Don Russell: The Man Faces His Last Deadline

“Not on my watch.” It was a motto, a mantra that could be hummed or chanted, and it was short enough that it could fit on a bumper sticker.

It came out in conversations with Don Russell, who began as the editor of “The Mountain Messenger,” then became its owner, as well.

Russell had a keen sense of when it was time to move on, to leave his little stage, but that was counterbalanced by a sense of responsibility. He was serious about “Not On My Watch!” As long as Russell was the owner/editor of the Messenger, the newspaper would continue. The community had lost plenty since his arrival, and one or two generations of the newspaper’s writers had thinned out, but Don remained. He vowed the longest-running weekly newspaper west of the Mississippi (established 1853, when the town was bigger, and the population expanding) would not fade away from this earth. And it didn’t. For Russell, it was a matter of will, certainly not practicality. He just wasn’t going to let it shut down. He’d keep it going for all those writers who once contributed, and those who might contribute in the future.

This tale may not all be true. It may become legend, and the dates may be incorrect. I’ve had a habit of writing long for the Messenger because when you’re on a deadline, it’s easier to cut than add, and you’d never know how much space you’d have until Wednesday night, when the paper was put to bed. I had to share the space with distractions like County Supervisors, river fatalities, and fights over gold claims. I competed by making my deadlines.

Over the years, I became accustomed to Russell making cuts and corrections, and his affection for old English phraseology.

In a way, the Messenger was like the gift of a white elephant, the kind of enterprise you might win in a poker game. In the later years, Russell let it be known he would accept a cash offer for the name, the goodwill, and whatever else was involved in owning the Messenger. He placed an ad for the paper in the Messenger, and there were no takers.

But it kept on, and so did Russell. Part of the trouble is that it was hard to imagine him bereft of the paper. Maybe he didn’t really want to let it go …not completely. He’d like to continue covering the Supervisor’s meetings and then to try writing a few short stories.

I remember when I first met him, in the town’s most well-traveled meeting place, the town’s sole “chain enterprise” — the post office.

He greeted me with something like: “I hear you’re a writer …”

I felt like a retired gunfighter. Call me “Shane.” But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say I’d given up the ink-slinging, but now I had a kid in diapers, a dog, an old house, and a spouse who worked full time. I was making rubber stamps and shipping internationally. Our closest social circle amounted to other parents and their children, a situation that Russell, formerly a commercial fisherman, tended to dismiss as “spawning.”

I was lucky enough to work an occasional job. Each year, I’d spend a couple weeks working in Southern California, where I’d written for a lot of city and suburban newspapers. On these occasions, I was a fill-in for the regular secretary-office manager of the Stuntman’s Association. I’d been doing that long before I set foot in Downieville.

Economically, the Messenger was no oasis in a desert. It was the most “pro” of “pro bono” activities.

In 1990, I’d written a single story for Liz Fisher — Russell’s predecessor as editor. There was nothing wrong with Liz, but the true voice of the paper came from a mismatched assembly of correspondents, most of them retired, many who appeared left over from the Gold Rush. They shared one thing — a long, sustained chuckle. Their chores for the weekly kept them busy and stimulated their friends and readers. They were peculiar writers with well-defined personas, and they were given a berth everywhere except the front page.

The pack included Pancho Willmarth, probably the all-time most prolific dispenser of carnival caricatures in the country. Due to a pitstop in Los Angeles and an engagement at the Brown Derby, Pancho’s caricature of Ronald Reagan became the single most valuable piece of art produced by a Sierra County artist.

There were others, including the long-running serials produced by Miner/Ranger Al Pratti and Carolyn Dobbs, a short, organized woman who favored big dogs, wrote as “Mountain Millie,” and whose home outside town featured a gold claim and a suspension bridge. In an earlier decade, the paper also featured a column from the novelist and pulp writer William Campbell Gault.

Alexandre Dumas, who was best known for The Three Musketeers, described Downieville in one of his volumes, as did the writers Benjamin Appel and Les Savage Jr. Before my time in the county, my eventual residence, our slate walkway and the path from our doorway to the bridge and into town had been featured in a Harlequin romance novel.

For a town of 300 and a depopulated county, there was a long and honorable tradition of the arts. We had our own historian, Jim Sinnot, and there were visits from the Nevada luminaries — cartoonist Bob Crabb, folksinger Utah Phillips, and the pianist and composer Terry Riley. The folk singer Kate Wolfe was a seasonal habitué and is now buried in the Goodyear’s Bar cemetery. Later, the drummer of an all-girl punk band wandered in and stuck, another friend of Mr. Russell’s.

Reading the Messenger was like sharing a hobby. It was almost the same for its editor and writers since there was a small circulation and no money in it. There were always potential readers who would avoid reading the paper on principle. It was not always far from being a vanity press, and it was like other small, local newspapers, published by the week, steady in serving their communities but in financial jeopardy all over the western states. The usual setup was a small, crowded office with a closet darkroom in an old building and limited hours of operation.

That’s what Russell walked into. He thrived. He became a pillar of the community.

Russell had a good long run at the Messenger. He added Don Baumgart (Nuke Brunswick), Carl Butz, and the iconoclastic cartoonist Dan O’Neill to the mix, and Mary Johnsen (Belle Tauer) came in with a column that was a little bit about a lot of things, a social calendar of local doings. There were new columnists from all over the U.S.

