For better public service against days of crisis, we need NO assaults close to home
(In some ways, this Skoder story—which I present in my habitual way of trying to make old woolly-bear stories relevant for modern-pragmatist times—still seems like an awful big knot of professionalism-related Sturm und Drang to try to make relevant to our post-election, post-Sandy situation of “Where to next, Quasimodo?” But this intro right here isn’t too bad—it’s built for possible perusal at a Starbucks; the much different Parts 1-4 [subheaded “Assault Close to Home”] on my “Mountain Bear” blog should be interesting but to a limited readership; and Parts 5 and following, which could well appear on this blog, should be more attuned to current needs and tastes. Bottom line? This old war story provides me with some experiential basis for deciding what to do about a more current issue—licentious behavior at a medical-media firm.)
[Editorial note: You know it, and I know it: time to remember what’s important, as we gather around the holiday table, and savor kith and kin, and give thanks. We’ll gobble down gobbler meat; suck up that delicious stuffing and/or mashed turnips and/or cranberry sauce; knock back a few tall, cool ones (of whatever sort). Some will go watch football for the rest of the afternoon. Big break from all the recent Sturm und Drang, right? And we deserve it. But life goes on; dark clouds are on the horizon, and it isn’t just perverse thoughts that lead us to acknowledge them. Our enthusiasm is for meeting challenges lately, and the challenges never sleep. But they are such that we get a bit grumbly thinking of them, as creative as we want to be. Some of the thoughts are fairly universal: “Where’s my f**king money?!” and “I ought to choke that so-and-so…!” Then, we can reach for therapy too: get on the laptop, maybe a smart phone will do—check out a Web site. “What is the dweeb up to now? What war stories has he got? How can I look good in comparison to him?” And you check out the latest blog entry, and then have that little voice in your head say: Ask not for whom the dweeb lands on his face: for he could be you, too.
[Another, unexpected spur to my posting the below information, especially relevant to Gene Mulvihill, whom I don’t want to sully the memory of any more than is incidentally necessary, is something that appeared in a food section—see under the columnist’s page of the company Web site—of the New Jersey newspaper The Star-Ledger on November 21, on Mr. Mulvihill’s having a nice wine cellar (for some reason the Mulvihill column didn't turn up when I tested this link; it should). Now I’m not slighting the columnist’s opinion, but, from the standpoint of someone who has lived in a town affected by Mr. Mulvihill’s business for years…. Mmmm! It’s cool that Mr. Mulvihill had this bon vivant side of him, but it also seems as if some public relations so-and-so (not the columnist) has been doing an assiduous job burnishing the reputation of his former employer. Not to worry, folks, a little history shown below—not to make an untoward mountain out of Mulvihill’s past deeds—will convey the realistic metes and bounds of what it has meant to pursue good work of various kinds in Vernon Township within the past quarter century, whether that work was paid or volunteer. So raise a glass, whether filled from a wine cellar or not, and say, “Prost!” (There may seem a wobbling between tones here; I sympathize with Mr. Mulvihill's family's sense of loss on Thanksgiving; but Mr. M was a focus of important news and grassroots controversy for many years in a township comprising ~60 square miles, about public discussion about such a figure, even following his death, can't be mealy-mouthed, though it tries to be fair.)]
[I will be unable to make corrections to this entry until after Thanksgiving. Edits done 11/23/12 & 12/6/12.]
Subsections below:
The 1998 Skoder story to be released in edited form; two phases to the story
The 1998 assault phase: Lessons for later, especially on the question of letting time heal wounds
The business-model side of the little newspaper involved
The parameters of my work arrangement: Quite a substantial job, for a part-timer, yet with profile very hidden
How the 1998 assault-phase story, at least, is relevant now
A taste of the 1998 assault-phase stuff, including telling exhibits
Links to obtaining a novel a friend wrote, inspired by Skoder
You may have wondered, as you read my recent entries related to Gene Mulvihill, the businessman who recently passed, what Skoder (pseudonymous) had to do with anything. Good question.
Skoder is at the center of a hairy story from 1998, which I have contemplated posting something of (i.e., in some form, or in some part) for quite some time, even before I started this blog (but had my own Web site). For a long time, I kept it under wraps…but one trick to dealing with it is, as when I was thinking of producing it before Hurricane Sandy hit, how to make it relevant to today (to either my own concerns, or others’ concerns).
