures and successes often make national headlines. Getting shot at, encountering roadside attacks, even being fired upon by fellow Marines – it’s a miracle any of them made it home alive, let alone all of them. Exactly how he managed to return with all 65 of his men still puzzles Fick, but he credits some combination of skill, luck and what one of his best Marines, Rudy Reyes, calls the “sacred geometry of chance.”

Enrolled at Dartmouth and headed for medical school, Nathaniel Fick was so moved by a motivational speech given by a former Marine that, within a few months, he found himself aboard a bus headed for Officer Candidate School (OCS) in Quantico, Virginia. 

“I wanted to go on a great adventure, to prove myself, to serve my country,” he writes early on in the book. “I wanted to do something so hard that no one could ever talk shit to me.”

He chose his path wisely. 

Three years later, Fick was leading a platoon of 22 men and one platoon leader – a hardened warrior named Gunny Wynn who is regarded by fellow Recon Marines as something of a legend – through battles in Afghanistan and Iraq. His platoon was part of the initial invasion of Iraq, breaching the southern border with Kuwait sometime in the morning hours of March 21, 2003, then crossing the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and eventually arriving in Baghdad just as the statue of Saddam was being toppled by U.S. troops.

Their journey was chronicled in Evan Wright’s acclaimed book, “Generation Kill,” and in his three-part series that appeared in Rolling Stone, but Wright’s account is strictly that of an embedded reporter while Fick’s was written by the man who was making the decisions. (In a sense, Fick’s telling of the same story proves how differently an event is viewed by each observer.)

One of the book’s many virtues is Fick’s ability to throw a shaft of pure light on the true makeup of his men. The notion of a United States Marine as a hardened killer with a piercing gaze is well warranted (and not altogether inaccurate) but Fick offers us another side of the story:

Christmas morning dawned clear and cold. The patrol had been uneventful, and I walked the lines to see the Marines. I thought some of the younger guys might have a hard time that day, but they were festive. A captured tumbleweed stood next to each fighting hole, pruned by hand into a triangular shape of a little pine tree. Candy and mini Tabasco bottles from MREs hung from the branches. There were even gifts. During the past week, Marines had squirreled away packets of cheese or pound cake — MRE delicacies — for their buddies.

On one occasion, after receiving orders from his commanding officer to move 10 kilometers on foot across rocky terrain, the Marines in Fick’s platoon carried 200 pounds of gear across the desert of Afghanistan under the light of the moon while another platoon moved in the comfort of Humvees. Evoking the spirit of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Fick writes:

I thought, then, of my favorite time at Quantico, those moments in the bunk after we sang “The Marine’s Hymn.” Now, as I had at OCS, I sensed an outpouring of grit, pride, and raw desire to live up to the traditions we’d inherited. These Marines came from places like Erie and Tuscaloosa and Bedford Falls. The most junior of them earned nine hundred dollars a month. Some had joined the Corps for adventure, others for a steady paycheck or to stay out of jail. Now they all kept walking for one another.

“One Bullet Away” makes no assertions of the validity or legitimacy of the war — it’s not entirely clear where Fick falls on the political spectrum except for a few brief glimpses into his upbringing. (“Some of my classmates had been hunters since they’d learned to walk, but I had fired a gun only two or three times in my life,” he writes.) But he is concerned with the legitimacy of his own men; after a particularly bloody battle with Iraqi insurgents, Fick writes, “I guessed the television news that night was full of reports of collateral damage and civilian casualties. I wished people could see how much we agonized over our decisions and prayed they were the right ones. These choices didn’t always translate into hesitation on the trigger or racking self-doubt, but sometimes it was enough to sit awake in the cold rain just thinking about them.”

Much has been made about that breed of otherwise virtuous soldier or Marine turning into to a callous, unfeeling murderer in a war zone, only to return home to face his demons with eventual unraveling. Contempt for this type runs deep throughout Fick’s platoon; each man deals with war in his own way, at the time of his own choosing, but no one falls so harshly upon himself as Fick:

As darkness fell over Valat Sukkar, I sat alone in the dim green light of the radios. I felt sick for the shepherd boys, for the girl in the blue dress, and for all the innocent people who surely lived in Nasiriyah, Ar Rifa, and the other towns this war would consume. I hurt for my Marines, goodhearted American guys who’d bear these burdens for the rest of their lives. And I mourned for myself. Not in self-pity, but for the kid who’d come to Iraq. He was gone. I did all this in the dark, away from the platoon, because combat command is the loneliest job in the world.

