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Dominica
Jack Phinney
A scenic island in the Caribbean is drifting serenely through the summer, anticipating the independence Britain has promised it.
Then, trouble.
An explosion in the guesthouse where a wealthy American investor is staying unnerves the British-appointed Prime Minister whose official residence is nearby. An assassination attempt is suspected. But by whom? Possibly Carib insurgents from the island’s once-fearsome tribe that now is neatly tucked away on terrain apportioned to it. Or perhaps scoundrels more wicked still.
Fortunately the mysterious American, though shaken, is unscathed. Nonetheless, the incident set in motion a far-reaching investigation, leading the island government’s senior security officer and his associate to Geneva, Switzerland.
There, in the space of two days, a succession of extraordinary events unfolds. |
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Wednesday Warrior
Jack Phinney
To some, Eugene Cervi was the most dangerous man in Denver. He was indeed temperamental, but not homicidal and only occasionally tyrannical. He had his own little newspaper, built around his Mile High Observations column where he walloped the high and the mighty. He was an unsparing critic of Denver’s two dailies. He described the Rocky Mountain News as “one bad, very bad, morning newspaper,” the Denver Post as “one clumsy afternoon paper wishing to be good if it only knew how.” He reflected on the debilities of the News during World War II and concluded it would have been best if the newspaper had folded, ceding the market to the Post. “Almost any competent operator could then have set in motion, in those postwar years of budding prosperity, a rival newspaper worthy of the spirit of legitimate and constructive competition that makes democracy work,” he wrote. Late in his life, Cervi seized the opportunity to provide exclusive and intensive coverage of a lawsuit understandably downplayed by both Post and News. The suit was a matter of grave concern to the management of both dailies because of its potential to put the Post -- and perhaps the News as well -- in the grasp of acquisitive press lord Samuel Newhouse. Although Cervi considered a Newhouse takeover likely, by no means did he espouse it. He had an acute distaste for chain-newspaper barons in general, and was among a coterie of independent publishers who fought against congressional legislation portrayed as a safeguard of editorial diversity but primarily intended to improve the health of unprofitable major newspapers nationwide. What was originally labeled the Failing Newspaper Bill became the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970 when signed into law by President Richard Nixon. Cervi had called it the Millionaire Crybaby Publishers Bill in testimony before a congressional committee and was aggrieved by its enactment. He didn’t live to witness the rise and fall of the means of preservation it provided -- or the outcome that made its way to Denver in 2009.
Wednesday Warrior is the culmination -- and admittedly the expansion -- of the author’s original plan. At a newspaper gathering in San Francisco in 1997, seated at dinner next to editor and publisher Bruce Brugmann of the San Francisco Bay Area Guardian, I mentioned that I was thinking of writing a book about Denver editor-publisher Gene Cervi, whose commentary had bedeviled business and political bigwigs for a quarter-century. Brugmann had crossed paths with Cervi a time or two and endorsed the idea. Brugmann and I also had crossed paths -- in 1955 at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Brugmann was editor of the campus newspaper, familiarly known as The Rag, and accepted a couple of squibs the author submitted -- both adorned with a sketch provided by ex-Army buddy Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist-humorist-songwriter who lives on in Puff the Magic Dragon, not to mention New York Times crossword puzzles. |