In fact, Hurricane Sandy, with its bringing to the fore concerns about local forms of help (first responders, utility companies, FEMA helping out, and so on), seemed to make the Skoder story not irrelevant again, because it had to do, in part, with providing local public service, which could relate to (among other things) a sort of infrastructure being in place in case of emergency.
(Actually, my own experience on township boards in the 1990s—which Skoder in 1998 did affect permanently for me in her idiosyncratic way—really did relate, to FEMA/emergency type parameters: in one isolated instance, my term on the Environmental Commission related to what information the township was apt to have on file with FEMA, or such, in 1996; and in 1997, when I was on the Board of Health, that board dealt with an issue regarding health department employees of a certain class being on call for emergencies…a very interesting issue in which I played a helpful role, which I should tell you sometime.)
The 1998 Skoder story ended up comprising a sizable enough chunk of my short novel manuscript First Love, though it was atypical of the larger novel (partly because the Skoder chunk closely hewed to the facts, not putting fictional twists on things as the rest of the novel did). And that’s where it was relegated for years, though I wondered if there wasn’t something more I could do with it….
The real-life correlate of Skoder has been a local person (in Sussex County, N.J.) who has worked as a news reporter, and more recently (for different employers) a teacher and an editor within a publishing company. Her career from about 1991 on was pretty scattershot, from what I could tell; I mean, mine has been catch-as-catch-can too, but she had a family she helped support, and the types of things she aimed for were (1) of a more conservative-career sort and (2) based on limited education, as she had for years, so in view of these features, the fact she ran afoul of employment desiderata in more dramatic ways than other people who work in the editorial and related fields was rather strikingly evident and telling. An interesting area I’m only being very cursory with here.
Skoder, when “flourishing” as a reporter in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, was highly controversial, for two reasons: she tended to engage in what many considered slanted news reporting on municipal issues—favoring one faction in town over another (typically she favored one faction or constellation of local Republicans); and she was highly litigious. This might seem like old history if her way of insinuating herself in an unseemly fashion into local politics, and being apt to threaten lawsuits, did not crop up again in 2010-11.
In fact, it is an easy assessment to make that no one person has caused more damage to civic life in Vernon Township in the past 25 years, or done it in a more peculiar (and that consistently peculiar) fashion. If this was confined to 1989-2000, it might be “able to be forgiven or forgotten” a bit, but it has extended to as recently as 2010-11. This along with the range of people whose rights she has trampled on or whom she has offended mean that her role in local politics has qualified as a serious problem locally.
Obviously, all this not only makes her a sort of “case study” in her own right, but also it poses a peculiarly paradoxical kind of threat: as she has shown over years, if you try to write about her (or otherwise address her publicly), she threatens a lawsuit (and at least in the past, this had typically been in a rather rambunctious, uncompromising manner).
The fact that she made strides in getting an education and becoming a teacher and an editor at an educational publisher does not negate the fact that her career trail has for years been littered with much “collateral damage” in terms of people she fairly noisily clashed with, sued, caused to leave local (volunteer) government service, and so on. In my opinion, as a self-determining career woman, she leaves quite a bit to be desired, to say the least.
How this related to me in 1998 is that, after I had been involved in a civic fashion (volunteer service, attending meetings, letters to the editor—not anything that would ordinarily have resulted in commercial benefit to me) in my town for approaching a decade, Skoder caused something to happen that resulted in the sudden crashing to the ground of my local-government service. After my service that included a little over two years on the township Environmental Commission, and one year on the Board of Health (as well as partaking in a local Democratic club, which did not provide the solemn, public-affecting work that the other positions did, and which Skoder couldn’t affect), I suddenly was shot down in a peculiar situation that not only involved a grossly unprofessional move on Skoder’s part, but also involved a phenomenal move on the part of one work boss of mine. My boss at a local-newspaper company, for which I’d worked (as a part-time staffer) since November 1996, was also indirectly a boss of Skoder, who worked as a stringer reporter for a local newspaper I did not have any direct involvement with. The boss favored Skoder, in effect, over me in grossly uncompromising terms in a particular issue. How this happened makes for a detailed, fascinating story that is the climax of the 1998 set of episodes included in the First Love novel.