In a recent reader review on Amazon.com, an anonymous person who claims to be a part of Fick’s platoon takes him to task for writing such a book so soon after the events occurred, calling it political positioning that’s “20 years early.” Not that the reviewer, identifying himself only as “SaltyTex,” has much of an axe to grind: his only real gripe seems to be that Fick was paid to tell his story, a notion in which only an idiot could find fault and only a jealous colleague would point out. The reviewer’s other apparent goal is to call Fick out as a well-to-do, Ivy League “thinker” with a good military record who aspires to one day become a  senator. (Why the American people would find fault in this behavior somehow eludes “SaltyTex.”) Fick himself admits that he has no desire to run for office, though that almost appears a waste, given that he’s currently earning his master’s degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at a little place called Harvard. 

“I’m really interested in policy, I’m just not that interested in politics,” Fick said during a phone interview. “I really like walking down the street and being anonymous.” 

But perhaps the most unsubstantiated claim by “SaltyTex,” and a difficult one to make, is that Fick’s book and Evan Wright’s “Generation Kill” paints Recon Marines in a bad light. Both books are honest depictions of a misunderstood (if not completely overlooked) generation within the military, and both portray these men as honest and caring, crude and violent, feared and respected killers. To suggest, like “SaltyTex” does, that these accounts “hurt our reputation” and expose the platoon’s bad side is to miss the point entirely. Fick’s book isn’t a piece of propaganda for the cause of the Recon Marine – or for the Corps as a whole – any more than “Full Metal Jacket” is an advertisement for war. Rather, the book is meant as a solitary voice among many. His view is simply that some stories need to be told, and that this happens to be one of them.

And this is exactly where Fick and “One Bullet Away” so masterfully succeed. In what he calls the “aftermath” of war, Fick is forced to face the evidence that his experiences as a Marine officer and as a veteran made him into a principled, honorable and heroic man.

“I took sixty-five men to war and brought sixty-five home,” he writes. “I gave them everything I had. Together, we passed the test. Fear didn’t beat us. I hope life improves for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, but that’s not why we did what we did. We fought for each other.”

Ultimately Fick was spared from doing what he feared most. “I knew if anybody got killed, I was the one who was going to have to fly to their hometown and explain to their parents what happened,” he said. He never had to.

Both unsentimental and quietly introspective, “One Bullet Away” emerges as one of the clearest voices to come out of the current war. Nathaniel Fick is just one man telling one story about one particular moment in time, and yet he and his men prove that uncommon valor may well be an uncommon virtue.

A Media Baron Aborning

Editor & Publisher Magazine

New Mexico collegian shows Independent spirit

By Joe Strupp | Editor & Publisher Magazine
Saturday, June 19 1999

Jason Watkins doesn’t want to be the next Rupert Murdoch or Dean Singleton.

But after launching his own weekly newspaper last month at the ripe old age of
20, and laying the groundwork for two or three more start-up publications in the next few years, this New Mexico college student is already on his way to a news empire that one day could rival those of Murdoch, Singleton, or William Randolph Hearst.

“Hearst, maybe,” Watkins says with a laugh during a recent phone interview from his office at The Independent, a 3,000-circulation weekly that Watkins launched May 21 in his hometown of Lordsburg, N.M. “I don’t really want to be a media mogul, but I like the freedom to do the things I want to do and make a good paper go.”

Watkins, who will start his junior year this fall at the University of Arizona, says he started the newspaper using a $30,000 bank loan — obtained with help from family members — and a desire to give his hometown proper news coverage.

During high school, Watkins says he worked for three years as a part-time reporter and photographer at Lordsburg’s other weekly newspaper, the Lordsburg Liberal, where he says former Liberal publisher

Jack Walz “taught me everything I know about journalism.” When Walz died earlier this year, Watkins tried to buy the newspaper, but was rebuffed by its new owners. So he collected financing, hired away the Liberal’s longtime editor Brenda Collins’ and started his own weekly for 30 cents a copy — 10 cents less than the Liberal.

“It was worth a shot,” says Collins, who spent eight years at the Liberal as reporter and editor and liked the challenge of a new paper. “The Liberal was not very local, and we knew we could give a local flair.”
Liberal publishers declined to comment. 

The Independent’s first issue included 16 pages of news and ads, among them a Page-One story on the death of Watkins’ grandfather, a former mayor.

Watkins admits that starting a newspaper at his age is unusual but says he got the itch after coming home from college on several occasions and wishing that his hometown had more to offer readers. He believes he can run the newspaper by taking a light classload and driving the two hours each way from Tucson to Lordsburg to work on the publication during weekends and vacations.

