Small-town publisher hopes to hold on until century mark
LINDEN – Weekly newspapers represent the heart and soul of small communities and Goodloe Sutton is doing the best he can to keep the Democrat-Reporter off life-support.
It hasn’t been easy. Financial problems have forced him to move the paper’s office that had been located across the street from the Marengo County Courthouse.
It was where Goodloe did his best work since 1964 — pounding out hard-hitting editorials and coming up with headlines that alternately amused and angered readers.
His office now is in a former barbecue restaurant a block away, where pieces of paper are taped to windows carrying the paper’s name.
The Democrat-Reporter is being printed in Monroeville about an hour away and the press that had been humming for decades collects dust in the big building that once housed it in the “back shop.”
His barebones office staff is without an advertising executive to keep the weekly’s bottom line above water and he’s seeking anyone with selling experience to consider the Democrat-Reporter as a future.
Circulation figures are in the dumps. It once was more than 7,000. Today, it’s down to 3,000 and Goodloe is doing all he can to stem the black-to-red decline.
Think that’s bad? Well, his health isn’t much better. He had a pacemaker implanted a few years ago — proving once and for all to detractors that he actually has a heart.
He laughs at that and he hasn’t had many reasons to chuckle in recent years. Those who know Goodloe can only commiserate with him over his financial problems, but they know the real loss in his life has been his wife, Jean Sutton.
He always credited her for laboring over courthouse records that helped the Democrat-Reporter win acclaim for exposing crooked cops, Marengo County’s sorry former sheriff who got his hand caught in the public’s cookie jar and an assortment of other ne’er-do-wells.
“Ole Goodloe and Miss Jean” as they were known in Linden, fell in love at the University of Southern Mississippi and, after graduation, moved to Linden where Jean’s initial reluctance dissipated the moment she set foot in the community.
The two formed one of Alabama’s most determined, honored newspaper teams and their hot-on-the-trail investigation of the disgraced former sheriff who eventually went to federal prison, earned them Pulitzer Prize consideration as well as kudos in People magazine and the New York Times.
Jean died in 2003 of cancer-related complications two months after she and Goodloe were in Ireland for an international journalism conference and recognition for their muck-raking abilities.
Goodloe said they were married 39 years, one month and one week. It’s his way of remembering the love of his life.
The loss of his wife-managing editor-best friend was almost too much to handle or bear in the years following her passing.
“It was hard for me to go home during that time,” he said. “I was like a zombie for several years after I lost Jean. I didn’t know what to do.”
The paper and his sons — Goodloe Jr. and William — helped him make it through those trying times and he’s slowly been coming around.
He’s still as erasable as ever and his racial-references in headlines and stories still upset many of his readers, although some dismiss them as examples of “Goodloe being Goodloe.”
Last March 19, his main big-letter headline blared off the paper’s front page with: “Selma black thugs murder Demopolite Saturday night.”
“What if they were white thugs from Selma, Goodloe?” I asked him. He didn’t respond to that question, but I seemed to detect a wink from him.
We’ve been friends through the years and I was once asked to introduce him and Jean in 2009 when they received an award from Auburn University. Jean’s was posthumous.
Goodloe is only a few months from his 77th birthday and I reminded him that “7” is supposed to be a lucky number. Having two of them side by side should be doubly lucky.
“Well, we just have to wait and see,” he said. “Right now, I’m working hard to keep us going.”
Above his desk, high on a wall, is a likeness of Geronimo, the Apache warrior who was imprisoned briefly in Alabama in 1887.
Asked why he had Geronimo as a “guest” in his office, Goodloe indicated it provides him with an inspiration to keep fighting, to never give up in the face of adversity.
That’s what he’s facing today — major financial woes, a skeleton workforce, a sharp decline in circulation and who-knows-what else might be around the corner.
His father, who lived to be 97, bought the Democrat-Reporter in 1917, meaning Goodloe is only two years away from celebrating his paper’s centennial birthday.
That should be enough to keep him working, not retiring. If he makes it, he’ll have reason to shout “Geronimo” as he jumps into his newspaper’s second century.