The 1998 Skoder story to be released in edited form; two phases to the story
The Skoder part of that novel, on which I recently did editing to make it intelligible to people outside the situation, is essentially Parts 1-4 of a series with the thematic subhead “Assault Close to Home,” available on my “Mountain Bear” blog. One reason it has taken so long to get any version of this tale available publicly is that the full story of “Skoder and consequences for me” actually did not merely comprise the 1998 stuff, but included an attenuated 1999-2001 phase, which had very little directly to do with Skoder, but also involved my boss and one or two other staffers at the newspaper.
In fact, the 1998 Skoder violence was an important precondition in my own mind for how I dealt with the 1999-2001 stuff, which included what I considered abusive behavior of my boss’s (which in 1999 did not directly relate to Skoder), which itself, after I resigned from the newspaper, I eventually complained about to the human resources department at the larger company that owned the newspapers that both I and my boss worked on as well as Skoder’s newspaper. The 1999-2001 stuff was largely confined to 1999, but there was a set of sequelae to it in 2000 and 2001. The whole mess ended in early 2001. This whole situation was all the more amazing for how it seemed so uncomplimentary to my two and a half years of solid copy editing work for the newspaper company, which over a fairly long time, my boss praised about as readily as she was inexplicably nasty in early 1999.
The 1999-2001 phase I have started to write on, but am not finished with, yet. I am less sure how much of this I would release publicly, at least in the near future. (It actually is suitable to my presenting the theme of how companies today, in their financial travails, try to make themselves able to be adapted to readily and ethically by talented, idealistic twenty-somethings, or not—which I think, today, is one good measure for how much “sleaze” element there is in a company that also causes it to shoot itself in the foot.)
One relevant feature of all this is that, not least in the 1998 Skoder phase—call this the “1998 assault-phase” story—lawyers were amazingly unhelpful in a situation in which a local news reporter, in effect, grossly interfered with a volunteer government board’s business. This experience of mine with lawyers went on through a number of months in 1998.
In the 1999-2001 phase—call it the “post-abuse/quixotic phase” story—another lawyer also proved distinctly unhelpful, including on a specific aspect of the 1998 assault-phase matters.
The two phases’ lessons about lawyers help explain one solid reason I was very unapt to use an attorney in the Bauer v. Glatzer mess of 2008.
More generally, the lessons I got about lawyers seem to show how lawyers are very difficult to get help from in complex, subtle situations of legal infringement on workers at media companies.
The 1998 assault phase: Lessons for later, especially on the question of letting time heal wounds
Not only this, but when it comes to local political bodies being allowed to function as they should, and meeting people’s needs even in an emergency, it is important that the public understand—and be quite willing to learn—how these bodies are supposed to function, rather than these members of the public imposing a grossly biased, recrudescent, or otherwise unhelpful attitude onto their dealings with such a body. In this regard, both Skoder and my boss, in their relating to me in the 1998 mess, seemed much more suited than otherwise to being intemperate functionaries in a seedy division of a quisling/quasi-fascist Eastern European government, which had more of a tradition of stultified, bullying bureaucracy than respect for the earnestly embraced precepts of Americans trying to serve their communities in line with Anglo-American civic-life ideals.
Further, the 1998 story poses a lesson in the following way. When we’ve allowed an old story of professional mishap, indeed assault on one’s person, to remain “in a drawer” for over a decade, can we return to it later and tease out meanings “for us today” that we didn’t quite see then? Does forgiveness help “allow good lessons to stew”? Do certain parts of the story fade in importance with time?
These questions not only relate to the 1998 assault-phase story, but also to my 2010 CommonHealth story. If I put a lot of that (2010) story in a drawer for a decade, would the nastiness fade with time? Would the sense of what lessons there are, change? (This is aside from whatever relevance there is now to the CommonHealth story in terms of current public-health interests.)
