It’s My 2 Cents — Getting Canned by Hagadone
The e-mail from former Bonners Ferry M.E. Robert James re: getting canned by the Hagadone newspaper brought back memories. Robert believes it had something to do with a personal column he wrote endorsing Democrat Jerry Brady for governor in the recent election. Who knows? In May 1982, I was unceremoniously booted from my position as editor of Hagadone's Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. It was also on a Friday. That's how the suits do it. Get a full week of work out of you and then give you the boot on a Friday afternoon, so the dust is allowed to settle until Monday.
Publisher C. Patrick King did the honors. I'd been editor for 4 of my 5 years in Kalispell. I was brought in knowing that the Hagadone chain was about to dump the current editor. Later, I became the sixth editor in seven years at the paper. Without warning, King called me into a conference room, asked for my resignation, and began to read a list of complaints that had never surfaced before. I was 28. I told him to knock the crap off and tell me the real reason. A few weeks before, I remember how the managers had sat around drinking wine and joking about a forced layoff in which each department had to can one employee. Pat wouldn't tell me why. But tried to get me to quit instead of being fired. I refused. Later, I was told by an attorney friend that I would have lost my unemployment benefits, if I had quit.
I told Pat then that someday down the road I would run into him again -- and ask again why he had fired me. Some suspected that I was making too much money since my salary equaled that of the composing room foreman (which shows what the chain thinks of its journalists). Fortunately, I landed on my feet as the assistant news editor of the Lewiston Tribune. Jay Shelledy, the former Idahonian (Moscow-Pullman Daily News) publisher who helped me get the Lewiston gig, said after he learned I'd been fired by a Hagadone paper: "That's the best recommendation you can give me." The Trib, one of the best newspapers of its size in the U.S., restored my faith in the news biz, after the firing and after I'd worked a decade for less-than-stellar papers, like Hagadone's.
Later, I did run into King again, after he retired and was living in Coeur d'Alene. He was having coffee with other codgers at the Iron Horse when I asked point blank if he remembered why he fired me. He was embarrassed. That was fun. Still later, a mutual friend told me that Brad Hagadone, Duane's son and my former darkroom technician, had bragged to him that he got me fired. Brad's a great photographer. But he wasn't highly motivated at the time. I rode him at times to perform the work the paper needed. Mebbe he complained to Daddy. Mebbe he didn't. Who knows? It doesn't matter now.
Getting fired wasn't fun. But it set me on a track to get to Coeur d'Alene and work for a good paper that paid decently. Indeed, it was the best thing that happened to me careerwise. I hope Robert James can say the same thing down the road a bit.