“After a year, I think I will be able to stay at school and let the editor run it from here,” Watkins says. “Hopefully, when I get out of school, I will be able to get another loan and start another paper. If that works, I’ll just keep doing it.”

The rookie publisher says he’s already instituted his first ethics policy — not to publish the names of those arrested for minor crimes. “In a small town, that can be deadly,” says Watkins, who runs a police-blotter page but without names of those arrested for minor infractions. “We try to be positive.”

Those who know Watkins say they’re not surprised by his ambition, which helped him start the campus newspaper, The Maverick, as a sophomore at Lordsburg High School in 1994. Phyllis McDonald, the newspaper’s advisor, says Watkins was publishing the newspaper every two weeks at its height.

“I was reluctant when he first came to me because high-school kids always want to start a newspaper, but they usually fizzle out when they see how much work it is,” says McDonald. “But he never missed a deadline, and it’s still going.”

McDonald, who taught remedial reading when Watkins approached her to help oversee the publication, says Watkins helped make the paper part of the high-school curriculum that eventually grew from one journalism class to three. “He changed the course of my career,” she says. “I’m now a journalism teacher.”

Last year, when Watkins worked part-time at a Tucson, Ariz., radio station, his start-up urge struck again when he launched a monthly employee newsletter for Slone Broadcasting, which runs five radio stations.

Slone vice president of programming Herb Crowe says Watkins got so involved with the newsletter that he often had to be reminded to do his job. “He spent every spare minute working on that newsletter,” says Crowe. “He has a real entrepreneurial attitude.”

Watkins says he is not out to rule the journalism world but is determined to make a living as his own boss in a profession he enjoys.

“I don’t want to ever have to work for someone else,” says Watkins. “I like being in charge.”

Cub Publisher

From The Arizona Daily Star

By ED SEVERSON | The Arizona Daily Star 
November 12, 1999

Thanks to a University of Arizona journalism student, Lordsburg, N.M., is a two-newspaper town. 

“I don’t quit anything when I put my mind to it,” said Jason Watkins, 21, publisher of The Independent, a 7-month-old, 16-page weekly. 

Boasting a population of maybe 3,500, Lordsburg, about 150 miles east of Tucson, sits beside Interstate 10 and the main Union Pacific tracks, more or less in the middle of nowhere. In fact, the highway and tracks are pretty much the reason for the town. Although it no longer has a picture show, Watkins’ hometown does have a bowling alley. 

“It’s got one high school, a post office, some fast-food places and a courthouse – that’s about it,” said Watkins. “It reminds me a lot of Willcox.” 

Watkins readily admits that the town doesn’t generate much news but, as he sees it, there are more than enough stories to fill the paper. He started the paper because he figured the local cover! age was too thin. The area has more “neat, fun people, who have led amazing lives” than any place he’s ever been, he says. 

“We go out and find those people that are interesting and make sure they get recognized.”

Serving a county of about 6,500, The Independent publishes 3,000 copies a week. Cost: 30 cents a copy. The competition – the 112-year-old Lordsburg Liberal – sells for 40 cents. 

“We’ve basically reached our (circulation) limit, because everybody’s already reading The Independent,” Watkins said. 

The paper has one full-time employee – an editor – and six part-time employees, including Watkins. Every week, he climbs into his Chevy Blazer for the 2 1/2-hour trek to Lordsburg, where he spends Tuesday night and Wednesday morning working on the paper. 

“I sell ads, sign paychecks, call people and do stories,” he said. 

Work done, he returns to the student grind in Tucson. 

For the ambitious Watkins, launching! newspapers isn’t anything new. In 1995, he started The ! Maverick Times, his high school’s first successful student newspaper. 

It’s still being published. 

Phyllis McDonald, one of Watkins’ high school teachers, credits him with changing her career. She used to teach remedial reading full time. Now she splits her time between remedial reading and journalism. She said other students had approached her about starting a student newspaper, but when they found out how much work it took, they dropped the idea. 

“(Watkins) promised he’d have a paper every two weeks, and he hit his deadline,” she said. “He always shoots for the moon, and sometimes he hits it.” 

Watkins became a newsman at 14, when he began working as a part-time reporter and photographer at the Lordsburg Liberal. 

“Jack Walz, the man I worked for, taught me everything I know about small-town journalism,” he said. “The bug kind of bit me.” 

Watkins said that when Walz died this year, “the paper took a nose dive.” Watkins made three offers to buy it. All were turned down. That’s when he decided to start his own competing paper. 

“Starting from scratch has been our best asset,” he said. “Basically, we’ve got a big empty canvas, and we can try anything.” 

