Near the
beginning of my newspaper days, I got sent on an assignment I still remember.
It would probably have been some time in 1973. The town of San Juan Bautista
(best known for having scenes of Hitchcock’s Vertigo shot there) was about to die, and I was sent out to do the
post mortem.
That little
old mission town, located a few miles off U.S. 101, had a population of just
under 2,000 people at the time. The principal employer and only industrial
activity was a cement plant or quarry that employed about 200, and the owners
had decided it was no longer economically viable, so they shut it down.
The mayor,
who may also have been the head of the Chamber of Commerce, was in all the Bay
Area newspapers, lamenting the imminent death of the town, owing to the loss of
its largest employer. One of the Bay Area TV stations had done a story that was
picked up by the CBS Evening News. My boss decided that even though it would
require paying 12 cents a mile for a 50-mile round trip, we had to have the
story. My salary then was so low it didn’t even figure into the cost
consideration.
The Community’s Last Gasp
Photographer
Sam Vestal and I went over after lunch to get the story. The mayor was unable
to meet with us until late in the afternoon, so we figured we’d do some
man-in-the-street interviews and capture the community angst about the
catastrophic business closing being the town’s death knell.
Actually,
the town looked pretty good when we drove in a little after two o’clock. There
were no boarded up buildings on the main street, and the restaurant scene
looked fairly lively. I figured it was the last gasp of looking good before the
inevitable collapse. Sam parked the car and we went into a store to ask the
shopkeeper how long she expected to stay in business now that the plant had
closed.
Instead of
the tale of woe we were expecting, we got a derisive snort and a stream of
unprintable language about the mayor. The shopkeeper explained that most of the
people who worked in the closed facility didn’t live in town and that the burg
had become such a mecca for antiques shoppers that it was thriving. She made it
pretty clear that any municipal obituary would be premature.
Things Not What They Seemed
I figured
I’d gotten lucky and scored my contrarian quote (or as much of it as I could
use in a family newspaper) right off the bat. But when the next half-dozen
people we talked to all said the same thing, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the
news stories were wrong, and the town was OK. When we finally got in to see the
mayor and he began hemming and hawing as I raised those points, I knew I was on
to something.
We got back
to the office, and I wrote a story about a town that had suffered a major
business closure, but wouldn’t die because tourism had become big enough to
keep it going. Forty years later, my story holds up pretty well. In fact when I
tried to go on the Internet to find out about the closed business, there was
nothing about it in any of the usual sources. The business whose death was
supposed to take the town with it has been entirely forgotten.
But I
haven’t forgotten the lesson of that experience and hope I never will. Reduced
to its simplest form, it’s this: Be skeptical
of the first version of the story.