Well, I find from the 1998 assault-phase story that some things are about as outrageous as they were then. In particular, my boss’s worst actions look now about as ugly as they ever did: the stark “unprofessionalism” about them was so, you might say, world-class and world-historical that they still offend, and hold lessons, today. And of course, Skoder’s worst actions don’t fade much either, though from a broader viewpoint, a lot of her behavior looks like the many silly details of a vastly manifesting source of peccadilloes, infringements, stumbles, outrages, threats, sick comedy, and so on—from someone who, in a most fundamental, unambiguous way, can’t mind her own business well at all.
The business-model side of the little newspaper involved
One aspect of this story is that the newspaper company involved—particularly in its local, non-subscription papers for some of which I did my work—produced papers that were primarily advertising vehicles, not so much servants of journalistic ideals. This can be readily appreciated in the kinds of papers that come freely in the mail, which seem to feature mostly advertising and whose articles seem mealy-mouthed, naïve, intelligence-insulting, and/or the like. Various consumers who receive these newspapers regard them with appropriate scorn, and may consider them “straight-to-the-recycling-pile” fare. Indeed, when I worked at this company, I fielded at least one phone call from a consumer who demanded that the distributor of one paper stop throwing it in his driveway. Similarly, a different company, in Sussex County, that distributed a similar advertising-vehicle newspaper received complaints from my lake community, Barry Lakes, because at the time the papers were thrown in driveways and ended up clogging drainage culverts and the like. The newspaper responded by rattling swords through an attorney who claimed First Amendment rights (of the newspaper company). For some time now, this paper is distributed in the mail.
Add to this basic understanding of a certain kind of newspaper that in the department in which I worked, my boss and I and numerous coworkers worked on such non-subscription, advertising-vehicle newspapers, but another newspaper produced in our office suite, over which my boss had a titular supervisory role, was a subscription newspaper (which hence had more class, as well as incentive to do professional news reporting), for which there was a tiny-circulation alternative edition, called the Argus, that was not a profitable proposition business-wise, and whose editorial coverage had mainly been West Milford, a neighboring town to mine. The company wanted to spread this newspaper’s subscription base to Vernon Township, my town, but the only reporter who regularly did news reporting for Vernon Township for the Argus was none other than Skoder, as a stringer reporter (a low-level kind) and not as a staffer.
And Skoder, unexpectedly for the Argus’s management, posed the dilemma that apparently no one other potential candidate for being a news reporter for the paper would consider writing for the Argus on Vernon regularly because of the ill repute brought to it by Skoder, whose baggage was already well established in Vernon Township by 1998. All this was easily enough appreciable background (certainly among various Vernon residents) to my 1998 assault-phase story. Even if my boss didn’t appreciate all these factors—and I think she was engaging in wishful thinking, at best, to blink the ways Skoder was a liability to the Argus—the ways the 1998 assault-phase story played out, which my “Jersey Bear” blog delivers as to the details that were important (in a sort of legal-case way) at the time, still shows both my boss and Skoder, in their respective ways, to have been inexcusable for what they did.
To some large extent, this whole story looks like “very local crap.” It’s the problems posed by people who were, so to speak, “not ready for prime time.” This is part of the reason I kept the 1998 assault-phase story under wraps. At the time I worked for the newspaper company from 1996 to 1999, I also worked for The Genesis Group Associates, a market-research firm concerned with nationally distributed products; Prentice Hall (the nationally distributing educational publisher, worked at through a placement agency); The World Almanac (worked for directly, not through an agency); Country Inns Bed & Breakfast, a nationally distributing magazine; Troll Communications, another nationally distributing media-related firm; and in 1999, TSI Graphics, a vendor to educational publishers such as Prentice Hall. The newspaper company was a place from which to draw a steady income (especially with taxes taken out, helpful at tax time when so much of the rest of your income was freelance, typically without taxes taken out), and it was an office to turn to like a “steady friend,” a place that regularly embraced my services every week—it was like a steady roosting place while so much else I was doing was in flux.