For start-up money, his grandmother co-signed on a $30,000 loan. “She borrowed against her house,” Watkins said. Watkins’ editor, 29-year-old Brenda Collins, also had worked at the Liberal. 

“We always knew that he (Watkins) was going to do something more,” she said. 

As she sees it, his strong point is coming up with good ideas and seeing them through. In a word: “Gumption.” 

For instance, selling ads for a paper that didn’t exist wasn’t easy. 

“It took a lot of sitting around and talking to people,” she said. “He’s not afraid to do anything.” 

Watkins’ mother, Connie Corbell, does The Independent’s billing. 

“I keep my thumb on the checkbook, is what I’m doing,” Corbell said. She also makes a 120-mile round-trip to Deming each week to get the paper printed and hauls back the edition. When her son first told her about his idea of starting a newspaper, she was against it. “It sounded overwhelming,” she said. 

However, she knew that trying to talk him out it was a losing battle. 

“I know him well enough to know that if he said he’d do it, he’d do it,” she said. “I thought that everyone in town knows him and likes him, so he’ll get the support of the community.” 

“There’s nothing like having your mom in your hometown, helping you out,” Watkins said. 

Eventually, Watkins wants to own a chain of small newspapers in New Mexico. As for now, he doesn’t expect The Independent to make money for a while. 

No matter. 

“I’m happy as long as we pay the bills, keep the lights on and keep printing.”

Taking the “Pulse” of Southern New Mexico

Pulse Weekly

By JEANNE LA MARCA | NMPA Shop Talk
December 2004

If you want to know what’s happenin’ in southern New Mexico, get your hands on a copy of Pulse. It’s a weekly entertainment guide that lists movies, places to eat, clubs, concerts, CD releases, things to do, and events. Anything and everything there is to do in the area you’ll find in Pulse, right in the Lordsburg Liberal.

Jason Watkins, the former editor and publisher of The Independent and later the Lordsburg Liberal, is the editor of Pulse.

The Pulse staff seeks to reach a wide readership of all ages, but the main focus is the much sought after younger reader. “When I was at the Lordsburg Liberal, I edited in a style that would attract young people so they would get in the habit of reading a newspaper,” Watkins explained.

“I’m doing the same thing with Pulse, and so we target people ages 18 to 34. That’s the demographic right now that’s being completely under-served. I know because I belong to it,” Watkins said. “We’re the ones right now who have the money and who are spending it. We’re the ones advertisers are desperate to reach. And we’re the ones who will, or already do, make the important decisions.”

Anyone checking out the ads in Pulse will see that many of them are, shall we say, family oriented, but others are not your mother’s advertisements. Some of the ads skate on the edge, right where the younger set hangs out. It’s easy to see why business owners choose Pulse as a place to spend their advertising nickel. The younger readers always want to know what’s going on, so they read Pulse and, Voila!, That’s where the cool ads can be found.

In addition to Pulse’s offerings of flixs (aka flicks), tunes, grub and clubs, included is a reprise of a Lordsburg favorite — ”Daytrippin’ — that’s become a hit. In addition, readers can visually snack on terrific feature stories, usually written by Adrian Gomez, Pulse’s features editor, and Watkins. If these two actually visit all the people and places they write about, it’s a wonder they have time to put the magazine together every week.

But then, good editors probably function best on a wing and a prayer, with a little sleep thrown in on a good day…er, night. These young guys do whatever it takes to keep their readers happy and in the know.

“Our goal is to be fresh, edgy, sometimes humorous and relevant,” Watkins said. It’s not easy to launch a brand-new publication (something

else I have some experience with) and sustain it. But, in the first few months of the magazine, we’re not just sustaining it; we’re growing. Make no mistake: Pulse knows its readership. “Young readers are so much smarter and so much more sophisticated than people think,” Watkins believes.

“There’s nothing worse than when we, the young readers, pick up a publication that’s bland, boring and not relevant to our lives.”

No one would describe Watkins as boring. When he bought the Liberal, it was (and is) New Mexico’s oldest weekly paper. Some might have seen this move as sketchy since he was only 20 years old, a tender age that made him the nation’s youngest publisher.

But from the time Watkins was in high school, he worked at the Liberal and was tutored by the best-for-Liberal editor and publisher, Jack Walz. Jack (he was rarely ever referred to as Mr. Walz) could see the talent and determination his protege had, and so endeavored to give young Jason as extensive an education in the publishing business as he could. This education “took,” and when Jason went to college, he majored in journalism at the University of Arizona, and graduated in 2003 with a bachelor’s degree. He has won several New Mexico Press Awards, Arizona Press Club Awards, and has

been featured in Editor & Publisher Magazine, New Mexico Magazine, and the Arizona Daily Star. In addition to being an accomplished writer, Watkins is an excellent photographer. His work has appeared in the Albuquerque Journal, New Mexico Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, and other publications across the west. He also puts his friends into hysterics with black-line-drawing cartoons.

