While Newsday reporters celebrated their winning a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1970 for an exposé of corruption involving public officials and Republican Party figures on Long Island, one of the crooks who had been exposed showed up.

Republican leader Freddie Fellman, who would subsequently go to prison, lived up to his reputation as a big talker, taking the floor and catching the attention of the assembled journalists. “Wait a second,” he said to the surprised revelers. “You couldn’t have done this without me!”

The story is from a new book, Pulitzer’s Gold by Roy Harris Jr., senior editor at CFO magazine. I mentioned it here five weeks ago because the book, which has been selling well, devotes a chapter to The Point Reyes Light’s 1979 gold medal.

Now that I’ve had time to read the book at a leisurely pace, I find myself frequently recounting stories from it, such as the Freddie Fellman tale. Anytime a book does that for me, I figure it’s pretty well written.

Another story I love from Pulitzer’s Gold recounts how Raleigh, North Carolina’s News & Observer won the Public Service medal in 1996 for revealing environmental problems from the state’s burgeoning hog industry. It illustrates the circuitous routes that newspaper investigations often take.

While looking into malfeasance at the North Carolina State Fair back in 1995, two News and Observer reporters discovered the state veterinarian was taking gifts from pork producers. They then looked into the hog industry and discovered that although it had become huge in North Carolina, this “had happened mostly out of the public eye,” the book relates. “And so had the pollution that came with it.”

News and Observer staff eventually wrote that a “megalopolis” of 7 million swine had sprung up in North Carolina, with each pig producing two to four times as much waste as the average human. What’s more, the newspaper reported, this megalopolis of pig pens has no sewage-treatment plants. All the wastes are simply flushed into open pits and sprayed onto fields.Not surprisingly, groundwater was becoming contaminated.

Still another good story from the book, this one containing a public-relations lesson, concerns The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s winning a Public Service medal in 1990. The prize was for revealing “how the American blood industry operates with little government regulation or supervision,” in the words of the Pulitzer Board.

In 1989, a business reporter at The Inquirer gave blood during a drive at his office. Afterward, he became curious about what happened to the blood next. Planning to write a routine business story, the reporter contacted the local Red Cross director and started asking routine questions: How much blood is in the blood bank? What is the dollar value of the blood?

But the director cut him off, saying, “We don’t have to tell you that.” The reporter told author Harris, “I was taken aback, and my journalistic antennae went up.” Suddenly suspicious because of the director’s stonewalling, reporter Gilbert Gaul eventually determined that 61 percent of the Red Cross’ business was blood, not disaster relief, and that “red cells are really a commodity, and they’re sold that way.”

Gaul revealed a secretive, nationwide market in blood, which was being repeatedly sold and resold. His series brought about more federal inspections of blood brokering nationwide, as well as more attention to keeping AIDS out of the blood supply. And it all began with the Red Cross director in Philadelphia refusing to answer some routine questions prompted by a blood drive.

Pulitzer’s Gold is also wonderfully rich in quotations from a variety of writers. Some examples that I’ve found myself repeating:

• “What I try to do in my paper is to give the public part of what it wants to have and part of what it ought to have, whether it wants it or not,” Herbert Bayard Swope, executive editor, New York World.

• The Jazz Age had had a wild youth and a heady middle age¦ the most expensive orgy in history. It was borrowed time anyhow “the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand dukes and the casualness of chorus girls.” F. Scott Fitzerald on the 1920s

• Every reporter is a hope, every editor a disappointment.” Joseph Pulitzer (Pulitzer’s son and grandson are seen above with a bust of the legendary publisher)

In looking at 88 years of competition for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which Joseph Pulitzer considered the top award, author Harris recounts some fascinating events in American history. And what makes the telling itself fascinating is that it’s history as seen through the eyes of reporters who covered the events, whether Hurricane Katrina, 9/11, or the desegregation of Little Rock, Arkansas, schools.

The book is also packed with interesting tidbits about the awarding of the prizes:

•  Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, for example, once wrote dismissively about the prizes although he himself had lobbied Pulitzer jurors on behalf of The Post. (In recent years, Bradlee has spoken more highly of the prizes.)

• In 1918, the Public Service prize went to The Milwaukee Journal for a campaign against “Germanism in America.” The campaign included opposition to German-language classes.

• Columbia University in New York City houses the awards program, and in 1972, university trustees tried to block the gold medal’s being awarded to The New York Times for publishing the Pentagon Papers. The trustees objected that the papers were stolen, but Columbia president William McGill convinced them not to intervene.

• Much of the New Orleans Times-Picayune coverage of Hurricane Katrina, which won a Public Service award in 2006, was published only online because the newspaper building was flooded.