Seven or eight years later, I returned to the Messenger with an apologetic expression on my face. Now I had two sons, but they were both attending Downieville school, and I had more of an opportunity to write. First, it was stories about entertainment events sponsored by the county Arts Council, then youth sports —soccer, volleyball, and basketball —and other school events.

Each story felt like a mini-opera, most of them performed in a high school gym with rainwater dripping from its ceiling.

In 2011, I wrote a two-part series about a national contest, “Proms Across America”: “A Prom As Big As The Ritz,” and “The Case of the Perfect Prom.” This was simply a voting contest, but it preoccupied the town for weeks. In the end, with 1074 schools competing, Downieville school placed sixth in the nation with 114,578 votes (for perspective, figure that the winner, Alief Taylor High, in Houston, accumulated 323,930 votes). Downieville School received a $1,000 credit for prom decorations that were used once and then shredded by the graduates.

Ultimately, I found myself writing a series of memorials to my friends who had passed: Tommy Vilas, Jim Austin, Utah Phillips, Oakley Hall, Miles Schofield, Daniel Eylar, Al Pratti, Mike Lozano, Damaris Harbert, Billy Reed, and now Don Russell. Russell was the second of four editors I would work with on the Messenger.

He wasn’t a friend, exactly. We traveled in circles that only infrequently overlapped. He was more of a “could have been a friend, but we skipped that and became colleagues.” Professional friends. He was a guy who seemed like he might be the best friend you ever had when you were working together. And after that, there were other stories and other correspondents, and I had kids to coach. Russell worked late into the night because it might be the only time that he would spend alone.

Russell was just three years older than me, but I walked down Main Street bouncing a basketball past the Messenger Office many times, and Russell never asked for a bounce pass or a chance to make a three-point shot. He was not a fly fisherman. He assumed that if you really wanted to catch a fish, you’d be using a net. I don’t think he ever swam in the river or skied. I couldn’t tell you his favorite movie, book, or song.

The newspaper office was a good haunt on a cold night. It was one place I could go when the town looked like it had been evacuated, and I’d not been informed. Then, if the office was closed down, I’d really get worried. If the door was open, I would ease inside and ease into Russell’s chair, because there was often no other place to sit, and to move a pile might cause disaster. Old issues piled up, along with paper of all sorts.

Pancho’s caricature of Russell was tacked up high in the inner sanctum, where it watched the grey veil of tobacco smoke with approval.

I could probably describe the caricature better than I could the man himself.

He had the look of a man who had had enough of physical labor, who had willingly moved on to the meetings of the County Supervisors — to meetings of all kinds. When he wasn’t working, he’d hit the road, often on a motorcycle.

Sometimes he wore suspenders, and usually a hat. There was a bigness and a genuine “do it yourself” vibe about Russell. Sometimes he looked like he belonged in a Bret Harte story. He was a regular at the Chili Cookouts at the pass, where he was customarily joyous and in character. But Don was bigger than that. There was a lot I didn’t know about him, but when I described his house and yard, about a block up the street, as a “salute to Detroit,” he smiled. His New Year’s parties were a blast.

For the longest time, it was Demaris Harbert (“she does the work”) and Don — holed up in that two-room office space above the beauticians, the spa, and haircuts. You had to go upstairs to get to the newspaper, and then you had a porch where the judges would sit for the annual Fourth of July parade.

There was something about that office, a mood, or mis-en-scene that should have been bottled or sold by the can. Between Don and Demaris, the two of them should have come up with a concept that would make money. … Maybe a podcast would have captured the ambiance of a small town newspaper and its local celebrities. There should have been a line for the film rights.

Recently, I came across a description of Babe White, a “Human Fly”, who climbed the exteriors of tall city buildings in the nineteen twenties. An observer described him as: “a high-class exhibition of nerve, skill, and ability, one that you seldom get a chance to see.” That is the way I like to think of Don Russell, though he avoided such hazardous labor.

This story is about Don, the office, and the words on paper. He was not all things for all people, but he was true to himself. He followed his own path along a clarion avenue of tsk-ing and controversies. The Messenger, being a newspaper, the occasional static comes with the territory. Most of the time, he managed to stay above it as some kind of arbiter, as the blank wall of the historical record. Though he sometimes swayed one way or another, he remained constant. He was an outsider who, by presence and effort, became an insider. He had a predictable look and maybe a closet of lookalike clothing, but it looked like the right kind of a wardrobe for an old-fashioned journalist. In Sierra County, he had enough room and ink to laugh while he acted on principle.

The writer lives and dies on a scaffold of words; the editor admires space and cherishes a sentence that is concise and pithy. The word “succinct” is one of the words they like. They’ll call you out if you start getting poetic. Russell played both sides at once, and if he hadn’t been so steady of nature, it would have torn him apart.

Did we finish all our beginnings? Did we get it all done? In this world, there are always things we leave unfinished. As a slogan, “Not on my watch” has more to do with context and consistency than achievement.

Right now, if I had five minutes with Russell, I’d ask him what was his best story, or the best issue, but it really doesn’t matter.

I’ve got to say he went out a winner.

The ship still sails.

Since leaving Downieville, Don Russell and the Messenger, Wilson has published 21 collections and reprint editions of classic crime and western fiction.

In 2011, he made his last rubber stamp in Downieville.