Watkins is excited to be taking on the duties of a new publication, not that he was displeased with his position at the Las Cruces Sun-News. He’s simply happiest when he can be doing something trendy and vibrant, and Pulse, the latest publication owned by Gannett, the nation’s largest chain of newspapers, is certainly that.

When Watkins was making things sizzle at the Liberal, he tried some things that raised a few eyebrows, mostly in approval. Once he decided to tap into the frustration his readers experience with technology that goes awry or gets out of hand. He and his compadres went out south of town and took his cell phone that had managed to rack up a bill to rival the national debt (not that Watkins had anything to do with the size of the bill).

They blew the phone to bits and photographed the whole event for the paper.

Though a couple of dissenters voiced their opinions of the blowup nearly everyone else loved it, provoking Watkins to toy with the idea of establishing a Website offering to blow up VCRs, computers, and similar items that make their owners nuts, and document the event with his camera. Speaking of his superiors at Pulse’s parent company,Gannett, Watkins said, “They haven’t yet allowed me to blow up a cell phone, but I’m working on it.” 

Pulse comes out every Thursday morning and is distributed in Las Cruces, Silver City, Lordsburg, Deming, Alamogordo and other areas in the southern half of the state. It is also distributed free on Fridays on newsstands across southern New Mexico.

Now at the ripe old age of 26, Watkins wants to make sure everyone knows where to go and what to do to have fun in southern New Mexico. “We want to know what’s hot, who’s coming to concert, what movies are opening, what clubs have the best drink specials, “Watkins explained.

“That’s what Pulse is all about. And if we can do it with style and humor, that’s even better”

Jack Walz would be proud.

Student Starts Newspaper

 

from Cursor, Fall 1999

By JIM PATTEN / Head of Journalism Department

 

We hear a great deal these days about newspapers closing. We don’t hear as much about new ones starting.

But over in Lordsburg, N.M., a new weekly newspaper has hit the streets – with a twist.

The publisher of the newspaper is Jason Watkins. After being rebuffed in his attempt to buy the Lordsburg Liberal, a long-established weekly in the western New Mexico town, Watkins decided to start his own paper and go head-to-head with the Liberal.

So on May 21, The Independent fired its first shot in what must be the smallest town in America to have a newspaper war. With a Page One headline that said “Start the presses,” the first edition included 16 tabloid pages. A color photo graced the cover.

The Independent is the second newspaper Watkins has launched. When he was a sophomore at Lordsburg High School, he started The Maverick, a school newspaper. The paper is still going strong.

The twist here – actually there are two twists – is that Watkins just (Sept. 28) turned 21. He started the paper when he was 20 – too young to buy a beer in a town where as a publisher he’s a community force. The other twist is that Watkins is a student in the journalism department, slaving alongside other beginning reporting students doing obits, weather and cop stories.

His J205/Reporting the News teacher is adjunct instructor RuthAnn Hogue. She said that when she asked members of her class to introduce themselves, Watkins left out the fact that he’s a newspaper publisher.

“He’s doing very well at hiding it,” she said, adding that he’s doing fine in her class.

He commutes from Lordsburg to Tucson, a two-hour drive. There’s his life as a student like all the others, banging away on the department’s rickety computers. Then there’s his life as boss of The Independent, where one of his first moves was to lure the editor of the rival Liberal to work for him.

Editor Brenda Collins (who, by the way, is 29) said Watkins is open minded and eager.

“He always wants to try all these new things,” said Collins, a Lordsburg native who earned a journalism degree from New Mexico State University. 

She said it doesn’t bother her to work for someone eight years her junior.

Watkins isn’t sure but he thinks, and probably correctly, that he’s the youngest publisher in the country. He and his newspaper have been featured in New Mexico Magazine, The Albuquerque Journal, the Deming Headlight and Editor & Publisher.

Jason has his own philosophy of journalism. “I believe then [when he started the high school paper] as I do now that I can do anything with honesty and integrity. I secured a three-year job at the local weekly paper, the one that would become my bitter rival.

“There, my teacher was… a raspy-voiced newspaperman who taught me much more than the proper way to curse. He believed, strongly and passionately, that the community press was a fragile instrument.

“He breathed respect and dignity into the pages of his work, and through his example I became a journalist of truth and integrity.”

