Don McLeese and Dave Hoekstra — remember those names, all you newspaper readers out there?
They were, in their time, which is not very long ago, among the most prominent, prolific bylines in the Sun-Times, McLeese on the music beat and Hoekstra on many cultural, entertainment and sports fronts.
McLeese left town first, going to Austin, Texas, where he wrote for the Austin American-Statesman and then on to the University of Iowa in Iowa City to teach journalism, which he has been doing for almost 20 years.
Having started writing for newspapers as a junior in high school for the Aurora Beacon-News, Hoekstra left the Sun-Times after nearly 30 years there in 2014. As he told me then, “The time was actually right, since the paper had mostly stopped covering many of the things I wrote about.”
Each has written previous books, McLeese’s about Dwight Yoakam and the Motor City 5, and Hoekstra’s about supper clubs, soul food and other matters (he’s also made a couple of fine documentaries, and has contributed to the Tribune). These new books are their most ambitious and bravest, one on a professional level and the other intensely personal.
In “Beacons in the Darkness: Hope and Transformation Among America’s Community Newspapers” (Agate Midway), Hoekstra writes, “To understand a community newspaper … you need to understand the meaning of community.” He also writes that this is “not just a book about journalism … (but) a book about a vanishing terrain of community ties and dedication to the common good.”
It began four years ago with his desire to write about the Hillsboro Journal-News in a small Illinois town of almost 6,000 people about 75 miles north of St. Louis. This notion grew into something more complex, as he interviewed and examined dozens of people at nearly 20 other newspapers, all independently owned and family-run, one into its fifth generation.
He gives us a look at papers in Miami, South Carolina and the Reader here in town, and delivers great stories. I was especially taken with those from Marfa, Texas, where the Big Bend Sentinel is run by a young couple from New York, who have embellished their offices with coffee and cocktail bars.
The upbeat and hopeful is set against a bleak backdrop, filled with such sobering statistics as “since 2004, more than 1,800 local print outlets have closed in the United States and at least 200 counties had no newspapers at all.”
“More than once during in-person interviews … a couple of family publishers were near tears,” he writes. But Hoekstra is an upbeat guy. He does not have any easy answers to the “how can newspapers survive?” question but he offers many examples of how some are trying, boldly and inventively. He writes, “newspapers are not dead if they share the spirit of experimental thinking with the community.”
I read this book before it was published and that’s why you’ll see some words from me on its cover. I wrote that in it there is “hope for us all.”
The same is true for McLeese’s “Slippery Steps: Rolling and Tumbling Toward Sobriety” (Ice Cube Press), in which he informs readers, some 250 pages in, that, “I didn’t write this because I thought a book about me would have any intrinsic interest, and, if I had, I could have made that part way more interesting — rock stars, journalism gossip, whatever. My purpose all along was to write how sobriety can change your life, or at least has changed mine.”
Yet, it begins in such a chilling fashion that it is impossible not to read on. He writes, on its first page, “I wasn’t exactly sure who I was, where I was, or why. I had no idea how long I’d been there. It was very dark out, and it was pouring, but was it 10 at night or 4 in the morning? There was lightning, and there was thunder. It was a hot August night in West Des Moines. I was lying on the grass, immobile, soaked.”
He then gives us the bumpy road that got him to that sorry place, through his childhood, running a record store, a first marriage, writing for the Reader and then the Sun-Times
His drinking was constant and for a time was embellished by marijuana and cocaine. He never realized the problems, since he remained high-functioning and seemingly successful. He had a family, good jobs and stature.
But he knows better now, asking in the book, “How many times did I drive drunk? Every damn time, at least on the way home. To think that I never hurt anyone, or killed anyone, or even got charged with drunken driving, seems like a miracle to me.”
He began to write this book without the idea that it would ever be published. “In some ways, it was cleansing for me, redemptive in the sense that initially I was writing it just for myself,” he told me. “This was an effort to make sense of myself.”
It is very frank and, he says, “My wife Maria was not a huge fan of me doing this book but she really is the hero of it,” he says. Still, she and the couple’s two grown daughters, Kelly and Molly, are put on the page with truth and tenderness, his affection and gratitude palpable.
McLeese and Hoekstra both appear to be happy as they go about the business of talking about their new books. We can only hope that they have more to write.