• The Point Reyes Light won its gold medal in 1979 for an exposé of violence and other wrongdoing by the Synanon cult, but even though my former wife Cathy and I then owned the paper, I hadn’t known what went on during the judging until I read Pulitzer’s Gold. According to Los Times media reporter David Shaw, who is quoted by author Harris (above), members of the Pulitzer board and jury told him “they honored The Light” more because it was a small paper whose editors had shown great courage, at considerable financial risk, than because the paper’s stories were necessarily better than the three other finalists in the Public Service category.

All thought The Light stories excellent. But Shaw quoted Michael O’Neill, then editor of The New York Daily News and a member of the jury, as saying that “if you took the names of the newspapers off the entries, I would definitely have voted for The Chicago Tribune series on the problems of the aged.” Shaw also quoted an unnamed board member as saying of The Light’s Dave and Cathy Mitchell: “The job that couple did was damn good, but the guts they showed, with Synanon just a few miles down the road, that’s what the Pulitzers are all about, that’s what won the award.”

Shaw of The LA Times accuses board members of sentimentality for reasoning this way. In contrast, Bob Woodward, The Washington Post writer of Watergate fame, “proposes that “degree of difficulty” should be factored into standards used for the Public Service Prize,” author Harris notes. “To some degree,” he adds, “the Pulitzer board already does that when it considers the long odds faced by a small newspaper.”

Pulitzer’s Gold, University of Missouri Press, 382 pages plus 90-page appendix, $39.95.

Fatimir Sejdiu, president of newly independent Kosovo. Its sovereignty has been recognized by the US, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark, and other countries, but not Serbia or Russia.

When Kosovo proclaimed its independence of Serbia two weeks ago (Feb. 17, 2008), news of the momentous occasion, and of rioting and an attack on the US embassy in Belgrade, was of more than passing interest to me.

Unlikely as it sounds, while the Kosovo War was underway in 1999, the little Point Reyes Light, which I then owned, chanced to have a correspondent in Kosovar refugee camps.

Equally unexpected, an 17-year-old refugee girl gave our correspondent, Adrienne Baumann, her personal journal. In horrifying detail, the journal of Albana Berisha from Pristina describes being caught in Serbia’s attempt to cleanse Kosovo of its ethnically Albanian majority. The journal goes on to record her family’s long and harrowing flight through the mountains to safety in the neighboring country of Albania.

Adrienne, a former Light reporter from a Chileno Valley family, had been working in Italy when the war broke out, and she volunteered to do relief work at miserable refugee camps in Albania. The Light printed her account and posted it online, along with Albana’s, prompting a flurry of angry emails to the paper from people in Serbia.

Light editor Tess Elliott has now told me she’s going to publish a recap of what was reported by the teenage Kosovar, Albana, as well as by West Marin’s witness to the war’s casualties, Adrienne. It’s bound to be a moving account.

Most Kosovars, like most Albanians, are Muslim, but culturally they are European rather than Middle Eastern. Most Serbs are Serbian Orthodox. A major reason why Serbs have long resisted Kosovar independence is that a number of their church’s hallowed places are in Kosovo.

In 1990, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic revoked the autonomy of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo, which resulted in an uprising that lasted from 1996 to 1999, pitting Serbian forces against guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army. Supporting the KLA were a nowadays-unlikely pair of collaborators: Islamic mujahideen and NATO.

Initially, there were atrocities by both sides, and while the Serbian government claimed it was merely fighting “terrorists,” the UN reported that Serbs had driven 850,000 of Kosovo’s two million inhabitants from their homes. As you’ll recall, in March 1999, NATO forces led by the US intervened with a seven-week bombing campaign, stopped the ethnic cleansing, and turned Kosovo over to international peacekeepers.

Those peacekeepers have been there ever since. For the most part, Kosovo has been relatively calm since the war ended, and perhaps that very calmness is what led to one of the more-bizarre diplomatic rows of recent times.

Among the international peacekeepers were members of the Norwegian Army Telemark battalion, and they found themselves stuck killing time, perhaps making them cynical about their role in Kosovo.

As it happened, back when NATO had intervened in 1999, a radio talk-show host in Seattle, Bob Rivers of KZOK, was unhappy with the US role as international policeman, especially because of its inconsistencies.

So Rivers took the music from the Beach Boys’ 1988 hit Kokomo, wrote new lyrics, and rerecorded the song as a political satire called Kosovo.

The parody caused much laughter in Seattle but after a year was mostly forgotten. In 2002, however, some Norwegian peacekeepers happened upon the parody. Seeing that the lyrics were apt for their own situation, the Norwegians (above) using a hand-held camera filmed themselves lip-synching to the song.

The Beach Boys’ song, as I’m sure you remember, began: “Aruba, Jamaica, ooo I wanna take ya/ Bermuda, Bahama come on, pretty mamma/ Key Largo, Montego, baby, why don’t we go?”