The Independent claims just 250 subscribers while distributing more than 2,600 copies, a natural strategy for a new paper. It has all the usual community news – obits, school sports, school lunch menus – plus a ton of advertising, including some on Page One.

It even has a web site. You can read The Independent at www.gilanet.com/independent.

Jason Watkins isn’t the sort of person to ask for any favors, but I think when the time comes the faculty just might let him graduate without taking The Tombstone Epitaph.

New Mexico Magazine

 

October 1999

A Newspaper Industry Casualty You May Have Missed

from the Columbia Journalism Review

Out in the desolate southwestern corner of New Mexico, a small newspaper in a small desert town died today.

By Edward B. Colby | Columbia Journalism Review
Thursday, Feb. 1 2007
The Lordsburg Liberal, the oldest weekly in New Mexico and the third-oldest paper in the state, delivers one final issue to its readers this morning, then goes out of business.

In today’s dog-eat-dog newspaper world, the Liberal never stood a chance. It is not available online. It has a staff of three, and normally runs 12 to 16 pages. But it has been around for 120 years, and now there is inevitable sadness about its fate, announced last week.

“It’s pretty heart-wrenching right now,” says Lorenzo Alba, the Liberal’s editor since October 2002 and publisher since last March. “I think a lot of people are treating it as the loss of a family member, as the loss of a friend.”

Alba, 39, grew up on the north side of town and occasionally sold the paper door to door, and says even now hawkers produce some sales that way. He covered high school baseball for the Liberal before leaving Lordsburg after graduation at 17, then returned in September 2002 and “kind of walked into this job.” Now his paper produces “awesome” coverage of local sports, with most news stories focused on Lordsburg, the county seat, with some from around Hidalgo County.

But if the Liberal is a community mainstay, it also competes against the weekly Hidalgo County Herald in a two-newspaper town, pop. 2500, that parent company MediaNews Group has decided does not have room for both. (The Liberal claims a circulation of 1,850, theHerald 1,800.)

Given Lordsburg’s small nature, it “just doesn’t have enough resources to put out a newspaper with the quality we expect,” says David McClain, vice president of the Texas-New Mexico Newspapers Partnership, which MediaNews took over in January 2006.

“The potential for growth is limited, so we decided to own both papers, or not own any papers in Lordsburg,” McClain explains. “We weren’t able to buy the other newspaper, so we chose to close Lordsburg and use our people, who are very talented, in our other areas of our company where they would get a return for their efforts.”

As a relative newcomer to Lordsburg, McClain says he cannot speak to the Liberal’s financial condition except to say “this year we are not losing money.” Alba, the editor, says he understands the paper “was about breaking even,” adding, “The last six months we were doing pretty well.”

Mayor Clark Smith says he always thought “that sooner or later one of the two wasn’t going to make it,” but he presumed it would be the newest paper (the 6-year-old Herald) that would close down, leaving him surprised “that such a large company would close down something that had been around for such a long time.”

And so the Herald, started by Brenda Greene in 2001, has won out, though she is not too pleased by the Liberal’s demise, either, saying that it eventually “will be good for my business, but it’s kinda sad to see it go.”

This quirky story would seem to end there, with Alba headed off to do major account sales and new product development at the Newspapers Partnership-operated Silver City Sun-News, were it not for the determination of another local newspaperman to keep theLiberal’s name alive.

Jason Watkins, 28, is the Liberal’s former publisher and a proud “fourth-generation resident of Lordsburg and Hidalgo County.” His grandmother’s birth announcement ran in the Liberal, as did his mother’s and his own. And, he says, “I have no intention of letting MediaNews Group just pick up and leave with the name.

“It’s not just a little community newspaper. I think it’s part of American history, and it has a tremendous heritage, and it’s worth saving,” Watkins says, noting that the paper preceded the state by a quarter-century, and that Lordsburg was once New Mexico’s second-largest city.

As a high school freshman, Watkins was hired by the paper’s longtime editor, Jack Walz, as a sports stringer. He quickly started doing more news stories, photography, and design, and by graduation he was assistant editor. Watkins went to the University of Arizona in Tucson as a journalism major. But after Walz died in 1998, he says, the Liberal “sort of went downhill.”

“So I set out to buy the Liberal and negotiated with the publisher of it, and she wouldn’t sell it to me,” Watkins says. Naturally, he then started his own newspaper, the Independent, at age 19 in 1999.

Jeanne La Marca, now the Liberal’s part-time staff writer and proofreader, says the Independent was soon doing so well that Watkins was on his way to putting the Liberal out of business. Within nine months of starting the Independent, Watkins says, he got a call from theLiberal’s publisher, who was ready to sell. His mom mortgaged her house to help him buy it, and from 2000 to 2002 the Liberal was his.