The parameters of my work arrangement: Quite a substantial job, for a part-timer, yet with profile very hidden
When the Skoder assault-phase mess happened in winter 1998, I had already been with the newspaper company almost a year and a half (which was long by the standards of the kind of position I had there). When I quit that job in June 1999, I had been there about two and a half years (again, long for that kind of work there). Though the Skoder infringement (of 1998) and my boss’s bad moves (in 1998 [relevant to Skoder] and 1999 [not directly related to Skoder]) were hurtful, at points even profoundly disturbing, at the time, I sort of chalked it up to the kind of crap you could see at a local craphole of a company. And indeed, as I once found when I did a quickie rating of three aspects of the various companies I’d worked for through the 1990s (paraphrasing the categories: care for product; office politics/brattiness factor; and general honesty/ethics), this newspaper company scored the lowest along the dimension of “care for product.” How this could be appreciated is seen, first, with the amount of work I personally did, which was overwhelmingly not on anyone’s bylined stories.
I copy edited, and later page-fitted (did page designs to fit the material I copy edited), press releases that made up a large enough percentage of two issues per week of Wayne Today and one issue per week of Suburban Life. The department I worked in, which served these two non-subscription, freely distributed newspapers, was inefficient in how it handled such editorial material. The material I was to work on was initially selected for being edited and prepared for possible publication by higher-ranking editors. A young woman who didn’t even have a college degree yet rammed all this material through a scanner—and its readiness for simple copy editing in a normal sense varied quite a bit—and then I had to edit it, whenever I got in to do this. I could have maybe a dozen such things to work on in a given night.
Altogether in my two and a half years there, I edited, I figured, over 6,000 press releases, but largely as a function of the space on pages available for it, only approximately one-fifth, I believe, were ultimately used (and I usually chose what was used). Measured in piecemeal terms, my work accounted for about 1,449 pages I laid out; and it accounted for 245+ issues of newspapers in which my editing featured. In all, for a given issue, the material I was responsible for editing amounted to an average of one-fourth to one-third of the total editorial material that featured in the pages of each of the papers I worked on. (And yet, again, I copy edited a lot more material than was ultimately used.)
Meanwhile, based on hypothetical estimates of others’ pay, I figured I accounted for only about one-eighth of the pay-related budget for the papers, and took only about one-twelfth of the time (total editorial hours from all editors on the papers) to do the work. I was a bargain in terms of preparing editorial material for those papers. I even pointed most of this out in my resignation letter of May 24, 1999. (Wayne Today, by the way, had a circulation of 43,000; Suburban Life, distributed to a weirdly concatenated set of municipalities, had less of a circulation.)
With this large load of work, there still was so much that typically happened—via management and sheer accident—that worked against quality of the product that the company seemed almost self-consciously intentional about producing shoddy work (bad editing, stories with parts bluntly missing, etc.). These errors often happened within the bylined-articles parts of the newspapers I was not responsible for. So, in my own “island” of responsibility, I tried to do the best I could in this larger situation.
Despite this function I served the company, while I also worked at nationally distributing publishers in that period, I could sometimes be treated as a measly dog with no rights—a hyperbolic statement you would understand more if you saw the full 1998 assault-phase story. The later “post-abuse quixotic phase” story tends to support this interpretation, too (but less).
As I’ve so often found in publishing, the decisions that get high-handedly made about you can have nothing to do at all with the quality of your work and everything to do with very petty concerns of office politics. (And do you think I was respected for “keeping the faith” with the large amount of efficiently done copy I was responsible for? At times, a bratty comment from a kid who had basically no experience beyond the local media level would speak as if I was a monkey not to be trusted with the bylined stuff.)
How the 1998 assault-phase story, at least, is relevant now
Today, when we consider a number of things, we can see how the Skoder story can be relevant again. These things are:
(1) how local organizations (government, nonprofit group, whatever) function should be understood as fully as possible by the public before they make complaints—and maybe the public, once understanding, can help them out more;
(2) business should not be illicitly pulling strings on the workings and fate of local government (though the details of this sort of thing narrow the definition here helpfully, and await actual stories);
(3) litigious-paranoid people, especially women of this ilk, are especially difficult, but have to be understood in their own crabbed terms;
(4) local lawyers, as I have found from long experience, are notoriously unhelpful with regard to items (2) and (3) here; and
(5) how young people starting out in a media career understand what is honest or honorable (and thus what they should adhere to as they develop their “work chops”) can vary widely, and this can affect how you function in a complex, pressured context with them (while you can be caused greater pain as a young person shows greater disloyalty to you, shows judgment errors, and/or such in this sort of situation).
