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1 1 The Early Days Editor’s Note Chapter 1 includes several selections from Paul Simon’s early career. These selections start with columns from the Troy Tribune, which was the first newspaper Paul bought and edited at the tender age of nineteen. The newspaper was essentially defunct when Paul purchased it, and he had to start from scratch to rebuild the paper’s physical facilities as well as its subscription and advertising base. The job required him to be owner, editor , publisher, reporter, and advertising salesman all at the same time. It was a difficult and trying time for the neophyte newspaperman, but it also offered an invaluable education in journalism and the newspaper business. Those were lessons that followed Paul Simon the rest of his life, and from the beginning he always identified himself as a journalist first and foremost, no matter how far his political career carried him. One of the reasons he consistently seemed to get good coverage from the media and to enjoy a good image with newspeople was that he was so clearly one of them with deeply engrained values honoring freedom of the press and the right of the public to know what was going on with their government. Another insight we gain from these first columns is a palpable sense of life in the small town of Troy, Illinois, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This is midwestern America in the Truman and Eisenhower eras, and Paul’s columns reflect the pace and the atmosphere of that day. The motto below the masthead of the Troy Tribune boasted that it was “A Progressive 2 The Early Days Newspaper in a Progressive Town.” Troy was a place of small-town values and sensibilities where a local citizen was not too busy to jump into his car and show Paul to his destination. It was also a place where the people wanted more “personal items”—that is, small-town news and gossip—to appear in their newspaper. The second column in the series also shows that Paul was already taking an interest in local politics and the ways in which national politics had a direct impact on the life and interests of the local newspaper subscribers. He writes about Congressman Melvin Price, who became a powerhouse in Congress and was legendary for his long service to that congressional district and for his ability to bring home federal largesse to the local constituency. Simon in that era also commented in a neutral way about the Democratic and Republican candidates for president in 1948, and his studied bipartisanship became one of the hallmarks of his later political career. The next two columns in this section show the early salvos in Simon’s fights with organized crime in Madison County. When he arrived in Troy, he was surprised to observe that both illegal gambling and prostitution were openly available in the county, and he quickly decided to take them on and try to clean up the county. These articles show his methods of publicly declaring that the law was obviously being broken and challenging the state’s attorney and the sheriff to do something about it. These articles and others like them led to the crusading newspaper editor image that Paul Simon acquired early in his first years in Troy, and that image stayed with him for the remainder of his career. An article published in Harper’s Magazine in 1964 shows the beginning of Paul’s career as a crusading reformer. By then, he had been elected to the Illinois House and then the Illinois Senate, and he had not been favorably impressed with what he found there. It was a legislative process where all too many legislators seemed to have their hands out, and the pursuit of personal enrichment took precedence over any thought for the common good. The article, coauthored with Alfred Balik, was the first time Simon came to national attention, as the article garnered a lot of headlines. It was a journalistic bombshell that put the Illinois General Assembly in the spotlight in a very unflattering way. Some of Simon’s colleagues were not amused, and they called him a traitor and worse in their response to his criticisms. From that day on, his relationships with some of his colleagues were strained or broken, and he was certainly never accepted into the tightknit club of insiders who ran the legislature for their own benefit and for the enrichment of the narrow...

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