Louisiana Voice

I knew it was bad news as soon as I heard her voice on the phone Sunday evening.

I was right.

Ruston friend and author Judith Howard was calling and the tone of her voice gave her away immediately. “John Hays died this morning,” she said.

The news, for the second time this year, slammed me in the gut like a sledge hammer. The first time was Jan. 16 when I learned that Wiley Hilburn, longtime friend and retired head of the Louisiana Tech Journalism Department had died. https://louisianavoice.com/2014/01/16/the-passing-of-wiley-hilburn-like-ripping-out-a-part-of-us-even-as-it-reminds-us-of-our-foibles-and-our-own-mortality/

Now it was John Hays. Two men, both a little older than I, but each close enough in age to be called contemporaries. The two men were as different as night and day but somehow strangely alike.

Hilburn was the consummate, professional journalist with a Master’s Degree from LSU to prove it. Hays, by contrast was a contractor by trade, no college degree to hang on his wall, but every bit the professional journalist by anyone’s comparison. Night and day but yet seemingly cut from the same cloth.

Both men died of complications from years of fighting cancer and both men were very much a part of my professional and personal life. Hilburn was both my friend and journalism professor at Louisiana Tech and Hays was first my nemesis when we labored for competing newspapers in Ruston (more about that in a bit) and later one of my closest friends (and certainly my best friend in my writing profession).

Whenever I was in Ruston, you could always find the three of us crowded into a booth in the Huddle House drinking coffee and chowing down on ham and eggs—anything packed with cholesterol.

In the early Huddle House sessions when I was still a disciple of Reaganomics, we rarely agreed on anything (Hays was a Yellow Dawg Democrat) and that’s what made our conversations so memorable—and enjoyable. Hays and I would argue while Hilburn would sit off to the side laughing at both of us. Despite all the heated debates, our friendship never faltered.

Sometimes we were joined by others like my lifelong friend Gene Smith and later John Sachs and occasionally Huddie Johnson. The cast of characters (and characters is the appropriate word) rotated in and out but the one constant was John, Wiley and me.

Now they’re both gone and Ruston—and the Huddle House—are suddenly much emptier.

Hays started his weekly publication, dubbed simply enough, The Morning Paper, on his kitchen table in 1976 with an IBM Selectric typewriter as the result of an ongoing dispute with his cousin, Ruston Mayor Johnny Perritt, himself one of those people you feel lucky to have known.

Assisted by wife Susan, John took on the staid Ruston establishment which, to that point, was not accustomed to being questioned, let alone challenged outright. He scoffed at the wisdom of Ruston’s owning its own electric generating power plant and fought the local hospital governing board. The early editions of The Morning Paper were a laughingstock among Rustonites, what with its hard to read typeface from his typewriter. The publication was amateurish in every respect but the price was right: it was free and it was thrown in every driveway in Ruston.

Eventually, he purchased computers and found an area newspaper that would print his paper, giving it a more professional appearance and gradually the tabloid grew to 36 pages each week and soon it was distributed in the neighboring parishes of Union, Bienville and Jackson to some 60,000 households. He also pioneered another concept, the publication of a garage sale map each week and if you don’t understand the significance of that, you don’t understand the attraction of garage sales in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The paper took off and before too long, Hays was able to purchase his own printing press and he began breaking stories no one else would touch.

He broke one story about Louisiana Tech football players who were being paid by coaches for making outstanding plays. Ironically, the loudest howls of protest came from the father of a player who was the inadvertent source of the story; Hays had overheard the player boasting about the payments in a local store. Because he never revealed the player’s name, the indignant father never knew his son was the story’s source. The upshot was the head football coach was fired and Tech self-reported the infraction and got a slap on the wrist from the NCAA.

He did a story in 1980 about the 1938 lynching of a black man in Lincoln Parish—a hugely controversial story because some of the witnesses were still alive at the time. The Ruston High School principal observed the day after the story was published that “every black kid at Ruston High had a copy of that paper sticking out of his back pocket.”

