EDITOR'S NOTE: In June 2004 I began a new venture as managing editor of both Northfield News and Faribault Daily News. This column originally appeared in the Northfield News on Oct. 25, 2005.
Ask any journalist and they can recall with vivid detail the description and events that took place during the big stories they were involved in. An average journalist can write hundreds of stories per year and lose the memories of most of them, but you never forget the "big ones" as we call them. I suppose in a sense it's why we do what we do; we love to be the one telling the big story, breaking the news to the masses, so to speak. But working at small newspapers, you rarely have the opportunity to cover something so big that it becomes the talk of the nation, and when you are thrust into that situation you never forget it. One of the days I will never forget was a rainy, drizzly, cold Oct. 25, three years ago. At the time, I was the editor of The Daily Journal of International Falls, a five-day-a-week newspaper located at the very tip of northern Minnesota. It was about noon, and being our paper was published and delivered in the afternoon, I was basking in the quietness that exists in a newsroom only after deadline has been met. Noon was usually a quiet time. The reporters emptied out of the newsroom; the publisher was at lunch; and very few people bother to waste some of their precious lunch break haggling the local newspaper editor. Suffice it to say, noon was my reflection time for the day; a time to catch up on e-mail, other correspondence, and collect my sanity. Then the news broke on CNN: I can remember very vividly the nasally-voiced Wolf Blitzer stating that a small plane believed to be carrying U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone had gone down in northern Minnesota. I watched as the television screened flicked up a computer-generated map of northern Minnesota with a red dot denoting Eveleth. The news spread around the newspaper office like a wildfire and I thought to myself that it was amazing that I was sitting two hours away from the biggest story in the nation that very minute. However, I never imagined how things would change for me. Minutes after watching the reports come across CNN, my phone rang. On the other end was an editor at the Star Tribune whom I had befriended some years earlier when I worked in Bemidji. He asked if I was busy; I said no; and he proceeded to ask me if I would head to Eveleth for the Star Tribune because I could get their quicker than any of their people. I remember little of the ensuing half hour or so. I know I immediately hung up; grabbed a camera from the newsroom; called my wife and explained that I might be home late; and yelled where I was going to the publisher as I passed him coming through the door. I, a lowly reporter for a small northern Minnesota paper, was on my way to cover the biggest story in the nation for the biggest paper in the state. I flew down Minnesota Highway 56, probably at speeds I shouldn't have considering the freezing, slushy rain that was falling. On the drive down, I tried to recall all that I remembered about Paul Wellstone. Born and bred in northern Minnesota, I knew him only from the few times I encountered him during my work in Bemidji. As a reporter there, I was assigned almost full-time to the American Indian beat, something that makes sense when you live at the geographic center of three surrounding reservations. And as many may not know, Wellstone was a friend of the Indians in this state, just as he was to the other groups of disadvantaged Minnesotans. So I had the occasion to cover him several times over several years, and it never failed to amaze me at his ability to recall people whom he met only a couple times a year. For me, it was always a queer feeling to interview Wellstone. Standing 6 foot 4 inches tall, you can imagine the dynamics of me interviewing the, shall we say, shorter but fiery senator. Also, it amazed me that early on, after once learning that I was a high school wrestler, he took on an affinity for me that I could never explain. As you know, the senator was a wrestler himself, and a much better one than I ever was. Lastly, I recalled the television ads from his early years as a political candidate: the running commercials, the green bus, the comedy that not many used in political advertising then. But that was the extent of my knowledge of the senator then. I arrived two hours later to a scene of chaos and wonder. Few journalists beat me to the Eveleth airport, which was just a short distance from the crash site. The local paper's editor was there, of course, and the local radio guy, one television station crew from the Twin Cities and me. We were all immediately jostling to interview a local pilot who responded to Wellstone's airplane's last signals and found the crash site. The description was fascinating to hear, although it was admittedly what one would expect to hear about downed plane: tangled metal, smoke, clipped trees. Shortly thereafter, I was among a small group of journalists who had convinced another local pilot to take us up and over the site. I called the editor at the Strib, who said whatever it cost, go for it because I was the only there yet with a camera. However a few minutes later, as we all huddled outside a small chain-link gate that would allow us on the tarmac, word came out from the office of the manager of the small airport ... the FAA had grounded all flights within the vicinity of the crash. I was going nowhere. From that point on I tried to grab interviews with whomever was available, local pilots who knew the terrain, airport officials, local authorities assisting on the scene, the usual drill. And not long after that, the full-time Strib guys got there and took over. I fed them my notes and hung out until early evening when I realized that I was no longer of use. Ultimately, most of the reporting I did that day never saw the light of day. The reporters used some of my info as general background in their stories but the rest they got themselves. Interestingly, because there's little trace of it, few would ever know that I was one of the first journalists on the scene of the Wellstone crash. But I can't forget it, and now living here where the senator called home for so many years, I'm reminded of that day often. As I said earlier, you just don't forget the times when you cover the big ones. -- Devlyn Brooks is managing editor of the Northfield News.
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