The song the Norwegians mouthed begins: “Croatia, Albania, somewhere near Romania/ It’s Euro and NATO, why the hell do we go?”

In the Beach Boys’ song, the lines were: “Afternoon delight/ cocktails and moonlit nights/ That dreamy look in your eye/ Give me a tropical contact high/ Way down in Kokomo”

Dressed in camouflage, and carrying their combat rifles, the Norwegians on patrol mouth, “Protecting human rights/ Air strikes and firefights/ And we’ll be dropping our bombs/ Wherever Serbian bad guys go/ Just up from Kosovo.” (Presumably in Serbia.)

The Norwegians dance atop armored vehicles and a bombed-out bus. From the bus, they mouth the lines: “Every time we go/ To little places like Kosovo/ We never really know/ What happens after we go/ Tough luck for Kosovo.”

In 2005, three years after the clip was filmed, it ended up on the website You Tube; Serbian television quickly found and aired it; television stations throughout the Balkans then rebroadcast the clip; and all hell broke loose.

Furious, the Serbian government claimed the clip proved what Serbia had been saying, that the peacekeepers were hostile to the country. Surprisingly, the Serbs also complained about the indecency of the soldiers sometimes being shown bare-chested.

Norway’s ambassador to Serbia immediately apologized, saying, “I really hope this incident will not disturb the lasting and deep friendly relations between our countries.” Luckily for them, the Norwegian peacekeepers had by then completed their tour of duty and were no longer in the military, so they were not disciplined.

Here’s a link to the video. I should warn you, however, that while the bulk of the video is humorous, its ending is grim although not gory.

The song ends: “Somalia, Grenada,/ Or rescuing Kuwait-a/ We screwed you, Rwanda/ Wish we coulda helped ya/ Iraqi embargo/ How it ends we don’t know…” At this point, the soldier singing gets hit by a truck for the final irony.

There once was a country called Yugoslavia.

At the end of World War I while the victors were dismantling the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, they created Yugoslavia by cramming more than 20 ethnic groups into one ungainly nation rife with internal rivalries.

From 1945 until his death in 1980, Communist Party boss Marshal Tito, popular for having led Yugoslav resistance to the Nazis, was able to hold Yugoslavia together. But less than a decade after his death, the Soviet Union dissolved, and soon afterward, Yugoslavia did too. (Although Yugoslavia had been communist, it had not been part of the Soviet bloc.)

The onetime Yugoslav republics of Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in 1991, Bosnia a year later. Macedonia declared its independence in 1991, but the UN didn’t recognize it as a sovereign nation until 1993. Montenegro declared its independence in 2006. Kosovo two weeks ago became the sixth region to secede, leaving Serbia as the only region still wearing the mantle of the old Republic of Yugoslavia.

It is easy to underestimate the power of coincidence; nonetheless, I am surprised by a sudden rekindling of interest in The Point Reyes Light and West Marin Citizen as representing two poles of community journalism.

A German journalist, Stephan Russ-Mohl, showed up at my cabin yesterday to interview me about the changes at The Light since I sold it two years ago. In 1992 while teaching Journalism at the Free University of Berlin, Russ-Mohl authored Zeitungsumbruch: Wie sich Amerikas Press revolutioniert, which devoted a chapter to The Light. Unfortunately, I can’t read it.

All I can tell you is that is that the chapter begins with a (presumably translated) comment by American journalist Robert Giles: “Die amerikanische Provinzpresse steht heute nicht mehr in der Tradition eins couragierten Journalismus, eines Journalismus, der Anstoß nimmt.”

Apparently the passage complains about “die amerikanische Provinzpresse” losing the courage to become indignant.

However, Russ-Mohl goes on to say, “Ein Beispiel jedenfalls, da es mutigen Journalismus auch an den Grass roots noch gibt, liefert ein Winzling unter den amerikanischen Zeitungen, der ein Strackweit nordlich von San Francisco erscheint: The Point Reyes Light.” I surmise that 15 years ago the author could see some counter-examples, including The Light, but as they say in Germany, “eIch verstehe nur Bahnhof.” *

Another book that devotes a chapter to The Light is Pulitzer’s Gold, which has just been published by the University of Missouri Press and is selling remarkably well.

Engagingly written by Roy Harris (senior editor at CFO magazine), Pulitzer’s Gold looks in detail at what the 12 most-recent winners did to earn the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which Joseph Pulitzer considered his top prize.

The book also details the work of several other of the 92 winners (through 2006) of the Public Service gold medal, including The Light. These others were chosen, Harris writes, “because they are not only terrific stories but also fine illustrations of how Pulitzer Prize-winning work has evolved over the years.”

The Light won its gold medal in 1979 for an exposé of violence and other wrongdoing by the Synanon cult.

