The Local Crank

During the late Paleolithic era I was a teenager working as a reporter on a weekly paper. Like every small town weekly, we had a local nut who wrote innumerable letters to the editor.

I can't state this as an absolute fact, but I don't think that a week passed when we didn't receive at least one Letter to the Editor from him. It seemed to me that he was an old man back then, but that might have just been my youthful perception. He had been around town for decades, had been a local politician, knew everybody, and had an opinion about everything.

Unlike so many guys, who sat around in the beer parlour playing bar-stool philosopher, he took pen to paper and took people to task. In my mind, I still have an image of him sitting in a little room, piled up with books and maps and old newspaper clippings, diving in to come up with some little tidbit to support his argument de jour. In retrospect, some of what he wrote was probably a little off the wall but it had to be tough to come up with something new every week in a town of 10,000 people, in an isolated area some 900 miles from the nearest major city.

I have thought about him a few times over the years, as I work to come up with something new every day. How did he do it, in an era without the internet, or cable TV? Was there really enough to get worked up about in such a small place? How much time must he have spent watching, listening and engaging people? Was he really just a crank, or was he the social conscience of a small and isolated town?

It would be a lie to say that I remember the content of his letters. I wish that I could read them now but, of course, the newspaper is long gone, and only a sense of his outrage and commitment remain.

The town was so small, and entertainment so sparse, that everyone had to read his rants, and many people thought that he was just a crank. The fact is that if he had been born 30 years later, or the internet had been born 30 years sooner, he would have been a star. Who knows how much of a difference he might have made, if an entire planet had been listening?