A taste of the 1998 assault-phase stuff, including telling exhibits
In Part 3 of my Skoder story, to appear on my other blog, http://jnthetransient.blogspot.com, there is the following newly added section, which has the benefit of being linked to “exhibits” that have the additional benefit of not revealing Skoder’s identity clearly (though in other respects their meaning is clear). Skoder, in general, seemed to think that taking a Woodward and Bernstein approach, while siding with local officials she favored, was an appropriate way to doing journalistic coverage in Vernon Township. As it turned out, she played a busy enough role in depicting the “nefariousness of Gene Mulvihill” that was a widespread phenomenon (certainly not limited to media professionals) in Vernon Township for years.
It was within my 1989 “tenure” working under Skoder [at
The Vernon News] that, at her direction, I interviewed [Gene] Mulvihill for his opinion about a woman, AH, who was serving as chair of the township Planning Board at the time. It was fairly generally perceived, whether rightly or not, that Mulvihill was having a running feud with her over development issues he was partaking in—generally, she tended to be a stickler about certain criteria, and seemed to run up against his being expedient as a businessman. But the specific issue that came up, that prompted Skoder’s having me interview him, was some allegation that Mulvihill made about AH having a conflict of interest in a specific application I believe he had before the Planning Board. [For an article reflecting some of this matter, see
Exhibit A, from the state newspaper
The Star-Ledger; the second page is the back of the newspaper clipping from which the story comes, to show the date; I have the original in my possession.]
In the interview by phone, Mulvihill and I got along OK; he was cooperative and forthcoming enough within the bounds set out by what Skoder had me ask about. In fact, his frank assessment of AH, which I duly reported in my not-quite-story, was such that Skoder, who was a blatant ally of AH’s—and typical of the way Skoder functioned as a reporter, with her taking sides in local political issues—reacted to the draft of the story as if
I’d engaged in egregious libel. Mulvihill’s comment, as I wrote it in a sort of crude draft of a story, not necessarily meant all to be published as is, was that AH “ ‘has a problem—and she desperately wants to be involved in our applications. It’s very important [to her].’ He added that he ‘doesn’t care’ about [H___], but that ‘anyone [he’s] talked to, any businessman in town, doesn’t feel she can do the job.’” Skoder wrote on the hard copy I gave her, which I still have—“libelous statement[;] all-out attack on Holbert.” [See
Exhibit B, which shows my draft, not really an article but a sort of report (because I didn’t think there was much of a story—I mainly opted to show what Mr. Mulvihill had to say); the second page is an actual, un-bylined story Skoder later had published (probably in August 1989) that included the two quotes she marked with such a “teacherly air of criticism” on my typescript; I have the originals.] Of course, in some sense this meant that this report could put the newspaper at risk, etc.—and yet her comment had a flavor as if Mulvihill’s statement was
my fault. [As I will convey in a future posting, she had no college degree at this point—which I only found out from a credible source in 1998—though in 1989 it was a clear impression to me that if she had attended college, she hadn’t done terribly well.]
At first she signaled she wasn’t going to use this report. For one thing, her kind of accusing an underworker (myself) for something
she set the underworker up for was something she did with at least one other reporter at that time [in line with Skoder’s “investigative journalism” philosophy—she tried to press low-paid stringer reporters into the same kind of Woodward and Bernstein efforts that she herself espoused in her own work, at the time and later]. Jan P., a professional psychologist who was also working as a reporter and office clerk at the newspaper at the time, had something of the same experience. Yet, even more amazingly, either just after I left working there or just prior to the time I did, Skoder used part of this report I’d written—had the part printed—based on the interview with Mulvilhill, not changing what it substantively said. Her version removed my careful brackets with the resulting quote, “She desperately wants to be involved in our applications[…] It’s very important to her.” Not only that, but an additional statement from Mulvihill in my report—“Further, he said there are ‘other reasons why she should excuse herself,’ although he wouldn’t elaborate to this reporter,” regarding which Skoder hand-wrote the remark “vague”—ended up in Skoder’s un-bylined story [as you can see in
Exhibit B] as “He said there were other reasons why she should excuse herself but would not elaborate.” The larger story, which still was on the short side, had Skoder representing AH’s comments in response to these remarks from Mulvihill—a sort of method Skoder used enough other times: giving some information or quotes she had acquired to someone else “on her side” for that person to have a chance to comment as if to “counteract” the information or quotes. In this small article, AH’s quotes went along with some hints of opinions from “Deputy public advocate Stephen Eisdorfer”—from whom Skoder obviously tried to get official input (I don’t know if he was county-level official)—who said “he had no public statement to make on the issue at this time and has only offered ‘background information’”—which Skoder did not specify—“as is the policy of his office, and should not be quoted by the press” (!!). This all is a good example, small enough but vivid and documented, of her ways, which would balloon in implications in later years.
