Provisional end to a story from 1998, showing a licentious small-time news reporter’s longtime cancerous effect on township civic life
Also comprising “Post-Assault/Quixotic Phase, Part 1”
[For the earlier installments of “Assault Close to Home,” see my “Jersey Mountain Bear” blog. And yes, this Part 5 mess is split into “Part A” and “Part B,” but as usual, it will be less of a pain in the neck for you to read this than it was for me to live it. And of course, this does not constitute legal advice. Edit done 12/3/12. Another edit 5/6/13, between asterisks.]
Preface
While my “Assault Close to Home” story may suggest I can get awfully trampled (in career-related situations) at times—and doesn’t this make me look foolish?—the real point is that you can’t know when a business arrangement (whether or not tied to a civic-service situation) will lead to an assault, or gross denial of your rights, or “terrorism,” or whatever you want to call it. You can’t always foresee an instance of this, and you certainly can’t stop violence that is sprung on you with the perpetrators’ maximum effort at keeping their plan secret from you. And it misses the point to simply conclude, “What is he, a schnook?”
The point is that you have to find out what to do to get redress afterward. After an assault, what you can do is try to get legal help, and/or investigate the matter on your own, and/or try to hold the parties accountable to the extent the “system” will allow. And yet you may often find that, certainly in New Jersey
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It’s surprising how much of the story remains, and I know I’ve written a version of what followed for some limited purpose elsewhere, but I will write from scratch, in November 2012, being as summary as I can (yet not skimping on important details).
A lot of this really pertains to the overarching theme of how lawyers proved to be particularly unhelpful in such a matter as a self-styled “investigative reporter,” as Skoder has called herself, being a rogue operator at best in a small town—not only from the standpoint of her short-circuiting of the democratic process there at times, but from the standpoint of how unprofessional she could be from a media company’s perspective—and how such a company could conveniently overlook this for its own purposes.
This part only prepares the ground, and does not go into, my NJN story in terms of events from 1999 through 2001—when it would shift to being largely one of mainly an within-office, media story, particularly the kind of bitter between-workers politics that should not have been going on if people had been decent and professional. The 1998 part about Skoder, as it happens, would only be in the background of this latter story. Further, in the 1999-2001 story, two loci of “enforcers of legal behavior” would become relevant in this story: a human resources department and, again, a lawyer—both generally unhelpful, the lawyer especially so.
After 2001, though I was almost 100 percent out of the Vernon politics scene (even in terms of attending local meetings, which I would only very rarely do), Skoder would remain a story of sorts—though she would be fired from the Argus in, I believe, 2001. If you thought her behavior starting at least as far back as 1989 and still going on in 1998 was “only a phase” (but what a phase!), her behavior as recently as 2010-11 (some to be reviewed below) proves not only in keeping with her longtime ways, but would be an advance on these: her ways of insinuating herself, quite inappropriately, in Vernon politics would become so baroque, blunt, and tasteless, that it would make an amazing, big story in The New Jersey Herald, which, apparently and (if she did so) predictably, led her to threaten it with a lawsuit.
This sort of story, along with others from the past decade, shows that my issues in 1998 weren’t quite as silly and inconsequential as they may seem: they were little tremors heralding, in a sense, what would be major earthquakes—with Skoder a major, unseemly part of what was going on—about a decade later (which would seem to go hand in hand with yet another charter-study-type change of some aspect of the form of government in town).
Aside from whatever else you want to say about Skoder, little has come close to her style of confrontation in terms of intrusions on your very life. As a town councilman from the 1990s once put it (in a remark quoted in the newspaper), people in town have to learn how to disagree. You stick your head out, he said, and it immediately gets shot at. He meant this to apply to a range of ways people in Vernon Township have clashed, but it was easy to see how Skoder’s ways fit in with this. My own take on Skoder is that, unlike nearly everyone else in the media world I’ve encountered with whom you have a sharp disagreement, she represented New Jersey at its worst in terms of threatening your very livelihood as a result of a particular disagreement, in the fiercest and most boorish way. This was certainly true in 1989 when I lost freelance reporting work because of her, and in a sense it was true again in 1998. And her general tone, through many years, not aimed simply at me but on display regarding so many other people, has implied an especially bitter and brutal way of registering disagreements.
