A Good Day's Work (18 page)

Three years later he was back in Montague, a married father of one, working at the family paper. That was fortuitous: in 1998 Jim suffered a massive coronary while on the ferry from Nova Scotia after getting an honorary university
degree. The kind of owner who flew by the seat of his pants, he had no succession plan. The finances were a joke. Paul, however, had cheque-signing authority. He was thirty-one. He may not have known it at the time, but he was already the person he would grow to be.

It is, therefore, worth noting that being editor of the
Eastern Graphic
holds little sway inside a Tim Hortons where old guys in tractor dealership hats carry on a conversation that has been going for decades and the girls behind the counter call everyone—the cleanly scrubbed folk in their Sunday best and the hungover-looking lads in the coveralls—“dear.” Paul lines up like everyone else for his customary black coffee and bagel with cream cheese. “Hi, Jim,” he says to a local worthy. “Scott” … “ 'Morning, Theresa” … “Helllooo, Smooth Guy” … “Good morning, Martin … Doug.”

People bend his ear. They want to talk about the old photo in the latest edition of the
Eastern Graphic
. They ask about the cabinet shuffle. Someone wants the real scoop on the identity of the mysterious benefactor funding the area's new wellness centre. Paul doles out some gossip and info, but it's a two-way street. There's a watchfulness—that slight remoteness that all good reporters seem to have—that goes along with the easy Island way. “I don't know if I'd call the way I work a process as much as a way of life,” he says. “I'm forever scanning the news, talking to folks. I don't really look for ideas. They just tend to naturally flow based on what I've read and who I've talked to. Tidbits fall into a column when appropriate. Could be weeks later, months later or more.”

It isn't like working for the
Toronto Star
, writing a weeper about a homeless guy and knowing you'll never see him again
in this lifetime. The subjects of
Eastern Graphic
stories buttonhole Paul at receptions, in restaurants and coffee shops. The people he writes about have children who play with his kids. They're in the next foursome at the golf club. If Paul writes a column calling for the firing of the deputy minister of tourism, well, he just may run into her on the way to the washroom at the pub. If he sneaks into the visitors' gallery at the provincial legislature, the premier might just halt proceedings, point toward him and, voice dripping with sarcasm, welcome “the number one fan in the Robert Ghiz fan club.”

Life here can be pretty claustrophobic. For all that, what a sweet little town Montague is. Located at the locus of three rivers and a nice, natural harbour, it was founded as a fishing and commercial centre in the early 1700s when Prince Edward Island was still the French-ruled Île-Saint-Jean. In the early days it suffered its share of odd misfortunes: a plague of field mice; a looting by a British warship on the way to the French stronghold of Louisbourg; near bankruptcy after the kidnapping of one of the town's commercial leaders by an American privateer.

Now Montague—with its great sunsets, its lazy Saturday-afternoon vibe, its “how-ya-doings” from complete strangers—seems, in many ways, in synch with the longings of the times. It oozes the ease and comfort that come from feeling anchored to a place and its people. It offers wide-open spaces when everyone else lives in cramped high-rises, and freedom from smog, crime and urban blight. There's also the kind of humanity missing in bigger centres, which comes from living in a place where people and community matter.

The question is plain: for how much longer? Anyone who
travels a bit in this country has seen lots of betwixt-and-between places like Montague. Its big industries, shipbuilding and fishing, on the wane. Its homes overwhelmingly populated by long-ago Scottish families. Its population getting older by the minute, as the young and ambitious leave for opportunities elsewhere.

Paul drives across the bridge over the Montague River. Past the old sandstone museum, the tanning salon, the real estate office, the restaurant, the small nest of government offices and the pub. Inside the post office, which is housed in a fifty-six-year-old brick building, he opens mailbox 790, pulls out a handful of envelopes, flyers and brochures and rifles through them. “Any day where there are more cheques than bills is a good day,” he says. Paul gets back into the car. Four blocks east he takes a left, climbs an incline and pulls into the parking lot at the
Eastern Graphic
offices, which inhabit the second floor of a former fire hall, with the old fire truck bays below to prove it.

PAUL walks through an entrance that is without fanfare: a wooden sign, peeling green paint, a two-by-four seemingly holding the roof in place. Newsrooms, it has been my experience, are what we have instead of asylums. My first one—at a daily in Sydney, Nova Scotia—smelled of vile vending machine coffee and industrial cleaner. A few weeks into the job a colleague in the sports department turned on his tape recorder. Instead of an interview with a journeyman NHL player on summer vacation, we were treated to the unexpected
sounds of the reporter and his girlfriend in flagrante. At my next paper in Halifax, typewriters flew out windows, angry desk men punched holes in the wall or, in a Captain Morgan haze, ran from across the room at a booze-up and head-butted the managing editor in the belly.

This newsroom is chilly and about the size of an elementary school classroom. It's early on a Wednesday, just hours after the week's paper went to bed. Everything has that post-coital feel common to all newsrooms after a deadline has miraculously again been met. Some twenty hours earlier Heather Moore, the paper's managing editor, sent the last story zipping electronically to a File Transfer Protocol site for download at an offset printing plant in an industrial park sixty kilometres away. Photographic images of the pages appeared on thin aluminum plates. The plates were mounted to the press. The inked images were transferred to a rubber roller that in turn printed the page on reams of newsprint winding through the press. Then, at some point in the early evening, the January 13, 2010, copy of the
Eastern Graphic
—“Bell Aliant meets with concerned Eastern Kings residents about high-speed internet,” the banner headline screamed—came rolling off the press and into the waiting delivery vans.