Pulitzer’s Gold notes that Robert Plotkin now owns The Light and concludes its chapter on the newspaper: “Though new to Marin, he has grand ideas. ‘This is going to be the Paris of the twenties. This is going to be the Beats of San Francisco in the fifties.’ Talent will gravitate to The Light, he says, because it is still known, even back East, as the little California paper that won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Mitchell, though, will never forget how strange it felt to have been so small and to have won so big: “It’s like being out playing touch football and making a good catch, and somebody says, “You could play for the 49ers with a catch like that.'”

Meanwhile Point Reyes Station journalist Jonathan Rowe’s article, The Language of Strangers, in the January-February Columbia Journalism Review continues to generate discussion. The article describes the new incarnation of The Point Reyes Light and the advent of The West Marin Citizen.

In discussing The Light’s editorial approach under its new publisher, Rowe (at right) wrote, “First, there was the braggadocio and self-dramatization. Most people in his situation would lay low for a bit, speak with everyone and get a feel for the place. Instead, Plotkin came out talking. We read that he was going to be the ‘Che Guevara of literary revolutionary journalism.’ The Light would become ‘the New Yorker of the West’ …. [However] he soon showed a gift for the irritating gesture and off-key note.”

A flap erupted when Peter Byrne, a columnist for an alternative newspaper, The North Bay Bohemian, posted an angry comment on CJR’s website where Rowe’s magazine story was online.

Byrne, who called Rowe’s article “terribly one-sided and unfair,” referred CJR readers to a column he himself had written. In the Bohemian column, Byrne wrote, “It seems evident to me that Plotkin breathes journalism day and night, and has responded to the expressed desires of his provincial readers,” adding that “The Light under the direction of Mitchell, was staler than day-old toast.”

Explaining his interest in The Light, Byrne acknowledged that “last year, Plotkin and I talked about working together, but it did not pan out since I require a living wage.”

Several CJR readers, including Rowe himself, have by now posted responses. “Byrne acknowledges that Plotkin is ‘narcissistic,’ which is his word not mine,” Rowe wrote. “But he blames this trait on us dim-witted locals, who lack a capacity to appreciate good journalism. ‘Townies waving pitchforks and whale-oil lanterns,’ he calls us. Now that’s reporting. It’s an interesting psychological theory too.”

A CJR reader named Monica Lee replied to Byrne: “Petah, Petah, Petah, sit yourself down, read much, study hard, and maybe someday you will write a piece as brilliantly spot-on about small-town newspapers and what they mean to a community as Jonathan Rowe has done.”

Another reader, Steve Bjerklie of Point Reyes Station, responded that publisher Plotkin is “a wealthy dilettante with a journalism degree playing out a Walter Mitty fantasy at The Light, and the West Marin community suffered for it until the advent of the rival Citizen.”

Michael Mery of Point Reyes Station wrote that Byrne’s comment was “a typical journalistic cheapshot, little information coupled with limited experience.”

I subsequently saw Mery in Toby’s Feed Barn and remarked on his response to Byrne’s commentary.

“It was drive-by journalism,” Mery said with a laugh. Although Mery came up with the clever turn-of-phrase on his own, he’s not the first to use it in describing a smear written by an out-of-town journalist who shows up only briefly. In fact, there is a book with that title by an author named Rowse (not to be confused with Rowe).

The Point Reyes Light controversy shows no sign of letting up any time soon, which no doubt explains why Sausalito-based Marin Magazine has now arranged to publish a lengthy excerpt from Rowe’s article.

* German slang that translated literally means: “All I understand is train station,” which is comparable to saying, “It’s Greek to me.” How do I know this and not know German? A little vegelchen told me.

The new owner of The Point Reyes Light, Robert Plotkin (below at right), and I agreed this week on a public statement announcing the conclusion of two years of litigation between us. Plotkin is likewise publishing this statement in The Light today:

“Point Reyes Light publisher Robert Plotkin and former publisher David Mitchell have reached a settlement of their pair of lawsuits and countersuits, which involved financial and non-financial matters.

“Although they have agreed to keep terms of the agreement private, they are both happy with the settlement. More importantly, both hope to resume a friendly relationship. Each wishes the other well, and both are now looking forward to getting on with their lives.”

Parts of the Big Mesa in Bolinas finally had their power restored at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday after being blacked out for more than five and a half days by last week’s stormy weather.

Much of the blackout on the Mesa resulted from fallen lines near the Elm Road home of Serena Castaldi. However, pockets of homes on the Big Mesa, as well as the downtown, lost power for only brief periods. High winds, which were clocked at hurricane force on Big Rock Ridge near Nicasio Friday morning, also caused multi-day blackouts in parts of that town and in parts of Inverness.