Her behavior has been such that, in 1998, getting her entirely out of Vernon politics was never my objective, but in being put in an especially disserved position in which her brutish intrusions on you were overlooked, it seemed as if (even if only in others’ interpretations of the general drift of your “case”) the only next step was to have her summarily removed from her “position of power,” which often (to others as to me) was her news-reporting role. But in 1998, her interference with the EC’s February 10 meeting would prove (for me) a surprisingly hard nut to crack, even while I dealt with it in a conservative, sensible way at the time.
The township administrator isn’t a help
At first, as seemed judicious and the least I could do to get some kind of accountability going, I presented a report on what happened to the township administrator, Richard Sheola. This report probably set forth its “case” largely by means of details—not terribly differently in manner from my “Assault Close to Home” story, but limiting itself to more essential details—obviously only up to the meeting breakdown of February 10, and maybe something just afterward: whatever the story was, it was only what was relevant to what the township would have been interested in. Over the years I had learned to handle—by means of such a report—issues involving different viewpoints and isolated, arguably violent incidents numerous times before (in some sense this went back to my years of working at the Marvin Center in the 1980s). Probably I was nervous, angry, etc., as I often am in such situations, and this mentality, in my experience, helps you focus on the essentials in preparing such a report. (I probably have a copy of the 1998 report to Mr. Sheola in my files but can’t be bothered digging it out right now.)
I probably didn’t have especially high hopes for what my report would do, in terms of official response. But I probably felt (1) I was obliged to do this report, given what happened, and (2) what I had to report was so sensational that it couldn’t help but convince its official reader about at least some of what it related. But I didn’t expect what happened.
Richard Sheola had been (for a few years) in a position that later became, in strengthened form, the “township manager” under the new form of government starting in 1998: he was a paid staffer who oversaw township workers, and who did the bidding, along some lines, of the elected township committee (per the old form of government), which itself made policy. Given the ongoing change of government, Mr. Sheola, of course, wanted to be appointed the new township manager, and was in a sort of temporary/caretaker mode in early 1998 while the township council was deciding whom to make the new township manager (reviewing several candidates, but including Mr. Sheola, who had to apply for consideration). Incidentally, up until this Skoder matter, I had never had a problem with him, personally, either in terms of manners or in terms of how I was dealt with more professionally as a volunteer board member who occasionally crossed paths with him.
In my report, I went as far as to describe Skoder’s threat of a lawsuit, which was one essential (I thought) of how badly things had gotten. I generally presented the mess as a breakdown in meeting functioning, which obviously had the element of an outsider—in fact, a news reporter—comprising an unlikely, key part of the breakdown. At this point, I think there was no way I could mention that my own boss threatened my job as connected with this—because I think it didn’t happen yet. I am writing from memory, and I know things happened in this matter in a quick, dense array. I’m not sure right now exactly when my boss’s threat came (and it followed a story that Skoder filed that was some days after the meeting); I have the records somewhere.
Probably as specially scheduled, Sheola had me in for a meeting to discuss my report, and he spoke, judiciously per his own lights, based on a review conducted by the newly appointed township attorney (the type of professional that, in general, mainly served the newly-defined township council; the same professional had served, the same way, the township committee under the previous form of government).
Sheola said, in essence, that there wasn’t much of anything here to do anything about; the issue was on the trivial side. I recall looking at the township attorney’s report, upside-down, on Sheola’s desk, and have long remembered that it had a word to describe my issue that wasn’t exactly the word Sheola used, but was close enough: mundane, I think it was, or close. I, of course, was surprised and offended.
The township attorney drops the ball
I have debated whom to identify as the township attorney in this matter; for one thing, he’s deceased, so libel of him is not an issue (the dead cannot, as a matter of law, be libeled; and anyway, what I have to say about him is based on facts and are matters of my honest opinion, both of which eliminate the issue of libel).
The new township attorney was BL, the lead partner in a firm that still exists, in Sparta Township , N.J.
