Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [111]
Page Two was about how I felt about Kennedy’s death and what it was like to watch Oswald get shot.
The next day my dad made the twenty-five copies of the St. John Eagle at AC Spark Plug and brought them home from work. He had personally typed, printed, and stapled each copy together himself. It was like an early Christmas present, and I could see it made him happy to see me so happy to have in my hands my very first newspaper.
The following morning I took the St. John Eagle into my fourth-grade classroom and handed them out to the classmates I thought would read it. Mrs. LaCombe saw this and asked for a copy. A big smile came across her face.
“Why, look at you!” she said. “This looks quite good.”
Would that the Mother Superior felt the same way. For when Mrs. LaCombe showed her my paper, she requested my presence in her office.
“Can you tell me what this is?” she asked bluntly.
“It’s our new student paper—the St. John Eagle!” I said proudly, not expecting any blowback.
“We don’t have a student newspaper, Michael,” she said. “And we don’t need one. This is not authorized and we cannot approve it. So you will have to collect the copies you’ve passed out and hand them over to me.”
I was crushed. It made no sense to me. What did I do wrong? But I dared not object, so I offered up a “Yes, Mother,” and went back to my classroom to gather the contraband.
The following year, still wanting to publish a newspaper, I started a new one called the Hill St. News, this one intended not for school but for our neighborhood. Again, my dad made the copies for me at work on GM’s dime, and this periodical lasted a whole three issues before a neighborhood parent called my mom, furious that I had listed her house for sale in my Want Ads section.
“But they have a FOR SALE sign in their yard,” I pleaded. “I was just trying to help.”
Of course I had no idea what houses cost, so I went ahead and listed theirs for $1,200—which, to a ten-year-old, is a helluva lot of money! No matter; the Hill St. News was shut down.
Two more times I would attempt to start a school paper at St. John’s – in sixth grade and eighth grade. And each time the plug was pulled. I got the message and retired from the newspaper business for the next nine years.
When you live in a company town like Flint, nearly all the media is bought and paid for and controlled by that company or its lackeys (aka the local elected officials). In the case of our one and only daily paper, the Flint Journal, it provided for a particularly pathetic situation. The Journal was so in love with General Motors, it never would turn a critical eye on its operations. It was a cheerleading newspaper: the company could do no wrong!
The working people of the Flint area hated this rag, but it was our only daily so you read it. Everyone called it the “Flint Urinal.” Editorially, the paper had historically been on the wrong side of every major social and political issue of the twentieth century—“the wrong side” meaning: whatever side the union workers were on, the Urinal took the opposite position. In the early years it attacked the socialist mayor whom the people of Flint had elected. It attacked the formation of the UAW and the Great Sitdown Strike of 1936–37 that forced General Motors into its first contract with the union. It endorsed the Republican candidate for president while the workers voted for the Democrat. It supported the Vietnam War. And it would become an unapologetic booster of boondoggle downtown developments that would leave the city devastated.
By 1976, my friends and I had complained enough to each other about the state of the newspaper in Flint that we decided to start one ourselves. At first, we called it Free to Be, but that sounded too hippie, so we changed it to the Flint Voice in honor of the great alternative weekly we received in the mail each week from New York, the Village Voice. There