Bolinas resident Laura Riley told me that by the time her home got its power back Wednesday afternoon, “my humor was starting to flag. It’s hard to do everything in the dark…

“We have a woodstove we heat with normally,” Laura said, and her home’s kitchen stove uses propane, so she could cook. For a while she used up food that was thawing in the refrigerator. “It was fun,” she wryly commented, “for about two and a half days, but how long do you want to eat that old turkey?”

Laura said her home’s on-demand water heater burns propane but has an electric starter, so it didn’t work. Her family, she added, spent a fair amount of time at her brother Ned’s home next door, which also has an on-demand, propane water heater but with no electric starter.

In fact, several Bolinas people told me that the worst part of the blackout was going without hot water for almost a week.

Jonathan Rowe of Point Reyes Station is known for a number of things. He hosts America Offline on KWMR at 5:30 p.m. Tuesdays (rebroadcast at 11 a.m. Thursdays). He is an advocate for a commons in town. He is a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly and YES! magazines. And he seems to do much of his writing on a laptop computer in the open-air coffeehouse at Toby’s Feed Barn.

More than a few passersby have seen Jonathan staring into his computer screen and wondered what kind of stuff he writes. This week, some folks here found out. As a number of people have alerted me in the past 36 hours, The Columbia Journalism Review just published a long article by Jonathan on The Point Reyes Light and The West Marin Citizen, as well as on the types of readers in these small towns. The article titled The Language of Strangers is already online.

Jonathan’s piece is accompanied by Inverness writer Elizabeth Whitney’s transcription of the community meeting a year ago in the Dance Palace where residents said what they wanted in their hometown newspaper.

Columbia Journalism Review, the best-known trade magazine watchdogging newsrooms around the US, is headquartered at Columbia University in New York City.

FRUSTRATION ON THE PRAIRIE

Every year or so for a couple of decades The Point Reyes Light and I would hear from a woman in Kansas named Melissa Koons. She filled us in on what was happening in her hometown of Newton (pop. 17,000) and on how her own writing was going.

This year when she wrote The Light, the paper forwarded her letter to me. The three-page, handwritten letter provides a glimpse into what it feels like to be an older progressive on the prairie. “Believe me,” she wrote, “it’s very hard to speak my mind in general public here in my own state of Kansas.”

Melissa, as a result, has chosen to speak her mind in A Poem on Ethics: “What is ethics?/ It is:/ People who have a voice./ Doing something about the world’s problems./ What comes to mind?/ Simple:/ Conservation./ Accepting people as they are./ Communication/ To change the viewpoint/ Of world leaders./ So what are we waiting for?/ Is anybody listening?”

Melissa Koons, a free-verse voice crying out on the Kansas prairie.

By tradition, the holidays are a time for seeing old friends and new. Here are some of the visitors I saw over Christmas.

The population of wild turkeys around my cabin keeps getting higher. Nine toms and 35 hens marched around my fields on Saturday while sentries such as this kept watch from pine trees.

Newspaperman Ivan Gale, a former reporter for The Point Reyes Light, has been writing for The Gulf News in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, for the past year. Ivan came home for Christmas to visit his parents in Chileno Valley, Mike and Sally Gale, and will move to a newly founded daily newspaper in Abu Dhabi when he returns to the UAE. Here Ivan feeds windfall apples to Lucy the cow, who savors every chomp.

Although some raccoons can become acclimated to human surroundings, domesticating wild animals is often not good for them and can lead to smoking and drinking. This counter-feral raccoon may have taken up bartending to support a corrupted lifestyle.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and thanks to no cats, all the creatures were stirring including these rats. Here two roof rats enjoy a Christmas Eve dinner of birdseed spilled on my deck.

“I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country,” Benjamin Franklin complained in 1784. “He is a bird of bad moral character… Like those among men who live by sharping and robbing, he is generally poor and often very lousy. The turkey… is a much more respectable bird and withal a true original native of America.”

On the other hand, if the turkey and not the bald eagle were our national symbol, would it be unpatriotic to eat drumsticks at Christmas dinner?

A spotted axis doe with a white fallow doe in the Olema Valley. Ever since the Point Reyes National Seashore in defiance of public opinion set out to eradicate their herds, the park administration has repeatedly contradicted itself regarding who would benefit from their meat. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of DigitalFamily.com)

Seldom are prophecies as quickly fulfilled as one in my Aug. 8 posting regarding the duplicity of the Point Reyes National Seashore administration. Anyone who still takes seriously the park administration’s public statements might do better to take note of this chronology:

In an attempt to sugarcoat the shooting of axis and fallow deer in the National Seashore, the park administration in early summer repeatedly told the press that dead deer would be given to the Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa and the St. Vincent de Paul Society in San Rafael.

In late July as White Buffalo Inc., the gunmen hired by the park, were preparing to begin their slaughter of 80 deer, the National Seashore administration told the press that no longer were all the slain deer earmarked for feeding the needy. Some carcasses would now go to Hopper Mountain Wildlife Refuge to feed condors.