In fact, BL’s fellow partner Richard Clark had been the Planning Board attorney in Vernon
The same could not be said of certain other attorneys who advised town boards. Glenn Kienz (who had also been with BL’s and Mr. Clark’s firm) had served as an attorney for the Zoning Board, I believe, at times, not as continuously as Clark had served the PB. Kienz was OK; I never had a “hello” relationship with him by any means. Kienz eventually left the area, and worked in another county or two. He had a more aloof flavor about him than did Clark . Clark is still active in Sussex County, I believe, and was working for the PB as recently as a few years ago, I believe. I’m not sure if he’s serving what is called the Land Use board in Vernon now.
BL I had never seen in action, I think, in town before 1998. He may have shown up once or twice to substitute for Clark at a PB meeting or such; I can’t remember. I know I’d heard of him, via the newspaper, as serving other parts of the county. I believe he was an attorney for some branch or other of the Sparta Township
My opinion of BL dropped significantly with his review of my report on Skoder. To me, it should have been a no-brainer to assess that the February 10 EC meeting broke down grossly unprofessionally, and that for a local news reporter to play the role she did was patently unacceptable. It was a different matter to say what should have been done about this: I grant you this. I forget now what possible “solutions” I considered (to the extent I did this at all) as options the township would have had; I think someone in authority’s lecturing the EC on proper conduct of its business, or such, was one idea. Today I would say that a letter from the township attorney to the newspaper company employing Skoder, reporting on her conduct and issuing the appropriate “If this happens again,…” would not have been out of line. But BL felt my issue was “mundane.”
Let’s be clear: compared to highly charged and controversial matters tied to government procedure in Vernon Township that occurred about 10-12 years later, the matter I was involved in in 1998 was minor. In fact, you can throw in (for the sake of argument) the supposition that in 1998 I was naïve in how I handled the official newspaper matter: say I “brought the mess on myself” to some extent. What remains is how Skoder behaved grossly unprofessionally, which was consistent with her methods from years before, and fairly consistent with methods she would show in later years. The breakdown that occurred on February 10, 1998, was not different in kind, though different in degree, from problems that occurred in township-board (policy-related) business later—again, problems that reflect differences among people and groups that track policy differences, not so much misunderstanding about proper government procedure.
Or rather, the big call-downs that have occurred regarding proper procedure have been done from one side of a policy-divide against another. The real fight has long been over group policy/philosophy mentalities, not over nuggets of procedural issues. The procedural fights have just been fault lines along which the policy rivalries have traveled, as if on a sort of pragmatic pretext. And Skoder’s roles amid this culture is remarkable for showing her repeatedly, over many years, crossing the boundary between a news reporter and otherwise, and/or (when not working for a newspaper) the boundary between being a concerned citizen and being a gross meddler.
Of course, BL as an attorney, in 1998, was not obliged to deal with policy differences. This is not my point. He was obliged to deal with gross breakdowns in board functioning. And on this he dropped the ball ridiculously.
So the 1998 breakdown was minor? Now consider when Skoder was reported in the New Jersey Herald on January 26, 2011 (pp. A-4 and A-5) as being so entwined (via e-mails) with the business of the mayor, Sally Rinker, that Skoder seemed an unelected co-mayor, to say nothing of Skoder’s sometimes coarsely delivered and judgment-questionable opinions reflected in a host of e-mails that the Herald had had opportunity to review.
And important procedural/rights errors were again being made. In one instance in April 2010, when the Herald wanted to get a copy, under the Open Public Records Act, of a list of candidates for the open position of township manager, the Herald was denied by the township clerk, citing the advice of the township attorney (not BL, of course). But Skoder had been forwarded an e-mail, by Rinker, with information on a potential candidate (p. A-4). Later in April 2010, Skoder gave advice to Rinker on a terse response she could give to the township clerk on an issue of providing minutes of a meeting, starting with “Tell her this…” (p. A-5).
