Editorials

Because the hometown newspaper, which gave the author his first job, is a presence throughout and its editor demeaned, it is a bit of a strain to obey the journalistic ethic of fairness, but I will try.

Dennis Love’s “My City Was Gone” is an entertaining, well-written, sometimes funny and sad, gripping account of the titanic struggle to wring justice and good sense out of Anniston’s environmental crises.

His heroes are the attorney, Donald Stewart, who pursued the suit against Monsanto with mind-breaking intensity and intelligence for years; David Baker, who organized community opposition against the polluting company, and Mayor Chip Howell, who somehow maintained composure and made sound decisions.

One villain was the giant corporation, Monsanto, which knew it was endangering community health but kept spewing PCBs. Another, which the author could have blackened in more detail, was the state’s Water Improvement Commission, which knew about but didn’t stop the pollution.

Love couldn’t quite make up his mind about The Star. He quotes it dozens of times, calls it progressive, an experience that gave him a larger, more mature picture of his city, but through some languid, mysterious path reached the wrong conclusion about burning nerve gas.

He is more certain about the editor and publisher, me. In his pages, my nearly 50-year career is reduced to a cartoon: a dilettante and effete snob who imports Ivy League reporters just to bedevil the community, and cares mainly about unnamed famous friends.

My liberal view of the world, constructed from inheritance, education, experience with enlightened Southern governors and presidents, wide reading and travel, is reduced to flighty “contrariness.”

Frankly, when I read that, the raging bull of ego flooded my mind, its horns aimed straight for the soft fanny of my former feature writer. In defense I will call only two witnesses: Time magazine which, twice, named us one of the nation’s best newspapers, and Columbia Journalism Review, which named us among America’s 30 best. I rest my case.

And now, on to the main story: Anyone who has ever rooted for the underdog, knowing the damned fool was fighting way out of his weight class but admiring his gaudy guts, will be pulled into the narrative of small-town lawyer vs. billion-dollar corporation.

How did Donald Stewart pull it off? It’s a helluva story whose gravitational pull will keep you turning pages as he searches out and finds a New York firm to share expenses, and together they nail the big bad guys.

Blurry-eyed searches through tens of thousands of documents and attention to detail finally led New York lawyers and Stewart to the mother lode of corporate files in North Carolina that clinched the case.

John Grisham hasn’t created a character who faced tougher odds, followed more blind alleys, labored for more years to get justice and some money for injured victims of corporate neglect.

Stewart — who despite years of verbally abusing and threatening editors and reporters at The Star — deserves the heroic role Love gives him in this case, and the $30 million in legal fees, too.

Another hero is David Baker, whom I’ve known only as a community activist quoted in the paper and as a reserved colleague on a local education foundation. His story is compelling, as well.

Baker was a leader, even in high school: big, tall, athletic — a pretty good basketball player. He left Anniston when integration was a hard, new thing and there was a good deal of racial tension. He headed north, for family in Brooklyn.

Eventually, with charm, guts, doggedness and brains, he became a prominent figure in the tough, tough world of the New York labor movement — a principal in AFSCME, the government employee union.

In one lightning moment of terror and instinct, he survived a murder attempt in his apartment, snatching a shotgun away from one of his assailants and wounding the other. A neighbor and friend raced up stairs and shot both dead. Police filed no charges.

It wasn’t long after that incident that he felt the full impact of New York burnout and returned to Anniston, where an inevitable alliance would be forged with Stewart.

The last of the book’s major figures is Love’s friend Mayor Chip Howell, praised for his heroic efforts in overcoming obstacles that prevented the actual start of the incinerator — the beginning of the end of that toxic nightmare.

Howell deserves praise, but why did Love wonder if The Star had sold out “to the establishment” for taking the same position? Since Dennis didn’t ask during dinner at our house or in my office, I’m happy to explain.

Our editors and I sat through mind-numbing briefings by Army brass, but we didn’t trust the Army. They lied to us before when they sprayed “harmless” agent from Ft. McClellan that caused a unique spike in lung complaints in Calhoun County.

Neither did we trust what we found to be the ideological obsession of Craig Williams’ anti-incineration group in Kentucky. We waited until an independent panel of the National Science Foundation determined incineration was the best of bad choices.

After a long evening of tough questioning of the chairman of that panel, two trips to the original, now decommissioned incinerator on Johnson Island in the Pacific, multiple trips to inspect other incineration sites, we decided, as Mayor Howell did, that burning was the best course.

Science influenced us, science and good, hard factual reporting. Though of course I don’t like the portrait of me, I’m willing to give readers of this column the following advice:

Read Dennis’ book. He’s a good writer, and in places it reads like a mystery. But, dear reader, please clip this column and stick it back with the index — just to keep him fair and balanced.

H. Brandt Ayers is the publisher of The Star and chairman of Consolidated Publishing Co.