On Aug. 8 just after White Buffalo started shooting deer, this blog warned that National Seashore statements about what would happen to all the dead deer were not to be trusted. When culling had been carried out in the park 20 years earlier, it was noted, those deer shot where the park’s hunters would have had to carry them a ways had been left where they dropped. It eventually turned out that most dead deer had not gone to feeding the needy even though the park had told the public that’s what was happening.

The Point Reyes Light on Aug. 23 published a photo of a dead fallow deer and said members of the public had found two such carcasses in the Olema Valley. The Light also reported: “National Park officials had received word of the deer but were as of yet unable to determine who was responsible for their shooting.” There has been a history of poaching in the park and park officials noted that poaching is ongoing. “It could very well have nothing to do with us,” said park spokesperson John Dell’Osso.

The West Marin Citizen that same day reported that someone else had found six carcasses of deer shot to death in the Olema Valley. The paper quoted park spokesman Dell’Osso as by then saying, “We’re basically stopping the work that was going on so we can look into this specific situation a bit more. If we find out this was part of our program, then it’s not acceptable.”

The Citizen also quoted Tony DeNicola, president of White Buffalo, as saying none of the dead deer found in the Olema Valley were shot by his gunmen. “He asserted that his hunters would have removed any animals they killed within a matter of hours,” The Citizen reported.

But the park administration’s line kept changing, and by the time The Marin Independent Journal interviewed Dell’Osso for its Aug. 23 edition, the park spokesman was saying that, contrary to what he and White Buffalo had previously told the press, some dead deer were deliberately “left in the park to provide food for scavenging animals.”

This is an arrogant indifference to truth masquerading as wildlife management. In a month’s time, the National Seashore administration’s story went from: 1) all the deer meat is earmarked for feeding the needy; to 2) some of the meat will not go to the needy but will be fed to condors; to 3) rotting carcasses of deer found shot to death in the park could well have been killed by poachers; to 4) if White Buffalo did, in fact, leave dead deer lying around, that would be contrary to park policy; to 5) the park told White Buffalo to leave some carcasses strewn about as food for scavengers.

And as The Light’s photo demonstrated, the main scavengers are typically vultures and maggots. The park administration wants to increase the amount of flies around here? And is willing to withhold meat from poor people to do so?

And what about the killing itself? The Aug. 2 Point Reyes Light reported that White Buffalo’s gunmen “aim for the head because a bullet to the head kills a deer in 30 to 90 seconds.” Yet the Aug. 23 Light notes the dead deer in its photo was shot in the shoulder. And The West Marin Citizen simultaneously reported receiving photos of six dead deer that “were shot primarily in the body, which could have caused unnecessary suffering.”

Welcome to the Abu Ghraib National Seashore where only the bad guys know how bad things really are.

Inverness resident Andrew M. Schultz died on Monday, June 18, at the age of 58 from complications related to small-cell lung cancer.

His death will inevitably be described by those who knew him as The Death of a Salesman, and Andrew would be the first to agree, as evidenced by his personalized license plates, AD SPACE.

Andrew’s specialty was selling newspaper classified advertising to automobile dealerships, which he did almost continually for more than 30 years.

Born in Manhattan, New York, on July 27, 1948, to Fran and Leon Schultz, he attended public schools in the Bronx, Plainview, and Long Island, as well as Hofstra University on Long Island for two years.

For two years he studied to become a chef only to switch courses and attend two more years of classes at the New York Institute of Photography.

Andrew moved to California in 1971. “I had been wanting to get out of New York. I felt trapped,” he explained in an interview last winter. I felt nothing was happening for me there.”

He arrived in Marin hoping to work as a photographer. Given his choice, he said during the interview, “I would have been a magazine photographer doing cover shots for magazines such as Glamour, Time, and US News and World Report, mainstream magazines.”

Many may have sent or received the composite postcard from Inverness with photos of downtown, a friendly pelican and the famous beached boatwreck. All those photos were taken by Andrew Schultz.

Another of Andrew’s favorite photo assignments has been the annual Disaster Council pancake breakfast at the Point Reyes Station firehouse. Andrew said he enjoyed capturing on film the pillars of the community stuffing their faces with pancakes.

In 1972, he recounted, “I went to work for The Funfinder as a photographer but quickly became a salesman. In those days, The Funfinder was an entertainment periodical the size of TV Guide, boasting a circulation of 20,000 in San Francisco and Marin counties.

When The Marin Independent Journal bought The Funfinder in 1975, Andrew went to work for The Independent Journal. “The most fun I’ve ever had was selling automotive classified when I moved from The Funfinder to The IJ,” he recalled. “It was one of the most interesting changes I made in my work life. It clicked, and I just loved it.