Let’s be clear: Kline was a township clerk, trained (certified as to certain functions) and paid accordingly. Ms. Rinker was a mayor, popularly elected at first as a member of the township council (and paid a stipend, per duly enacted law). Skoder was a member of the Land Use board, according to the January 2011 article in the Herald, and as such (as we know from more general protocol in town) she was a volunteer member of the public who was appointed by one or more members of the township council. Skoder had never (and to my knowledge, has never) run for any elective, township-wide office.
In a June 2010 e-mail, Skoder responded to an e-mail forwarded to her by Rinker, which contained information on a township referendum and another matter concerning the Open Space Trust Fund, “Tell the [expletive] this is fraud, and we will sue” (p. A-5) [parenthesized “expletive” is in the source].
I wonder if BL would have considered all this “mundane.”
There were numerous other sensationalism-apt stories that rolled out of the Vernon government from about 2008 through about 2011, including a RICO lawsuit filed by one councilman against a host of other people, including a Vernon Township policeman; see, for instance, the New Jersey Sunday Herald of November 8, 2009, pp. A-1 and A-3, and (on the same lawsuit, five months later) the New Jersey Herald of April 14, 2010, p. A-7.
Or consider Victor Marotta, who had been mayor in Vernon in the mid-1980s and was elected again mayor in late 2011, suing the township council *[see added note below]* in 2009 over an alleged impropriety in filing a vacancy on the council (AIM Vernon, June 25, 2009, p. 2; Skoder was not the reporter, though she had been working for that paper otherwise; a Jessica Zummo was reporter for this story). As I recall, Marotta later prevailed in this case. *[Update: This lawsuit is pretty much described the same way in the New Jersey Herald, February 2, 2011, p. A-2: Marotta sued the township's Republican Committee and the township council over their failure to name a new councilman (filling a vacated position) within the prescribed time frame. Generally, the Republican Committee, a party organization of volunteers, would have presented one or more (my vagueness on number) candidates for the slot to the township council, which is ordinarily a body of elected officials, for the council to vote on whom they wanted to fill the slot. The party's appointing a new member of the council to fill an unexpired term followed the law, but what Marotta sued over was the relevant parties' not operating within the statutory time frame. He won the suit.]*
I wonder if BL would have considered all this “mundane.”
Other things I would see would be mundane. For example, sometime in about 2000, I was at some event in the township (or maybe elsewhere in the county) where I saw BL give an opportunistic wave hello to Skoder as Skoder passed through the reception or whatever it was: as if the attorney was giving a courtesy wave to a long-established, respectable member of the press. In general, I think attorneys have a laughably naïve view of what the media is really about, in part as if they can often be star-struck kids who wouldn’t mind their own “day in the sun” in press coverage. But if an attorney can’t see the forest for the trees when it comes to the likes of Skoder, that’s pretty bad. Sorry to say, my opinion of BL was changed for all time by the 1998 “mundane” assessment and this wave to Skoder of a couple or so years later.
I could add that, from my perspective as a committee member in winter 1998 (starting my third year on the Environmental Commission), it’s hard enough to get members of the public to serve on these boards, who are capable, willing, and ready to roll with some kinds of more-ordinary blows. And no wonder I’ve seen various people spend only a year or two on these boards, over the decades. I was lucky in that, in the 1990s, I was contributing within township government, whether as a member of the public attending meetings and occasionally commenting during open-to-public periods, or as a member of a couple different boards—the total for roughly seven years (from 1992 to 1998). In a sense I felt I’d had a good run when my EC status was smashed in 1998.
But attorneys are paid to uphold the law. In Vernon Township, attorneys get $150 or more an hour (I think that was the rate then; obviously it’s probably higher now) to help ensure that the township government, partly staffed by volunteer members of the public, serve the public weal properly. When an attorney, essentially, farts in your face when you diligently and carefully report on a gross breakdown, you never forget that. It certainly sours you on attorneys, if nothing else.
And in case you feel there was a certain lack of common sense in myself, Mr. Sheola, and/or BL in this initial “consultation,” there will be further measure of it below in this account.
For now, that was one attorney.
