Vaya Con Dios

Thirty minutes into the hike, we crossed a bridge over the Colorado River. I had finally made it to the bottom of the Grand Canyon! Jed and I hung out on the bridge for a few minutes gazing at the wonder of the infinite.

The first set of switchbacks was just ahead, and we knew that the only direction was up and that the going would be tough.

We hiked along the swiftly moving Colorado River for 30 minutes before the trail began a sharp ascent, which actually felt good on my legs. New muscles and new direction filled me with energy.

We reached Indian Gardens by 10 a.m., and we immediately headed for the shade, hunkering down beneath the trees. We were not about to repeat the mistake of the day before. The sun had taught us a lesson.

It was time to rest and watch the clouds.

We moved from Half Moon Bay back to Tempe in the fall of 1991, and I took a position once again at the East Valley Tribune. After a couple of months, the city editor, John D'Anna, and the managing editor, John Genzale, asked me to look into the financial dealings of Governor Fife Symington.

I quickly found that Symington was just another real estate wheeler-dealer. I wrote a series of stories about his serious financial problems related to his service on the board of the now-defunct Southwest Savings and Loan. Soon we got lawsuit threats from Symington's legal team, headed by Washington, D.C., attorney John Dowd.

I got hold of Symington's personal financial statement, and it was obvious that he was not telling the truth about the values of his real estate investments. In January 1992, I told D'Anna that it appeared that Symington was bankrupt.

I accelerated the pace of a well-documented journalistic assault on the governor. His handlers responded with a counterpunch that scared the wits out of the gutless top brass at the Tribune. At one point during an editorial board meeting, I had a nasty confrontation with Dowd and the governor's media consultant, Jay Smith.

Smith challenged me to a fistfight. I said, "Let's go!" and pounded my fist against my tape recorder. I was escorted from the room, and the publisher wanted to fire me on the spot. D'Anna and Genzale intervened and saved my job, but I was removed from the Symington beat.

The next day, I printed out all my notes off my computer and moved all the records I had collected to the trunk of my car. I had no intention of leaving behind the files I had collected in case the ax fell.

A few months later, grace once again intervened. I did not need the Tribune any longer since a benefactor had appeared out of nowhere, the indefatigable Florence M. Mahoney. I consider Florence one of the most important American women of the 20th century, and she was a master at connecting people with ideas — and, Lord, she had plenty of them.

Her former husband had been publisher of the defunct Miami News, which was owned by Cox Newspapers. She was a friend of the rich and powerful, having entertained John F. Kennedy in her Georgetown home the night before he was inaugurated president.

Florence was impressed with my coverage of Symington for the Tribune, which at the time was also part of the Cox Newspapers chain. I told her the brass had abandoned the effort and that I wanted to start my own weekly.

She pulled out a checkbook and provided the seed money to start the Southwest Sage.

Barbara and I set off for Flagstaff to start the Sage. She sold ads, something she had never done before, and did it well and with grace. I handled the editorial side, with far less tact but with plenty of vigor. It was an ambitious venture that absorbed every minute of our lives.

We quickly were overwhelmed. It soon became clear that we could either raise our children or publish the paper. The choice was clear.

We shut down the Sage, but not before it won a couple first-place awards from the Arizona Press Club, and not before every advertiser had paid his bill in full. By early 1993, my old friend Jeremy Voas was managing editor of New Times, and he encouraged me to join the alternative paper in Phoenix.

"This place is made for you," he told me.

So I hitched my horse to Michael Lacey's free weekly, and we moved back to the Valley of the Sun.

Voas was right. New Times provided a platform that allowed me to pursue investigative journalism without fear or favor and with the complete support of the paper.

I soon honed the art of attack journalism.

Rather than sitting back and waiting for "newsmakers" to hold "press conferences" to spin their views, I dug into the underbelly of the beast. I loudly demanded information, often through the Arizona Public Records Law, which is vital to journalists providing the public with a better understanding of why their community is what it is.

The kind of journalism I practiced at New Times is not for the weak-hearted who want approval from the powerful and wealthy, or who want to be invited to lunch with the governor and to power brokers' fancy parties.