“With the majority of the people that I meet, I discovered that there are three stages. First, they don’t like me at all. Then it’s, ‘Let’s give this guy some time.’ Then, I really win them over. You always know when you’ve broken through to the customer.”

Andrew said he genuinely liked his customers. “About six times, dealers offered me jobs, but I didn’t want to sell cars. Whenever a dealership offered me a job selling their product, I knew I had them right where I wanted them… that they trusted me and we had built a strong professional relationship. Contrary to what most people think, business relationships are really personal relationships.”

Andrew worked at The Independent Journal until 1987, when he moved to Monterey County and began selling automotive classified adds for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “Nine months after I got there, I won salesman of the year,” he recalled with pride. I left Santa Cruz a month before the Loma Prieta earthquake. I had been living in Soquel, two to three miles away from the epicenter in Aptos.”

After moving back to Marin County, Andrew sold advertising at The Point Reyes Light for a year, at the Petaluma office of a free “pennysaver” owned by newspaper chain publisher Dean Lesher, at The Petaluma Argus Courier, The Cotati Times, The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, and Auto Trader in Petaluma.

Indeed, Andrew sold advertising space wherever he could find it, whether it was on cash register tapes or the community-access channel of Horizon Cable. In 1999 after public-utility deregulation, he even tried to sell electricity and was hopeful of signing up most of California’s schools. However, the company he was working for collapsed.

Many West Marin residents knew Andrew as an advertising salesman and operator of Horizon Cable’s community channel, Channel 47. As such, Andrew donated a good portion of his time to helping the local nonprofits with their fundraising.

West Marin had enjoyed good television reception until 1973 when Bay Area channels stopped transmitting from Mount San Bruno and began using the newly constructed Sutro Tower. TV signals to this stretch of coast were then blocked by Mount Tamalpais. Among those unhappy with the resulting poor reception was Andrew. The poor reception also prompted John Robbins, formerly of Inverness, to build the West Marin Cable system, starting in 1983; he sold it to Horizon Cable in 1991.

Robbins, who had employed Andrew part time, recalled in an interview last January, “The first time I met him, I was at the White House Pool building the cable system. He stops his car right on the corner of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Balboa Avenue and wants to know when he’ll get hooked up.”

When Robbins was building the Stinson Beach part of the cable system, he hired Andrew to line up customers. “I let him go there and knock on doors.”

Even after the cable system was built and sold to Horizon, Andrew continued in his spare time to sell advertising for its community-access channel, which was then Channel 11 and 13 and is now Channel 47. Only recently did he finally relinquish that responsibility to Horizon owner Susan Daniels.

“He’s a wonderful, pushy, in-your-face salesman, and he aims to leave you feeling good about the conversation,” Robbins said. “You always knew when Andrew was coming. His voice was a big as he was [6-foot, 3-inches and more than 250 pounds].”

“Sometimes I’m insensitive in realizing that I’m a very big guy,” Andrew acknowledged. “I’ve been told at times I’m disruptive… I’m definitely noticed. I’m good at parties, but I don’t care to go to them very often. I come home at night and the mask comes off.”

©Art Rogers/Point Reyes

Rather than socializing, “Andrew’s life revolved around his computer and movies,” Robbins noted. “At times, I am nearly a hermit,” Andrew confirmed.

“Yet I feel as if I have lots of good friends. I have loved many in my life. I have a hard time understanding jealous people. They don’t seem to realize that you can’t take love from others. Love is only given.”

Surviving Andrew are his brothers Billy, Nathan, and Barry Schultz. His father Leon Schultz died in 1990 and his mother Fran in 2000.

Andrew is also survived by his former partner, Daniel Medina. Andrew also leaves a long list of people he has loved and who have loved him, commenting several weeks ago, “They will all know who they are…”

At his request, Andrew will be cremated. Adobe Creek Funeral Home in Petaluma is handling arrangements. A memorial service will be held on Limantour Beach at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 23. Before he died, Andrew asked that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Hospice by the Bay and West Marin Senior Services “please.”

Editor’s note: At Andrew Schultz’s request, several of us combined efforts to write this piece before he died.

In contrast to the controversy raging in town and in the press this week over the sorry state of The Point Reyes Light under its new publisher, life has remained fairly bucolic at my cabin.

In preparation for the fire season, tractor operator Gary Titus from Tomales on Saturday mowed my pasture and that of my neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman.

Homes uphill from fields of dry grass are particularly vulnerable to wildfires, county firefighters remind West Marin residents each summer.

Titus, who mows our pastures annually, told me that ours, like other fields he’s mowed this year, were faster to cut than usual even though the grass was higher. It apparently has to do with which types of grass grow best as the timing and amount of rainfall vary.

The mowing provides quite a show, for crows continually fly in circles around the tractor looking for insects, snakes, and other small creatures killed, or at least stirred up, by the mowing. It is not uncommon for West Marin’s ubiquitous gopher snakes to get chopped up by mowers, but Titus was happy to report that this year he hasn’t killed a single snake.