Another, personal attorney is no help
In the lingering winter of 1998, after my boss NR’s threatening of my job in the wake of Skoder’s grotesque intrusion on the EC’s meeting, I felt it was worth a shot to take my issue with the EC/Skoder/NR to the woman I’d tried to use as my personal attorney, LBB, in March.
LBB by that point was tough to deal with, and virtually a lost cause for me as a personal attorney. The only time she really gave me solid service as an attorney was in 1991, when I drafted my first will (I had actually contacted her then after, I believe, seeing her run an ad for this in a local newspaper). After that, I tried to consult with her numerous times over several years, but this didn’t always yield anything, usually not even so much as a solid single consultation. Partly this was due to my naivete about how much attorneys were really likely to help you anyway (I’ll explain, regarding specific examples).
The one other consultation of substance—in addition to getting a will drawn up—that I had with her was in early 1992, after I was laid off from All American Crafts and I wanted to feel out what options I had in terms of suing AAC for how Cam, my thick-headed and in ways simply unprofessional boss, had handled me there. LBB gave advice that has remained in my head since—that these places were hard to sue, because getting evidence (or its quality) could be a problem (I’m paraphrasing, maybe interpolating my own interpretations a tiny bit); and people would be unwilling to testify, in fear for their own jobs—that sort of thing, she said. This seemed reasonable at the time and over the many years afterward, this supplied part of my framework for assessing, based on more solid and extensive empirical evidence, what could be done about unprofessional publishing companies. (That is, her advice seemed to square with circumstances at other jobs, and it essentially meant that you really had to carefully pick your fights, and often had to let major disservice or rights-trampling roll off your back, probably as is quite untrue of other industries.)
She also, in early 1992, said that an employer could not give a bad reference for you after you left, lest that employer get sued. This, in my experience, was not observed in practice, by one employer I had already worked for. But in general, for myself, especially as seems quite suited to the publishing industry, I rarely have employers serve as references, and in practical terms this can usually be managed well, because the level of professionalism at so many of them (in this industry) can be so bad that you wouldn’t want them serving as any sort of reference for you.
Another thing LBB said regarding AAC was more personal, and was more unhelpful, I thought. She said she didn’t think I had the gumption, the focus, to take on AAC readily, or such. I was surprised to find that the issue—for her, anyway—was how bullheaded I was as a client rather than what I would have expected her to assess, as an attorney, as actionable facts that I presented. In fact, in winter 1992, I was so shaken by my experience at AAC that I really wasn’t ready to go barreling along in the way she seemed to expect, as if aggression was all. That sort of remark of hers would linger with me; it made me more gun-shy about consulting attorneys.
There’s actually more to say, partly based on professional things I’ve heard from an attorney giving a general opinion in the media, about how “ready” you can or should be to use a personal attorney in a tort situation, but leave that aside.
As it turned out, I had to learn a lot about what attorneys are “for.” [This passage pertains to attorneys in civil matters, not in criminal cases, and to the American legal system. And I would hope that readers of this blog entry know the general difference between practicing attorneys (in civil matters) on the one hand, and on the other hand, law professors, judges, and other legal professionals whose raison d'etre is not merely representing one side in a legal dispute.] As I’ve said in some other context, attorneys are not like doctors, who have to treat any bleeding case that comes into their realm of service, with equal compassion for all. Attorneys are businesspeople that take on clients based on what kinds of risks they are—clients are like business propositions, not people who in some way have been “harmed” and need “help for their wounds.” (In light of this, in more recent years, whenever I hear some attorney jargon about “making people whole again,” I think that is so laughable as a concept that it just reflects on how willfully naïve and almost con-artist-like attorneys can be. Which means, in part, that they con themselves about what they can do. With some cases, how can you possibly be “made whole” again? You can maybe be made “less wounded”; but “made whole again”? Why don’t these attorneys join the living!)
