Chapter 9

It was about 10:00 a.m. when Martin collected a left over caramel roll from the break room and made his way back into the Sentinel reception area. Shirley was finishing up a call from a local restaurant owner who wanted to beef up their advertising rotation in preparation for the summer traffic. She transferred the call to Ronnie Hemple, carefully took off her headset and looked up at Martin suspiciously. “Caramel rolls, Martin? What do you want?”
Martin was surprised at how transparent he was, at least to Shirley Campbell. “Wow, Shirley, can’t a guy just feel generous one morning?” he asked, laughing nervously.
“No Martin, a guy doesn’t just wake up one morning and after two years of being pretty much a snob and not having any desire to hang out with his fellow employees ever, no, he can’t just feel generous one morning without wanting something. Those boneheads in there might be fooled by your sudden generosity, but not me.”
Martin opened his mouth to reply, but closed it quickly when he realized he wasn’t going to get anything past Shirley. His mind worked quickly on a strategy, and he decided to just stick to the facts. He needed the keys to the storage locker and access to the microfiche.
“I’m working on a story about a Siren High science teacher who is retiring this spring. Human interest. Touchy feely stuff about how many lives he’s… impacted.” Martin paused, closed his eyes for a minute to gather some courage and continued, “I want to look at some old papers from when he started. See what was happening at the time he began teaching, see if he ever did anything that was covered by the Sentinel. Just research, you know, building the foundation, whatever…” Martin knew he was rambling.
Shirley squinted at him behind her granny glasses, then opened the center desk drawer, pulled out the keys to the shed and held them out for Martin to catch as she dropped them in his hand. “Sounds good, Martin. Here are the keys. Feel free to let me know when you need access to the microfiche. But just so you know? I’ll need a little more information about what you’re really up to before I hand that over.”

It was clear to Martin as he put the key into the Schlage padlock to open the metal shed in the Sentinel parking lot that no one had been in the building for years. The lock was rusty, and Martin had to work hard to turn the key to get it open. The door of the 8’ X 10’ shed creaked as he opened it and dragged it across the asphalt. Martin looked in to see stacks and stacks of old Sentinels, one placed on top of the other, all threatening to fall down at the slightest touch. Martin took a deep breath, and inhaled dust and mold that tickled his nostrils and instantly made him sneeze. “This will be murder on my allergies,” he thought.
As he looked at the stacks that hugged the perimeter of the shed, he saw an antiquated folding chair, brown metal with a ripped red vinyl seat and back, which he pulled out and set up just outside the door so he’d have a place to sit while he looked at the papers. It, too, was hard to open and unfold, and Martin wondered how long he’d be able to sit and work out in the shed with such an uncomfortable chair. He knew that there were about 2,800 newspapers out there – 53 years with 52 weeks of papers. But then he remembered he was only going to need to look at 1973 to 1980. Only about 10%. “I can do this,” he thought. “Not a big deal. I just hope someone had the good sense to keep the papers in order…”
Martin entered the shed again, reached up to the top of one stack right in the middle of the line-up and pulled down 5 papers. Mouse droppings fell on his head as the papers came down, and he shuddered in disgust. If Sharla hadn’t been in the back of his mind, he would have dropped the papers, folded up the chair, closed the squeaky door, locked the padlock and raced home quickly to take a shower and change his clothes. But she was in the back of his mind, so he didn’t stop, even though he really wanted to.
He used his forearm, covered with the sleeve of his jacket, to sweep off the dust and the remains of the mouse turds from the newsprint. Looking at the upper left corner, he saw the date – June 4, 1960. The four papers under that edition at the top of the stack were all in consecutive order, leading up to June 4. He stood on tiptoe to carefully place the papers back on their stack, and moved to the right to take down another 5 papers. The papers were from 1964, ascending in order. “Can I really be this lucky?” Martin thought to himself.
As he quickly moved over 4 stacks after replacing the 5 from 1964, Martin tripped and fell into the stacks on the right hand side of the shed. He tried to reach out to stop the cascade of falling newspapers, dust and mouse droppings, but failed miserably. He fell back onto his rear and tried to protect himself with his arms over his head, but it was hopeless. The dust surrounded him, and he was coughing uncontrollably, when he saw a pair navy blue clogs and tights under a corduroy jumper appear at the shed door. “Problems, Martin?”
Martin continued to cough and spit out dust for about 30 seconds before he could answer. “Just a little clumsy, Shirley. I was so excited to see that these old papers were in chronological order, I moved a little too quickly, tripped and …well, you can see what happened.”
“Yes, I can see what happened,” she replied, irritated. “It took me almost 2 full days to put these in order and now, I’ll have to spend another day just picking up after you.”
“No, Shirley, please, I’ll do it.” Martin spoke quickly without thinking as he picked himself up and brushed off the back of his pants. “I just got so excited about the possibility of finding out what I needed to know to nail Frank…” He stopped short and looked into Shirley’s face. “Frank who, Martin?” she asked, as she looked at him sideways through narrowed eyes. When he didn’t answer, she asked again. “Frank who, Martin?”
Martin stared down at his brown suede saddle shoes and tried to form his words carefully. He knew that Shirley was Clark’s watchdog, and if he tipped his hand to her, she’d tell Clark in a heartbeat. He looked back into her face and saw that her eyes were hard and demanding an answer. “Just give her the facts,” he thought.
“Shirley, I’m working on a story about Frank Talbot. He’s the teacher who is retiring.”
“And why, exactly, do you want to nail him, Martin? Did he give you a bad grade or something?” her voice was soft but a little caustic. There was something in the look on Shirley’s face that made him wonder if she knew something about Talbot.
Martin continued to brush dust off, buying some time. “No, Shirley, he didn’t give me a bad grade. I just want to share the many aspects of his impact on the student population in Burnett County as he sails off into retirement,” he replied carefully. “I shouldn’t have used the word “nail”. It implies some wrongdoing. And I’m a member of the press, so I can’t be that judgmental. I just want to do some fact finding, that’s all.”
Shirley smirked. “Martin, do you really think you’re going to find any facts in the Sentinel?”