At midnight, back in Montague, commercial flyers were stuffed inside the papers and address labels attached for mailing before drivers threw bundles of
Eastern Graphic
s into the backs of their cars. By now, the paper is on sale at grocery and corner stores. People are fishing coins out of their pockets at gas stations. Tourists on the ferry to the mainland are dipping their French fries in gravy, squinting into the morning light and scanning the front page.

Standing in the newsroom, with only a disembodied voice somewhere breaking the silence, I have no sense of the scramble that putting out a paper necessitates. The howler misspellings caught at the last minute. The mangled syntax discovered after the last story has already headed to the plant. Some years ago, Paul's father walked into the office just after a bundle of papers arrived and opened one. The front page carried a story about a land developer who had sold some land to the province for a nice profit. Unfortunately, that story occupied the same real estate as a story about a major drug bust in the area. Somehow, the headlines got mixed up. “SELLS LAND FOR MEGADRUGS” blared the sixty-point headline about the businessman.

Which was problematic: the developer, who was convinced that the
Eastern Graphic
was carrying on a personal vendetta against him, had already threatened the paper with legal action. Jim considered his options for precisely three seconds, then in his Scottish burr croaked, “Get every paper, every jeaselly one of them,” and sprinted on bandy legs for the door.

Paul's door is adorned with two nameplates: the bottom one reads “Paul MacNeill, publisher,” the title he's held since May 1998. The top one says “Jim MacNeill, editor and publisher.” “Dad wanted out of Scotland,” Paul says of his father, who was born in Castlebay, on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. “He was a restive spirit who always wanted to see what was on the other side.” I met the legendary James MacNeill once, in a Halifax coffee shop a night after he had been on a bit of a toot. So I have an inkling of what Paul means. Thicker of beard and body than his son, he told me how, after serving a stint in the Royal Navy, he landed in Toronto, where
he met and married Shirley Nicholson, a Prince Edward Island girl. They planned to move to British Columbia to become missionaries, but the priest who recruited them died. Instead, they headed to Charlottetown, where Jim landed a job selling ads for the Summerside
Journal Pioneer
, half an hour away. Soon he had moved over to news because he was bringing in more stories than the people out there on the beat.

In time Jim was bitten by the newsman's fatal bug: the desire to own his own paper. “The early years in Montague were nip and tuck,” he recalled. He worked seven days a week, selling ads and writing every word of copy that appeared in the paper. Shirley did virtually everything else. The paper was typeset in the back of their house. Then Jim would hop in his beater, take some of the papers to some stores, supermarkets and service stations and deliver the rest, door to door, by hand.

The
Eastern Graphic
survived two fires. Even worse were the ads cancelled by angry businesses and governments displeased with stories that appeared in the paper. “The people in power,” he told me, “just weren't used to seeing themselves criticized in print.” This was a new kind of journalism on an island where people seldom questioned authority. Until losing a court case, Jim printed in the paper the salaries of every provincial civil servant in the province. (They still run the federal salaries.) When a deal was struck to build the Confederation Bridge between Prince Edward Island and the mainland, he read every page in the agreement—a pile of documents several feet high—and harvested dozens of juicy stories about the deal. No one was immune: when Jim was convicted of drunk driving on the mainland, he didn't slink back into town; he
ran the story under a banner headline on the front page of the
Eastern Graphic
.

He was larger than life, that's for sure. This craggy original with his love of peaty whiskey, the MacNeill kilt and a round of golf with one of his thirty or so pipes clamped between his teeth. This self-taught intellect so fond of quixotic quests—like trying to walk the coast of Prince Edward Island via pick-up-where-you-left-off spurts of a few hours or a few days. This lover of the underdog, so fond of bringing down-on-their-luck strangers home for dinner or standing them a round in the pub.

Sitting still was not a strength, his friend Denis Ryan told me. Ryan was a member of Sullivan's Gypsies, a precursor to Ryan's Fancy, the well-known Irish music group, when he first met MacNeill in 1970. During the sound check a guy nursing an Alpine at the Charlottetown bar walked over and asked where they were from. They hit it off. Libations were had. One of the band members had to be put to bed even before the concert began. Eventually Shirley called looking for Jim. At 11 p.m. he was found: he was on foot, halfway through the thirty-kilometre trek back to Montague.

Ryan moved to Montague in 1977 and ended up living there for three years. “On Tuesday night, after their deadline, I'd get the call around ten or eleven—‘Are you up?' ” Ryan, who now lives in Halifax, recalls. “I was in Lower Montague, which is four miles away. He'd pull into the driveway, and many's the time we'd stay up until daybreak, drinking our bottle of Scotch or just talking.”

At the pub, or at a kitchen party, Jim listened as much as he talked. If he heard something that interested him—and everything really did—then he would jot it down on the index
cards he always carried with him or in the several notebooks that were always going at once. Rick Maclean, who edited weeklies in New Brunswick before turning to academia, used to run into him at community newspaper journalism conventions. Organizers would labour to set up the best seminars and sessions they could. Maclean would just head to the bar and learn what real journalists do from Jim.

“You find out more talking to five fishermen than the minister of fisheries,” James Joseph MacNeill used to say. Another one of his journalistic maxims: “Always have one fewer chair in the newsroom than you have reporters; it forces them to get out and meet people.” Jim had other rules: “Talk to fifty people a day, not full-blown conversations, but a what's-going-on-chat. Get to know the secretaries in the government because they're the ones who really know what's going on.” But these things too: “Engage the mind. Most of all, be the voice of those who are left behind.”