Later in the 1990s LBB was less helpful, and was getting downright less-than-professional. There was some consultation I tried to do concerning some insurance-related issue in 1994. There was also an attempt to reach her in 1995 and 1996, as I find from old paperwork of mine. I can’t remember all the details of why I tried to reach her in the mid-1990s, but suffice it to say that I didn’t make much headway, and she could well have been finding me a bit of a pain as a client (she might not even have considered me a client, but an entreating prospective client she wanted to shake off), without directly saying so. And it seems this may have been (I speculate) because I did not come to her with, in line with what she said or implied one time, the idea that a case was something where she could go trotting off to court with something actionable (I think this point may have been made in 1992 regarding AAC).
There was also one time where I recall specific vivid but unseemly behavior, when I tried calling her office—she was a solo practitioner in a hole-in-the-wall office, with only one legal secretary at any given time—and I got someone who left a message, or spoke to me directly on the phone, in a downright rude, city-accented voice (I never knew if this was LBB in a weird frame of mind, or her secretary). It sounded trashy and bluntly expressive of rude anger.
All this is to provide the background of our March 1998 consultation, which was the last true consultation LBB and I had. Mind you, after all my experience with LBB, I was never again apt to go so far (as I did with her) to try to have a personal attorney for the type of issue that meant violence done to you. What I did get an attorney for in the future was, in 2001, drafting another will, and this latter attorney I’ve been able to talk to on occasion about a range of things (none of them tort matters, I believe). And amazingly, she has made clear her limitations as to what she can or would take (as a matter of the nature of her practice, she won’t take matters involving litigation, which narrows my practical choices with her down helpfully for me). Our relationship has continued to be of mutually agreeable “keeping our business with each other to narrow tasks and limited scope-wise.” This has seemed adequate. (I say all this to show I’m not just a nightmare of a potential client for an attorney.)
But with LBB in March 1998, after I had told her what I felt I needed to about the EC/Skoder/NR situation, she ended up unspooling a brush-off that was downright insulting: She bluntly said it was “dumb” for me to address the official-newspaper matter as I had. And perhaps when I pressed the facts of the matter, she said I was “living in a fantasy world” and hence should just forget about the matter. (Recall what I’ve said above about Skoder and Sally Rinker in 2011, and Skoder involved in other more recent township business.)
I WAS STUNNED. I went away with LBB, probably feeling I was done with her forever. I had a bill from her for services, though.
Sheola again; and he quit working for Vernon Township (I don’t blame him)
Of course, I didn’t know where to turn for legal help now. In the meantime, I had LBB’s bill, and since I knew that the township’s bylaws and/or other policy that I knew about said that volunteer board members were indemnified by the township, I submitted to Mr. Sheola’s office a copy of my bill from LBB to get it paid by the township, if this met its approval.
Mr. Sheola responded, some short time after, with some balking and indignation. I forget whether he wrote me by mail, or if he had me come in, or both. His main point was that he couldn’t submit this bill to the township council (I think he specifically said this; he considered this option because he would have had to have the TC would have to approve it for payment) because, he said, the township had its own attorney; why hadn’t I gone to consult with him?
I forget precisely what I said, but my point was that this involved a threat from my boss regarding the Skoder imposition on the EC meeting, which technically speaking was partly not a township-business matter….
I don’t recall saying the following, but it certainly was in my mind (either at the time or later): I wouldn’t have consulted with BL on the boss-threat matter because he had thought my Skoder/EC matter was “mundane.” How could I go to a specific attorney in good faith, about something like the boss-threat matter, when this attorney had taken that attitude toward the Skoder/EC matter?
Sheola wouldn’t have my bill paid (I’d already paid it out of pocket anyway), and I believe I conveyed to him (in a letter) that I’d thought this may be the case, per my own reading of what the township was likely to indemnify.
I didn’t really have hard feelings toward Sheola—not as I did (for years) toward BL.
It could be said Sheola was following a conservative line regarding me because he didn’t want to make waves while he was being considered for township manager. In a way, I don’t think I blamed him for this, though I think I didn’t respect him a whole lot for it either.
But in one way he seemed to give me a tip of the hat—though he may not have consciously done so—in terms of which ugly way the winds of township “governance” were blowing in those days. This was in June 1998, when the decision was finally made to hire a new, permanent township manager. Sheola wasn’t chosen. An outsider was. Sheola abruptly resigned in a day or so.
