Out of the armpit

On the downside, when a well-known Washington Post humor columnist quoted her remarks in his story, “Why Not The Worst?” naming Battle Mountain “the Armpit of America,” she lost her job.

But Lorrie Baumann, former editor of The Battle Mountain Bugle, is one of those “the cup’s half-full” sorts. And the upside is that she finally got that chance to pursue the secret dream of just about every journalist on the planet and write the Great American Novel.

Her book, cranked out in less than two months after she was fired in early December, is a murder mystery. “It’s set in a small Northern Nevada mining town that bears some resemblance to, but is not, Battle Mountain,” she says. She’s not divulging the title, but as of last week she’d actually finished the book and was sending letters out to publishers. She’s already starting on book two.

Baumann, a petite 46-year-old with wispy, straight, desert-colored hair, doesn’t let any dust accumulate under her feet. It’s just not her style.

“I’m the most prolific writer you’ll ever see,” she says.

Of the post-Sept. 11 journalistic casualties, Baumann stands out as one of the most unlikely. She didn’t do anything so dramatic as question our nation’s foreign policies or critique the war on terrorism.

She was merely honest with columnist Gene Weingarten about the state of a rural Nevada town that, while riding the familiar waves of a boom-and-bust mining industry, has been lolling around in a trough. The slowdown of the mining industry forced more than 1,000 residents to leave the small town (population 5,000) in the past two years. Losing one-fifth of the population is enough to wrench any community apart.

“What leaves along with those people is your son’s soccer coach and the classroom mom who brought cookies,” Baumann explains. “Those people are extracted, and others have to make sure those things continue.”

That’s the kind of thinking that got her fired.

“When Mr. Weingarten first came to me in August and said ‘armpit,’ I thought of layoffs and unemployment. Schools are hurting. Battle Mountain is hurting. I wouldn’t myself describe that as the ‘Armpit of America.’ But I could understand how somebody coming in from the outside could dismiss it that way.”

Here’s an excerpt from Weingarten’s piece:

“Journalists may be notorious for their negativity, but when The Washington Post calls to say it is thinking of identifying as the Armpit of America the city or town in which your career is unspooling, negativity often yields nicely to sputtering indignation. At least that was the way it usually worked.

I telephoned Lorrie Baumann, editor of the Battle Mountain Bugle, and told her my idea.

“The Armpit of America?” she said.

“That’s sort of the, um, concept.”

Silence.

“Sounds about right,” she said.

“He spent about 15 minutes with me,” Baumann says. “It was kind of a shock. … He quoted me accurately, though.”

During the short time that Weingarten spoke with Baumann, she says that the two went over many significant issues. Later, Baumann saw him at the high school’s Homecoming bonfire.

“I walked by and there he was. I said hello and kept walking. I have no idea how much time he spent in Battle Mountain. I heard later than he spent the better part of a day with the [Battle Mountain] Chamber [of Commerce].

“I’ve heard many people say that he got it right. Whether they like the fact that he got it right or not, he told the truth about his experience of Battle Mountain. People take issue with how he got that experience: You don’t go to the dump to look at a sunset.”

Weingarten wrote: “It all seemed beautiful and humbling, out there at the famous sunset-viewing site, above the NO DUMPING sign riddled with buckshot … out there alone with nothing but my thoughts and a disquieting fragrance carried on the west wind, out there at the dump.”

To be fair, the Washington columnist went to Battle Mountain twice for the article that ran Dec. 2 in The Washington Post Magazine. The first time he went as a humor columnist poking not-so-gentle fun at the town that proudly “marks its identity on a nearby hill in enormous letters fashioned from whitewashed rock"—"BM.”

Weingarten noted that editor Lorrie Baumann didn’t actually live in Battle Mountain, but in the relative metropolis of Winnemucca, an hour away. He commented on the misspellings on various signs in town ("obcene” language) and described Battle Mountain casinos as “drunks at slot machines … [who] play with the intensity and excitement of people sorting socks at a Laundromat.”

He picked on chukars. ("It’s a scrawny little flapdoodly thing with mottled feathers and a hooked beak. … It looks like a cross between a chicken and a pigeon, with the least fortunate features of each. It is the color of dirt.")

You get the idea.

Weingarten left Battle Mountain and wrote his story for The Washington Post Magazine. But the story hadn’t run by Sept. 11, when Americans had a dramatic mood swing. “The zeitgeist had shifted,” Weingarten explained in his December story. “Snide was out.”

