By Gerry Boyle '78

Tom and Pat Gish looking over an edition to The Mountain Eagele

It was 1974 and the Gishes' newspaper, the weekly Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., was closely covering a bitter battle to limit the weight of the coal trucks that traversed the mountain roads in eastern Kentucky coal country. At one meeting of area coal-mine operators someone warned that a plan to derail the coal-truck regulation would fail if Tom Gish got hold of it and put it in his paper. "One of the other people there said, 'If Tom Gish writes anything about this, we'll just burn him down,'" Tom Gish said. "We did and they did."

Just as pro-slavery mobs repeatedly destroyed Lovejoy's press in Illinois, ruffians destroyed the Mountain Eagle press and offices. The fire eventually resulted in the conviction of a local policeman for arson, but it didn't prevent the Gishes from publishing even a single issue. "We just moved up to our house," said Pat Gish, a former reporter for the Lexington Leader. "We did it with typewriters."

And for 44 years, the husband and wife team has done it with linotype and a variety of other presses-and hard work, high standards and firm convictions.

The fire was only one of the roadblocks that have been thrown up in front of the Gishes as they've endeavored to maintain the Mountain Eagle (front page motto: "It Screams") as the voice of the rank and file in Letcher County. On one occasion, the newspaper's scrutiny of the local school system roused the ire of the school board chairman, a local political boss. He urged the school system and its employees to boycott the Eagle. The immediate result was a 700-copy increase in circulation.

On another occasion, the Gishes supported a system of medical clinics established by the United Mineworkers Union. When the Kentucky Medical Association and others tried to get a law enacted to prohibit such "socialized medicine," it was Tom Gish, a former state house reporter for United Press International, who showed proponents of the clinics how to get their side of the issue heard in Louisville. The Kentucky Legislature listened and refused to shut the clinics down.

That had repercussions at the Eagle. One of the key supporters in the effort to shut down the clinics-a big automobile dealer-was one of the Eagle's biggest advertisers over the years. "He stopped his Eagle advertising and never spent another penny in the next thirty or forty years," Tom Gish said. "Huge in Eagle terms. Probably cost me a thousand dollars a month or more. For twenty-five or thirty years."

But that was a small price to pay, and one of many exacted over the decades. When the newspaper started covering county government, officials stopped going to the Eagle printing operation with county business (the Gishes sold that side of the operation). The Gishes have been called communists, a serious charge in the 1950s. The Gish children, literally raised at the newspaper, were never picked for parts in the local school plays. At times the Gishes found themselves shunned by much of the community as they refused to buckle before local powerbrokers. "The Whitesburg merchandising class generally was unwilling to make the courthouse crowd unhappy so they generally were never on our side," Tom Gish said. "If they were, they were very quiet about it."

That was and is the way of eastern Kentucky, he said. In a poor rural region with power in the hands of very few, the working class learned to bite its tongue rather than speak out. "It's a little bit more open now than in previous years but it hasn't changed all that much," Tom Gish said. "You don't dare publicly criticize the county judge or the sheriff or the governor or whatever. If you do, there's always going to be payback."

There has been positive payback for the Gishes and the Eagle . Circulation went from 2,000 when the couple bought the paper in 1957 to 7,500, sliding in recent years to the present 6,200 as the county's population has declined. The Gishes have always felt the working people of Letcher County were with them, and today an anonymous comment section is the most popular in the newspaper, "after the television section," Pat Gish said.

The couple are nothing if not self-effacing. They've received national awards for their writing about poverty. In 1974 they received the John Peter Zenger Award, a national honor bestowed by the University of Arizona for exemplary work supporting freedom of the press. The winner in 1973 was Katharine Graham of The Washington Post. The year after the Gishes it was Seymour Hersh of The New York Times.

Tom: "We were declared to be, what's the phrase, Pat?"

Pat: "I don't remember, Tom. I could look it up. I think it was 'Treasures of American Journalism.'"

Tom: "Yeah, 'Treasures of American Journalism.'"

Asked whether they ever considered that they would receive such awards, back when they were writing into the early morning hours in the early years, weathering criticism from the powers that be, "Eegaad, no," Tom Gish said. "You don't think about such things."

Added Pat Gish, "I guess we have to handle our small part as well as we can."

Text of the Gishes' Lovejoy address is posted online following the October 11 Lovejoy Convocation. Visit www.colby.edu/communications/lovejoy/recipients/gish_r.shtml