I was a reporter for the Baton Rouge State-Times when Hays started his publication and my former employer, Ruston Daily Leader Publisher Tom Kelly (another of those people who have had a profound influence on my writing career) brought me back in 1976 as managing editor in an attempt to counter the impact Hays’ upstart start-up paper was beginning to have on the community. But the times they were a-changing (apologies to Bob Dylan) and thanks to Watergate, there was a new awareness of—and respect for—journalism and locally, Hays was riding the crest of the wave. Our efforts to counter his aggressive reporting proved fruitless—and frustrating.

That’s where the adversarial relationship began. It was my first introduction to Hays and though my hiring at the Daily Leader had not been announced (I was still working out my two weeks’ notice at the State-Times), Hays somehow found out about the new hire and called me in Baton Rouge to interview me. Thinking the announcement had been made, I gave the interview and Hays ended up scooping the Daily Leader on its own story.

Hays had an inside source—a mole—at the Daily Leader and he knew every move we made which drove us to such a state of paranoia that we started holding staff meetings in the parking lot to get away from the offices we thought were bugged. Still the leaks prevailed, much to Hays’s delight and to our growing consternation.

But more than a mere antagonist (though he certainly was that), Hays had the true instincts of an investigative reporter and it paid huge dividends.

When, because of his illness, he shut down publication just over a year ago after 37 years of poking a stick at the establishment, the Monroe News-Star, in an editorial appropriately written by Hilburn, compared him to legendary writer H.L. Mencken (the ultimate compliment for a writer) and called him “a born iconoclast.” http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20130721/OPINION02/307210007/A-modern-day-Mencken-in-Lincoln-Parish

Along the way, he attracted national attention with his stories that revealed various swindles and massive Ponzi schemes. One of those was a $5.5 million scam dubbed by Hays as the Pine Tree Caper that was rolling along nicely until it attracted Hays’ attention in 1990. Another was the $55 million ALIC investment scam. The biggest was the $550 million Towers Financial Ponzi scheme. The unrelenting glare of The Morning Paper’s light on that one attracted the attention of federal prosecutors and resulted in prison time for the perpetrator and produced a two-page story about Hays and The Morning Paper in 1993 in the nation’s premier publication, the New York Times. His investigative skills were also lauded in Forbes magazine and the Atlanta Constitution. Not bad for a country publisher with no formal journalistic training.

https://louisianavoice.com/2013/07/06/its-a-30-for-rustons-morning-paper-sadly-tough-minded-independent-publishers-like-john-hays-the-exception-today/

His one error in judgment, in my and Hilburn’s opinion, was the decision to go to paid circulation. He did so with the intent of bidding on lucrative legal advertisements from local governmental agencies—city councils, the school board and the police jury. He won the legal ads but saw the size of The Morning Paper shrink to eight pages and his circulation dwindle even more. Without the circulation, his display, or commercial advertisement likewise dried up. He closed his office, laid off staff, sold his press and moved back to his kitchen. For those closest to him, it was a sad transition to watch. It even seemed to adversely affect his heretofore bulldog tenacity as a dogged investigative reporter as the groundbreaking stories seemed to grind to a halt though he remained a thorn in the establishment’s side.

He was awarded the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for his investigative reporting and later joked that the check he received as his prize was eaten up by travel and lodging expenses incurred on his trip to California to pick up the award.

Perhaps it’s somehow fitting that John’s passing would come so soon after the death of actor James Garner. After all, two of Garner’s movies, Support Your Local Gunfighter and Support Your Local Sheriff, were among John’s favorites.

But for those of who believe that reporting is more than reprinting press releases and that there is always—always—more to a story than what an elected official says in a press conference, we will not soon see another of the likes of John Martin Hays.

Rather than paying lip service to transparency the way certain Louisiana officials like to do these days, John Hays created his own transparency by his sheer stubbornness and determination, establishment line be damned, and gave us a living, breathing example of how good newspaper reporting should be done—degree or no degree.

You fought cancer for eight long years and you will be missed, my friend. More than you could ever know.

Visitation will be Tuesday from 4 to 6 p.m. at Redeemer Episcopal Church Fellowship Hall on Tech Drive in Ruston.