“Sept. 11 changed his view of what he needed to look for in Battle Mountain,” Baumann says. “It did clarify for us how much we hunger for a community experience and to know who we share ties with. Sept. 11 showed us we had an enemy out there and that we needed to look around for our friends.”

So Weingarten went back in early October to catch the world championship human-powered-vehicle race, a biking event held annually in Battle Mountain, and to look for the upside to the community. He ostensibly learned that boring could be good. A boring road with boring traffic levels drew that international recumbent-biking crowd to Battle Mountain. And since there’s not much to do in Battle Mountain, plenty of people turn out for youth sporting events like a Homecoming bonfire and The Big Game—of high school football between Battle Mountain and a rival team from Lovelock.

After several heart-warming moments, the famed columnist is conflicted. Dare he impose such a weighty judgment—Armpit of America—on this hapless burg? Driving out of town, the Washington Post photographer with Weingarten points out a gas station sign with a letter burned out. The photo ran on the cover of The Washington Post Magazine with Weingarten’s story. In the picture, a sign towers over the town—SHELL.

“The S is burned out,” Weingarten wrote. “So there you have it, for better or worse.”

You can read the wondrous and pithy article for yourself at The Washington Post Web site. It’s even linked now from Nevada writer David Toll’s travel Web site, www.nevadatravel.net. It will make you laugh and make you cry. As it did the residents of Battle Mountain.

When Weingarten’s article first ran, the chukar leavings hit the fan. Residents were divided. Some saw the truth in the outsider’s observations. Others were merely hurt and angry.

“Local folks were stunned and angry,” Toll says in a recent Nevada Travel Network Trip Report via e-mail. “They had been minding their own business, and out of nowhere they’d been blindsided, mugged in the national press.”

Businesses were especially frustrated and immediately lashed out at the first available target—Lorrie Baumann, the editor who didn’t live in Battle Mountain, who’d assured the dubious Weingarten that if he weren’t sure the town was the armpit, “… a quick drive around downtown ought to answer any questions that might be lingering in your mind.”

Within days of the story’s publication, Baumann got the boot. Bugle publisher Lee Denmark filled in as editor of the twice-weekly paper with the help of a former office manager promoted to assistant editor, Kim Nelson. Nelson had gotten some writing experience working with Baumann. “It’s a small paper,” she says. “We all do whatever it takes.”

Recently, Denmark hired a new editor, Dave Woodson, to replace Baumann. Woodson is moving to Battle Mountain. Given the recent era of residential exodus, it turns out to be a good time to buy a house there.

Nelson had “no comment” about how the paper was doing without Baumann. And Denmark didn’t return calls.

“You’re not going to get anything that hasn’t already been in print,” Nelson tells me in a professional aside.

As it’s turning out, the Armpit story may have been the best thing to happen to the small town in some time, which is pretty much what Weingarten intended. Between the Armpit label and the firing of Lorrie Baumann, Battle Mountain’s gotten plenty of national press. It’s been featured on CNN, the BBC and in USA Today.

“Now that the shock has passed, Battle Mountaineers are beginning to think they were floored by the unfamiliar knock of opportunity,” Toll writes in the travel e-mail.

With that in mind, the community is pooling its resources to market the Armpit of America notion, always with the sub-slogan: “Five inches from the heart.”

“We’re working on billboards right now,” says Sharlene Peterson, head of the Battle Mountain Chamber of Commerce. Peterson, with the help of Bugle publisher Denmark, put together a tabloid publication as a good-natured response to Weingarten’s article. Stories in the tab point out that the Shell station sign has been repaired. Pictures of nearby mountain ranges are intended to illustrate Battle Mountain’s not-so-flatness. One article defends the high school’s Cow Plop event, a fund-raiser for the Battle Mountain Rodeo Club, about which Weingarten had written: “… a cow is led over a grid of numbered squares, and you bet on the numbers, and you win if the cow poops on your number.”

“Well, I guess you busted us on that one,” Battle Mountain responds in the tab, going on to explain that folks in Martin City, Mont., play a similar game—only with chickens. “Welcome to small-town America, where the entertainment depends on a community’s creativity.”

Peterson says the event is a popular way to raise money for a good cause.