So, he had learned from me: the township was becoming the kind of “chump dump,” or trashy employer, where if you were done dirt as I was in the winter, you resigned abruptly, as I had from the EC in February.
But my story is far from over.
Things dormant for some months
One thing to keep in mind is that, in 1998, unlike today where so many staples, pillars, and whatever else of society—and our own lives—seem to be coming undone (investment-bank practices, workplace ethics, etc.), my own career was actually generally doing pretty well, and of course the overall economy was good: the federal government was having surpluses under President Clinton at that time, the “dot-com bubble” was underway (but not brought to light as such, yet), and overall people would have said things were going pretty well (if maybe the pace of life was a little hectic). The solidly productive phase of my editorial career, in its freelance segment, ran from 1997 to about 2007, and as it happened, 1997 and 1998 were my busiest, or among the busiest, years I had. And they were among my best-paying years.
This did not come as a delightful windfall that I didn’t work for. From July 1997 through January 1998, I was busy with the High School Literature project at Prentice Hall, the first stint of work of that length involving a placement agency, and it was manic-busy work in its own right. In fact, I’ve wondered if the sheer anxiety posed by the busy pace I was under with the Prentice Hall work potentiated my being a little too “wrapped up in my own spinning wheels” to deal with the EC matter fully well. And this Prentice Hall “gig” coincided with my ongoing work for North Jersey Newspapers (NJN), the company that produced the Argus and hence employed Skoder as the one freelance reporter who covered Vernon Township, but which also produced many other “community newspapers.” My NJN work averaged maybe 25 hours a week.
And then the Prentice Hall stint was over—basically to my regret, because I wanted to try to work there again. And I did briefly, in about March-April 1998, when I briefly worked in a situation including working beside, for a short time, one Amy Capetta, a young woman who would later work for the magazine producer Bauer Publications as a writer/editor or such, and would work at a host of such popularly oriented media. I mention Ms. Capetta partly because, to her credit, she also had done time at AB Bookman, apparently in a year after I left in early 1993; she told me about this when we were at Prentice Hall.
Maybe most importantly for the phase of my career that crested in 1998, I started working for The World Almanac in May 1998. This association, which would last through seasonal work through early 2001, would be one of my very most successful “engagements” in publishing, with what was a truly respectable outfit. And in fact, of the three editions of the book (long a Christmas-gift favorite) I worked on—1999, 2000, and 2001—the 1999 edition (which was prepared in 1998) involved the most hands-on work for me, and something of a learning curve in adapting to what was needed.
There was enough to keep me busy for the rest of 1998; and in terms of any legal recourse I might have had regarding Skoder and the EC, basically not much more happened in 1998, with an exception I’ll come to.
So—and this just sums up things roughly—I had enough going on in 1998 that the disappointment I faced with the EC was minor—or at least, “able to be muffled”—in the larger scheme of things. But the shame of how my volunteer township service ended so ignominiously was not easy to swallow, especially with how tacky Skoder’s behavior had been. On a level, as many people would say, I could have just said, “Well, the EC thing was volunteer, and if volunteers are going to get crapped on like that, then good riddance to bad rubbish, and stick to your paid work.”
I could indeed end up forgetting about it on a practical level—township-government stuff was no longer a corridor of life I routinely went down, with the sense of honor it conveyed. Emotionally, things were more complicated. As you can see, technically and emotionally, it turns out to be picking at an old scab, raising blood and causing a bit of new pain, even trying to coax a practically oriented story out of old records and memories on this. Is it worth it? Maybe I’ve said enough of this Skoder/NJN story in this Part A.
One important thing this points out is that, with a matter like that I’m dealing with regarding a medical-media firm—where the implications for the public are greater—dealing with it as fully as you can much closer to the “time of the violence” is more effective—and probably healthier, not just for me but for others.
In other words, I won’t wait 14 or 12 years to tell my 2010 medical-media story. I don’t even know if I’ll make it (independent of all else) to age 64, and anyway, at age 50, almost 51, I should not be dealing with this kind of shit. The shrapnel doesn’t belong in me. I hope to be returning it to its originator before long.