“It was my baby. I came back home and put my life and my college plans on hold so I could build this newspaper again,” Watkins says.

But when MediaNews approached him in 2002, their offer was too good to pass up. By selling the Liberal he could finish college and further his journalism career — and, Watkins says, “They assured me that they would keep it in print and honor the traditions of the Liberal.” (According to Watkins, MediaNews was in charge of the Newspapers Partnership then, before it turned those papers over to Gannett, and before Gannett turned them back to MediaNews a year ago.)

So Watkins is appealing to MediaNews to allow the surviving paper, the Herald, to carry on the Liberal’s name. Dean Singleton has not returned his phone calls or e-mails, Watkins says, though he has spoken with David McClain, who says this: “The Lordsburg Liberal is our name, and we’re giving Jason’s suggestion consideration.”

The Herald’s Greene says she hopes something can be worked out, and Mayor Smith, a history buff, says he supports Watkins’ efforts “100 percent.”

“I think it sets a bad precedent for a big media conglomerate to come into a town and run the paper into the ground and leave,” Watkins says. “I’m not going to give up the fight. I’m going to appeal to anyone who will listen to me and really try to save this paper again.”

State’s Oldest Weekly Folds

from The Albuquerque Journal

 

By RENE ROMO | The Albuquerque Journal

LORDSBURG – The three-inch-tall headline in today’s edition of The Independent Lordsburg Liberal summed up its own sad story: “EL FIN.”

The end.

After nearly 120 years, New Mexico’s oldest weekly newspaper rolled off the presses for the last time Wednesday.

Media giant Media News Group, which bought the little paper in October 2002, announced last week that a challenging economic climate forced the closure of the paper.

The newspaper’s fans said they felt its demise personally.

“This is like part of the family,” said 85-year-old Lordsburg resident Allen Hill. “Ever since my high school days, it’s just been a part of us.”

Hill, chairman of the board of the Lordsburg-Hidalgo County Museum, had signed a letter with other residents asking MediaNews to reconsider its decision.

The Liberal’s 39-year-old editor and publisher, Lordsburg native Lorenzo Alba Jr., said the last few days were difficult.

“Now it’s time to let go of something that is very near and dear to my heart. It’s like losing a love or a family member,” said Alba, who delivered the paper as a pre-teen.

Besides the bumpy local economy, another factor in the Liberal’s demise was the head-to-head competition against another weekly – the upstart Hidalgo County Herald – for advertisers and subscribers in a town of fewer than 3,000 residents.

Former Liberal employee Brenda Greene started the Herald in late 2000. She basically runs a onewoman operation, aided by her sister who works part-time as advertising manager.

Lordsburg Mayor Arthur Clark Smith said, “I don’t think there was any doubt that two newspapers could not survive in a small town. There’s just not enough advertising dollars.”

The surprise was that the Herald outlasted the paper owned by a company that owns more than 50 newspapers in a dozen states.

Greene said she, too, is sad to see the Liberal close. Her first post-college reporting job was at the Liberal in 1993 under the late Jack Walz, then owner and publisher, who ran the paper for more than two decades.

In 1994, Walz hired an eager high school student, Jason Watkins, who went on in 1999 to start his own local weekly, the Independent. Watkins merged his paper with the Liberal after buying it in February 2000.

Over the years, the Liberal covered all the major events in the community’s life. Among them: a train stop by presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896; a 1927 visit by aviator Charles Lindbergh during a barnstorming tour; a stop by President Harry Truman in 1948.

But, in a tribute to the paper published today, Watkins, who now edits a San Diego magazine, said the paper’s true purpose was covering the little things that make up small-town life.

“If you grow up in this community, it’s likely the Lordsburg Liberal will run your birth announcement,” Watkins wrote. “When you’re married, your wedding announcement will run in the Liberal. So too will your child’s birth announcement. And when you die, the Liberal will run your obituary. Read in its entirety, from the first issue to the last, the Lordsburg Liberal tells the collective story of this community.”

Years ago, Smith said, it was not uncommon to see a local resident’s obituary on the front page.

“I’d go to work and people would say: ‘Man, is that the only thing going on in Lordsburg? You’ve got to put the obituary on the front page?’ ” Smith recounted. “Jack (Walz) would say, ‘In a small town, everybody’s important.’ ”

Farewell to the Lordsburg Liberal

from The Guardian

 

By ROY GREENSLADE | The UK Guardian

 

Lots of newspapers close, but I record this particular newsprint death simply because I love the paper’s title: the Lordsburg Liberal. After 120 years the oldest weekly in New Mexico is about to publish its final issue. Its owners, MediaNews Group, say they prefer to grow another of their titles instead, the Hidalgo County Herald. But it’s a pity to lose that title, is it not? And some of us – not President Bushobviously – do like the Liberal media!