Skoder’s allegiance to AH was such, and her attitude toward me after she was fired from The Vernon News in mid-1991 was such (even though I had had nothing to do with her after September 1989), that she worked to try to discredit me when I started working for The Vernon News again in fall 1991 (while I was working full-time at All American Crafts, where I’d been, starting part-time, since August 1990). AH made an issue over something I reported in a story about a local microwave-communications business, MicroNet, regarding which the township Planning Board, with AH as a member, had dealings. Tina Halsted, the editor of The Vernon News at the time, went to an effort to defend my reporting by even going to the township meeting tapes to check what I reported. Her effort is reflected in Exhibit C. Ms. Halsted reflected to me that she had her work cut out for her in dealing with AH’s (I put it nicely) entreaties, and Ms. Halsted suspected (rather behind the curve on this, all things considered, and not that she could be blamed) that Skoder was putting AH up to this.
Skoder would later file a lawsuit in 1993, in Superior Court in Sussex County, against numerous parties for her loss of her Vernon News job in 1991. The suit was dismissed, from what I heard, in 1994.
These are just select highlights of Skoder’s business in town from the period of 1989-93. Her working for a newspaper (that folded after a short time) in 1994 is reflected in my second blog entry on Gene Mulvihill. Two women whose (supposed) letters, supporting the school of township-political thought that Skoder herself supported, ran in that newspaper were later sued by Skoder, in a suit filed in 1996, alleging defamation by six codefendants (all former friends of hers). That lawsuit was dismissed in 2000.
An editorial note in The New Jersey Herald in December 1995, which pointed out how Skoder was using a fake name under which to send letters to the editor of that paper, is discussed in Part 3 of my 1998 assault-phase story. I have an original and copy of this editorial note in my possession.
So here we have a history of Skoder’s functioning as a local-newspaper reporter and otherwise as a “local activist” over about a decade in the 1980s-90s—the length of time not connoting merely a passing whim or impulse. Her age from 1989 through 2000 was approximately from 35 to 46—she was no kid. Leaving aside whatever may be of similar ilk in Skoder’s public career from the past 12 years, I think we have adequate grounds to appreciate what a shaky number she was, as to feature as she did in my 1998 assault-phase story. In the details of that 1998 story, we can see how poor my boss’s judgment was in dealing with me vis-à-vis Skoder.
Links to obtaining a novel a friend wrote, inspired by Skoder
A friend of mine whom I first met when we were working for
The Vernon News in 1991 wrote a short novel about Skoder, naming her “Pinky Antonelli,” which is for sale
on Amazon and can be seen listed
here and
here.
An e-book version can be gotten here. (I haven’t read the whole thing but am amused by the initial impression given of Skoder in the freely available sample chapters. The image of this person with her large bag—very much the impression Skoder gave in 1989. However, what I have seen of the book’s characterization of her personality, specifically some illustrations of her paranoid ideation, show the book takes liberties with reality that may be its right to do as fiction.)
To be continued. Part 2 was envisioned to include a thematic part, “An explanatory principle is my boss’s eventually putting a young lieutenant in charge of Skoder’s paper.” This lieutenant, apparently, is the staffer who later released Skoder from working for the Argus, in about 2001. This plan altered. My November 27 entry shows one way I truncated this plan, with the darker Skoder story diverted to a Part 2 viewable here as well as a suggestion in the November 27 entry that there could be (not 100 percent likely) a mostly positive story on the lieutenant, which would have very little to do with Skoder.