Upon realizing that he might have an ally, Martin asked Shirley if he could take her to lunch after she helped him restack some of the fallen newspapers. “Wow, Martin, you really are a generous guy today,” she said sarcastically, but agreed to join him for lunch at the Adventures Restaurant in Siren.

It was “South of the Border Day” for specials, so they each ordered a Northwoods of Wisconsin version of Mexican food. They traded pleasantries and small talk, but soon the conversation turned to work and the newspaper. By the time they finished lunch, Martin thought that Shirley might be as disgusted as he was with Clark’s “hands off the real news” approach to the Sentinel. “Why run a newspaper like the newletter for the Burnett County Convention and Visitors’ Bureau?” she asked him between bites of her chicken quesadilla.
As they waited for the check, Shirley took a slurp of her coffee and asked him, with her voice hard, “So Martin, what about Frank Talbot?” As the question hung in the air, he looked up at the ceiling and thought that maybe he had misjudged Shirley’s potential sympathy. “I mean it, Martin. I need to know what’s going on here if I’m going to help you.”
Martin looked down at her and saw that her face was earnest and open. “Help me?” he asked.
“Of course,” she answered him impatiently. “Look, for the past 2 years, you have come in every day. You don’t talk to anyone, you don’t mix with anyone, you just come in and in your uppity, snobbish, “too good for the rest of you” way, you go about your business and pretend you’re a ‘journalist’.” Martin could see that Shirley was on a roll, but he wasn’t going to stop her because she said that she might help him. “Today, you come in and clearly, you have uncovered something that has you so whipped up, you’re willing to hang out with us peasants to get something done that you feel needs doing. Well, it must be important, and if it is, then I think I should help you because you sure need it.”
Martin started to protest, but knew she was dead on. ““Martin, I got news for you,” she continued, almost in a frenzy. “Covering church socials and school board meetings is not journalism. If you have something that the community needs to know, then it’s your journalistic duty to tell them!”
Martin looked around the restaurant to see if anyone was paying attention as Shirley’s passion seemed to escalate. When he saw that everyone was lost in their own conversation, he responded in a whisper, “What if it costs me my job?”
“That’s where I can help,” she answered, and gave him a satisfied smile and a quick wink. “Don’t worry about it, Martin. You just let me help you, and Clark won’t know what happened. He’ll just take the kudos when it’s all over, and the dust has settled.”
As Martin and Shirley walked back to the Sentinel building, he learned quickly that it was more than just Shirley’s wardrobe that hadn’t left the 70’s. He discovered that she was a bit of a rebel, someone who was born too late to fully experience the truly turbulent times of the 60’s and was frustrated by the lack of opportunity for protest in the 70’s as the country moved into disco fever soon after she graduated from Siren High. At 18, she thought that working at a newspaper would give her the opportunity she wanted to do something with her life, to make a difference, to expose injustice, greed and depravity. But she, like Martin, found out all too quickly that the Sentinel was a mouthpiece for the vacation industry in Burnett County. And youthful ideals and passion gave way to the comfort of having a regular paycheck and middle-age complacency.
At 53, Shirley was ready to find her 18-year-old, idealistic, passionate self again, even if it meant teaming up with a snotty nerd like Martin Lundeen.