Young Publisher’s Plea For Old Newspaper

By ROY GREENSLADE | The UK Guardian

 

At the weekend I mentioned the coming closure of the Lordsburg Liberal in New Mexico. That prompted an email from the paper’s former publisher, Jason Watkins, who is obviously an extraordinary young man. He was just 20 when he bought the paper in 2000, becoming America’s youngest press publisher, and then sold it in 2002 to MediaNews group, so that he could finish his education.

Anyway, the now 26-year-old Watkins pleaded in today’s final issue of the Liberal for the title to continue, urging the company to reconsider its decision to drop the name, or to allow a rival to use the title. “That way,” he writes, “our children and grandchildren can read the same Liberal our parents and grandparents read.”

Oldest New Mexico Weekly, Slated to Close, May Have Its Name Live On

from Editor & Publisher Magazine

 

By JOE STRUPP | Editor & Publisher Magazine

Thursday, Feb. 1, 2007

 

Although today marks the last scheduled edition of the tiny Lordsburg (N.M.) Liberal, which touts itself as the oldest weekly in the state at 120 years of age, a new push to save the name has emerged.

When word came out last week that the 1,850 circulation weekly would close, locals reacted with disappointment and opposition. As a news source that stretches back through generations, there was no shortage of readers who could claim they “grew up with the Liberal in my house.”

“The reaction has been incredible,” said Lorenzo Alba, the paper’s publisher, who was forced to close at the direction of MediaNews Group, which owns the weekly paper. “People have been calling and trying to find out what is happening.” 

Corporate officials have said that economic pressures, which have dropped the Liberal’s circulation from about 2,300 four years ago, are to blame. “We decided to close our paper down because the paper wasn’t making any money,” said MediaNews CFO Ron Mayo.

Also among the causes is the competing Hidalgo County Herald, an 1,800-circulation paper that has been eating in to the Liberal’s readership since it launched in 2000. “People started buying both papers and that was the biggest contributor,” Alba said.

But as the Liberal prepares to publish its last edition today, a new movement is afoot to save the weekly. Several longtime residents, including the publisher of the Herald, propose to keep the Liberal going by transferring its name to the Herald. 

Jason Watkins, a native of the area who owned the Liberal from 2000 to 2002, has proposed that MediaNews simply allow the Herald to change its name to the Lordsburg Liberal, thus allowing the historic paper to remain. He says when he sold the paper to MediaNews in 2002, “they offered me every assurance that they would keep it in publication.”

Watkins, who has relocated to San Diego but remains in touch with local news people, says he has gotten support from several Lordsburg residents, including Brenda Greene, Herald publisher and a former Liberal staffer. “If it is money they want, we will raise it to make it happen,” Watkins said. “The problem is that the name, Lordsburg Liberal, will just disappear. It has been around since 1887.”

Greene, who launched the Herald in 2000, says she would be glad to rename the paper as the Liberal. “It would be nice for it to remain in our community, it is an historical part of our community,” she said. “There is a sentimental value to the community.”

MediaNews Group’s Mayo said he was unaware of the proposal, but planned to look into it. MediaNews Group CEO William Dean Singleton has not retuned calls seeking comment on the proposal. Watkins said he has been trying to contact corporate executives for the past week, but with no luck.

David McClain, regional director of the Texas-New Mexico Newspapers, which operates the Liberal and other area newspapers for MediaNews Group, also did not return calls seeking comment.

Watkins said he believes the request can be agreed to if he can meet with MediaNews officials. “I don’t plan on giving up,” he said. “I am not going to let it die.”

Why JPants?

Here’s the story on JPants: When I moved to California, I lived with a few people, including my friend Jason Lilley — who is, incidentally, a decorated war hero and Silver Star recipient who will be featured in the upcoming HBO documentary “Generation Kill” (http://www.hbo.com/generationkill/) — but there was one too many Jasons living under the same roof so, for no real reason, I started calling him JPants. (His actual pants were unremarkable, as far as I remember.) Eventually, the suffix was added to the first initial of everyone in the house but somehow, with the passing of time, my name was the only one to which the suffix stuck. When I registered my domain name, I tried to get jasonwatkins.com but the fake Jason Watkins — who does not appreciate you e-mailing him, by the way — already owned it. And thus, jpants.com was born.