More Than Bricks: The Dothan Eagle’s People Defined Its Soul

We took what we did seriously, but we didn’t take ourselves seriously.

Demolition has begun at the old Dothan Eagle building downtown

I literally yelled “stop the presses!” once in 23 years at the Dothan Eagle.

It was the night of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing. If I remember correctly, it was a Friday night and the press had just begun.

It was just a paragraph from the Associated Press wire service. I told our press foreman we may have to “do another run”, which was pretty audacious for a 26-year-old greenhorn who had just been at the Eagle for about three months.

The first notice came to us some time just after midnight. The 2nd-lede came a few minutes later and the additional paragraphs more accurately captured the magnitude of the event. I scampered downstairs, drunk with power.

“Stop the presses!”

That was a long time ago, but I believe the AP’s 3rd-lede writethru made our paper and wound up in most homes and racks a few hours later.

The press was located behind that big hole knocked in the wall in the screencap above. That famed journalist-specific proclamation was the first of many memories I would make behind those now-breached walls.

I wrote about the planned demolition of the downtown Dothan Eagle building a couple of weeks ago.

Now it is happening. We once scurried from that building one block east to keep an eye on City Hall. Now that site will be City Hall, or at least parking for it.

We attempted serious journalism for quite a while, and sometimes succeeded. I wrote meaningful features, game stories and investigative pieces. I won some awards along the way and tried to tell Dothan’s story.

Seeing those walls knocked down doesn’t make me recall newspaper stories. It makes me recall newspaper people.

For years, two of us in sports would stay late each night to “watch the press”, which meant we would grab the first few newspapers off the press to look for egregious errors (which we sometimes still managed to miss).

Sometmes we played rock/paper/scissors to see who stayed and who got to go home. We invented silly games to pass the time, like who could roll a hockey puck all the way across the newsroom without touching a desk and trying to make it squeeze between two narrow goalposts at the far end.

We may or may not have broken a picture frame on the wall while trying to replicate a particular college quarterback’s delivery known at the time for inaccuracy.

Some of us would go to Waffle House after watching the press on high school football Fridays, sharing stories about the games we covered and the shocking things coaches said on the sidelines.

In the early years, we met regularly for staff meetings. We had a publisher at the time who had a reputation for red-marking the paper and leaving copies on the editors’ desks. We hated the way he conducted business, but he left the paper better than he found it when he moved on from Dothan.

Our next publisher put me on the paper’s editorial board. It was rare to have a reporter on the editorial board because there once was a clear line between news reporting and opinion. But, since I wrote sports and not news at the time, he believed it was a risk worth taking because, for some reason, he liked the fact that I had an opinion on almost everything.

One day the editorial board was discussing how to respond to the scandal involving Bill Clinton, then-president of the United States, and intern Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton overtly lied to the American people when asked about his relationship with her. Some in the room did not see that as a big deal. I did, and still do, although the truth-telling ship sailed from the Oval Office a long time ago, if it was ever there.

I mentioned something about the president losing the trust of the American people. I mentioned something about wondering how we can believe him about anything if he’ll so easily lie about that.

“And so …?” my publisher asked.

“And so he can’t be trusted,” I responded.

“And so …. what should happen?” he asked.

“And so …. he shouldn’t be president,” I said.

And that’s how we became the first daily newspaper — or at least among the first — to write an editorial calling on President Clinton to resign.

Within days after our editorial, the New York Times called and sought an interview with us. Several more papers, much larger ones, would follow suit in calling for Clinton to resign.

Our editorial page editor Bill Perkins shared those thoughts some time later with an opinion piece in the New York Times.

We weren’t afraid to be who we were. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have diverse opinions and worldviews. Some people were Reagan conservatives like me and some were bleeding heart liberals, but we all got along and did our best to reflect the community. Not everyone agreed with us, of course. Often the best thing that could happen to a local candidate would be for the Dothan Eagle to endorse the opponent. It comes with the territory.

We laughed a lot together. Someone always came back to the newsroom with a funny story. Whether it was the absurdly humorous lady who wanted us to do the feature on her multiple personality disorder (not an Oscar-worthy performance), or the numerous people convinced they saw UFOs, or the lady who thought she was calling her plastic surgeon for breast implant advice and instead called the newsroom. (When the page designer sheepishly told the woman she called the paper by mistake, the woman still asked him what he thought about her, uh, situation.)

We had the typical gallows humor found in most newsrooms, probably because we saw a lot of awful stuff and humor is usually the best way to process it.

Not long before I left the Eagle in 2019, a reader found an urn on the side of the road in a local neighborhood and gave the remains to us in hopes of reuniting the dearly departed with a relative or loved one.

In an effort to confirm the contents, I (not too) carefully removed the top. A smidge of ashes fell to the newsroom floor. We paused for a moment, not too sure how to react to a person’s remains becoming part of the newsroom. After about six seconds of silence, we laughed uncontrollably at the absurdity of it all.

Some of us were nickname generators. Some of us were downright good impressionists. Some of us could turn the most serious matter into a 10-minute standup comedy routine.

We made it enjoyable to come to work, even when we had to write the heavy stuff; even when the revenue started to wane and the cuts started to happen; even when I could no longer guarantee that the wire stories I was choosing to put in the paper were accurate.

We quoted movie lines continuously. One of our reporters even donned a wrestling mask to write his story. Another wore a sombrero for no particular reason and one wore a hubcap on a large chain a-la Flava-Flav.

We took what we did seriously, but we didn’t take ourselves seriously. If only it were that way today at the bigger places.

My friend Bill Perkins wrote about the building recently, confessing that the building where he spent most of his career didn’t really mean a lot to him.

It was the people that meant a lot to him.

Same here, Bill.