From the Editor's Desk
I've seen far worse so far
Arthur McLean
Ioriginally planned to have a very different column in this space, but I've decided to hold it until next week.

Something the other day got me to remembering my first newspaper job. There I was, fresh out of college and far from home when the biggest story that town had ever seen practically exploded like a bomb on Main Street.

There were two hospitals in this little rural county, one, county owned, and one privately founded by one of the county's two most beloved doctors. The pair had split years ago, and it had become all very Hatfields and McCoys since then.

Well, the old county hospital was getting mighty long in the tooth and it was landlocked. Meanwhile, the private hospital, after a stint serving as a drug rehab center, was closed, its founder dead, but it was sitting on a pretty large piece of land, enough to cover plenty of expansion.

Well, when the county commission and some members of the hospital board suggested buying that other hospital property to expand the county hospital, you'd have though they had just insulted half the townsfolk on a right personal level.

And let me tell you, it got ugly. The issue immediately polarized the people. Friends and neighbors now found themselves sometimes on opposing sides.

Vicious rumors flew around the county about everyone and everything connected with the proposed move.

My editor at the time wrote an editorial in favor of the move, and that pretty much made me the enemy in the eyes of the people opposed to it. In the process of covering this long, drawn-out story, a couple of folks tried to physically intimidate me, little old ladies shook their fingers in my face, I, my editor and the paper as a whole were threatened with lawsuits.

Amusingly, some letters to the editor tried to paint the paper's employees as wellheeled aristocrats who didn't care about "working people." One look at the run-down cars in our paper's parking lot would have provided all the evidence one needed to see how laughably outrageous those claims were. Once, vandals even stole the newspapers out of several racks and littered the countryside with them.

Of course, the paper was never sued, but there was plenty of legal action to go around anyway. There were standing-room only days in packed courtrooms as injunction hearings and other actions were heard in the court. Years after I left that paper for a larger one, there was still some lawsuit connected to the whole thing hanging around in the courts.

Of course, the only winners in those kinds of legal battles are the attorneys. There were a couple of them who probably funded their retirements from all of that.

This is all to say that I've seen far worse than the battle brewing over alcohol here in Thomasville. I'm sure things will intensify if a date for a vote is set and it draws near, but so far, things seem to have remained relatively civil. We're all neighbors here, so I hope things can remain civil. But, even if they don't, I've seen worse.

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