A Muckraking Newspaper

1027
April 16th, 2019
Back A Muckraking Newspaper

Evan Mecham served as governor of Arizona for less than two years before his political enemies impeached him. The impeachment forced Mecham, a Mormon Bishop, out of office and the former governor went back to managing his family's Pontiac dealership in Glendale.

He was bitter about the attacks against his honesty and integrity by the Pulliam Press which operated Phoenix's two daily newspapers, the Phoenix Gazette and the Arizona Republic. That was why he started up a daily tabloid newspaper he called the Evening American.

Mecham hired two editors, Jack Karie, a former investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic, and Art Heenan, to head his editorial staff. Karie was a friend of mine and he hired me to be a reporter.

Those were the glory years in my journalistic career in the Valley of the Sun.

Karie was a gambler who ran poker games at his home in Phoenix. He was also a friend of Del Webb, who built the retirement community of Sun City, AZ. and who owned gambling casinos in Las Vegas

I accompanied Jack to Las Vegas on many weekend junkets. We always stayed at the Mint or at one of Webb's other casinos and we were never charged for a room.

The Evening American lasted for a couple of years before it was forced out of business by the Pulliam Press. When it ceased publication, Mecham converted it into several newspapers that circulated around the state, including the Tucson American, the Yavapai American and the Globe American.

We were a muckraking newspaper and our readers loved us.

When we heard that the melon growers near Yuma were paying their workers substandard wages and housing them in flimsy buildings full of cockroaches and rats, we sent Mark Monday, one of our reporters, to Yuma to apply for a job as an undercover laborer.

Mark worked in the melon fields for a couple of weeks, experiencing the hell the workers went through daily. Some of the melon farms were owned by people like Sen. Barry Goldwater and his brother, Bob, and Monday's articles ripped the roof off the melon field scandal.

When our tabloid ceased publication, Mecham continued publishing newspapers on a weekly basis. We heard that a prostitution ring was operating in Tucson...

...using massage parlors to ply their trade. I was sent to Tucson along with another reporter and we posed as clients in order to get the story.

The Tucson American published a series of articles exposing the operation. About a week after we published the front page story, a truck showed up at our Tucson offices. It contained a load of manure and the driver asked us where we wanted him to unload it.

One of the madames had ordered the manure to show us what she thought of our newspaper. We laughed probably as hard as she did and sent the truck away.

Politics is a vicious business. Mecham was one of the most honest men I have ever met but his political enemies were deadly and they succeeded in driving him out of office as Arizona's 17th governor. But they didn't silence his voice.

For a couple of years after the daily newspaper ceased publication, I traveled around the Grand Canyon State wit other reporters and dug under rocks and canvassed towns for stories that would make a difference to our readers.

The work was interesting, challenging, tough -- and I absolutely loved it!

I played poker with Jack Karie until he died. I also attended the greyhound dog races with Art Heenan who was a friend of the Funk family who owned a string of dog tracks in Arizona. They were two great journalists and the memory of them will always be a part of me.

“he started up a daily tabloid newspaper”

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