Most of the wildlife around my cabin have, of course, not been affected by the mowing.

Possums at night still climb lattice to drink from the birdbath on my railing.

And the raccoon that my stepdaughter Anika photographed last month peering in my dining-room window is back at it. Standing on my firewood box outside, the raccoon (which appears earlier on this blog) initially seemed to be merely checking on what those of us inside were doing.

This week when I spotted her again, however, the raccoon had more on her mind. On my window ledge is a ceramic candlestick with the lifelike shape of a small bird. The raccoon obviously wanted to grab it, but there was a pane of glass in the way.

In contrast to the rural tranquility around my cabin, protesters in Point Reyes Station milled around in front of The Point Reyes Light Monday morning. Some were upset by the paper’s sensationalism, which which under publisher Robert Plotkin has been heavy on gratuitous gore. Others complained that the newspaper no longer provides West Marin with the coverage it needs. “It’s lost connection to the community,” protest organizer Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness told the press.

The demonstration, which got advance coverage in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle and by the Associated Press, was covered live on Monday by Sonoma County public radio and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

In a lengthy article by Paul Payne, The Press Democrat quoted Plotkin as calling the demonstration a “march to mediocrity, a protest against excellence. I bought the newspaper to make something extraordinary.”

Payne also interviewed Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, who plans to launch a competing weekly newspaper in West Marin on July 5.

Hack told The Press Democrat and The Chronicle that his newspaper would cover school board and other public meetings (as The Light did before Plotkin bought it in November 2005). He also promised to also cover the special accomplishments of everyday residents, such as “aunt Mabel’s prize-winning raspberry jam.”

The new paper has been temporarily dubbed The West Marin Pilot until readers chose a final name, and Hack last week told The Chronicle that scores of people have begun subscribing before the paper even exists or has a definite name. He has also reported significant success in lining up advertisers.

Editing the new newspaper will be former Light editor Jim Kravets. In Saturday’s Chronicle, Kravets is quoted as saying, “It’s a journalist’s dream to work in a community where people don’t just pick up the paper out of rote, but run to it.”

Kravets has called for a community meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, June 18, in the Dance Palace, to tell editors and staff of the West Marin community newspaper what they want and don’t want in their newspaper. He described the meeting as a chance for West Marin residents to ensure the “paper is not merely relevant but essential for the enlightened practice of West Marin citizenship.”

Notwithstanding the protest and a new competitor, The Light itself got some good news this week.

Missy Patterson, who runs the paper’s front office, has changed her mind and will not work for the new newspaper, Hack reported. He said Patterson did not explain her reasons in detail, mentioning only that she was uncomfortable with her earlier decision to jump ship.

And on Wednesday, The Independent Journal reported that former Light bookkeeper LaShanda Goldstein has pled guilty to embezzling $62,000 from the weekly.

Goldstein, 29, of Santa Rosa remains in Marin County Jail in lieu of $62,000 bail, The Independent Journal added.

On Monday, she pled guilty to “one count of embezzlement with an enhancement for stealing more than $50,000,” the paper reported. She could face a maximum sentence of four years in state prison, but Deputy District Attorney Rosemary Slote said Goldstein may be sentenced to probation because she has no prior record.

PROTEST AT POINT REYES LIGHT. Some 15 to 20 demonstrators showed up Monday morning to protest new publisher Robert Plotkin’s debasing the formerly all-West Marin-news community newspaper. (Photo by Scott Leslie)

In the year and a half since Plotkin bought The Light, the paper has dropped most coverage of West Marin’s local-government and school-board meetings while adding a smattering of news from Sonoma County, East Marin, and San Francisco.

Also offending numerous demonstrators was The Light’s new sensationalism, such as photos of a girl biting into the severed head of a goat on June 6, 2006 (666 supposedly being the symbol of Satan) and large, color photos of blood draining out of dying chickens that are hanging upside down with their throats slit.

The protest, which was organized by Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness, was called “Take Back The Light,” and some demonstrators brought copies of The Light to return.

Historian Dewey Livingston of Inverness (in cutoffs with back to camera), who has quit writing for The Light, arrived with a copy of The Light’s quarterly Coastal Traveler.

Noting that West Marin is already plagued by dangerous drivers, Livingston complained about the spring 2007 Traveler in which Plotkin advised motorists from out of town to “give your car an Italian tune-up. Take it up to the redline [the maximum revolutions per minute before the engine is damaged]. Compress the suspension. Northern California highways are better than any Austrian pass or German Autobahn.”

The same issue contained an enticing photo of a girl in a swimsuit wading out into Nicasio Reservoir, which is illegal in the drinking-water supply. The photographer was Plotkin.