“It can actually be a lot of fun,” she says. “Two years ago, I think the pot got up to $1,200. The kids really got out there and sold tickets.”

You can now get T-shirts advertising Battle Mountain as the Armpit—"Five inches from the heart!"—at Mills Pharmacy, owned by Harley Mills. And local artist/wildfire fighter Sidne Teske created a cut-out sign in which a cowboy raises his hat over his head revealing a sort-of armpit, symbolically represented by a torso in the shape of Nevada with a painted heart and arrows pointing to the juncture of arm and chest. The 10-foot sign is being displayed at the Nevada Commission on Tourism’s booth at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The display is intended help promote this week’s Cowboys & Indians West Fest, being observed in several communities including Battle Mountain and Elko.

Battle Mountain residents and businesses are even planning their own Armpit Fest for June 28-29.

But what of Lorrie Baumann?

To back up here, Baumann’s job history is diverse. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of Arizona. She’s worked for the Girl Scouts of America training volunteers in Elko, Susanville and Reno. She spent five years working for the University of Nevada’s cooperative extension in Winnemucca. She spent five years reporting for Winnemucca’s daily paper, The Humboldt Sun.

She’d been the editor of the Bugle, circulation 1,700, for about two years. The term editor may suggest a person who sits behind a desk and keeps things running smoothly. But that does not describe Baumann sufficiently. She was also the paper’s only reporter, covering every beat in town, from cops to county commission to mining to basketball.

“I wrote the newspaper twice a week, hundreds of column inches a week,” she says. Baumann, it turns out, also served as the photo staff and the production team, which means she took all the photos and built the pages of the paper, laying out stories and photos.

“Did you design ads, too?” I ask her.

“No, that wouldn’t be ethical,” she says.

“How long does it take to lay out the paper?” I ask.

“That depends,” Baumann answers, “on whether I have a county commission meeting that day.”

The paper comes out on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Here’s how Baumann describes a typical Monday. If the county commission was meeting, she’d be there at 9 a.m. While the commissioners broke for lunch, she’d go back to the Bugle office and build half of the pages.

“Then I’d finish the rest of the paper after [the commission] finished for the day at 3:30 or 4 p.m.” She’d go back to the office, write her commission story and finish the pages. “By and large, I usually got out of there by 6 or 7 … unless I had a school board meeting.”

School board meetings lasted another chunk of time, after which Baumann would finish writing another story. Eventually she’d complete the paper’s layout and go home …

Unless she had a youth sporting event to attend that night.

Sports reporting turns out to be a critical element in small-town newspapering, says Baumann, who, it turns out, spent any free time she had attending kids’ games in the evenings and on weekends.

Baumann’s own two children are grown now. Her son is a computer programmer in Los Angeles. Her daughter is pursuing a degree in biology at the University of Nevada, Reno. (She wants to be a plant molecular biologist, Baumann says of her daughter. “What that means, as far as I can tell, is torturing plants and seeing how long it takes them to die.")

High school football coach Jay Huckaby calls Baumann “the best thing we’ve had” for keeping the Battle Mountain community up to speed on school goings-on.

“She really bought into the idea of what a small-town paper should be for the people who live here,” says Huckaby, a father of two who’s lived in Battle Mountain for a decade. “Kids who go to school here aren’t going to have their names in the Reno paper. No one from the Gazette is coming out here to interview them.”

Baumann’s articles were clipped and saved by many parents and kids in Battle Mountain.

“She’d drive down to Lovelock to see us play,” Huckaby says. “She’d show up at every game, not just football, but even wrestling. At sports banquets, she’d get standing ovations from the kids. They’d get together and buy gifts for her or invite her to team dinners.”

Baumann’s sports reporting philosophy is simple.

“When you catch kids being good, the kids find more ways to be good in their formative years,” Baumann says. “What you do is teach the kid that, ‘What I do matters—it matters to people I care about.’ You can change the community.”

Though she didn’t have any experience in sports writing, she soon discovered that covering games was simple.

“I learned there were only a couple of things you need to know. One, you’re not writing about sports, you’re writing about kids. Also, any referee’s call that goes against us is wrong.”

Coach Huckaby, by the way, was more than a bit irked by Weingarten’s story. When he and his wife came to Battle Mountain from Elko, they thought they’d stay as long as they liked it. And Huckaby has received offers to go to other schools.

“We’ve never wanted to leave,” he says. “We look at other schools, at the things that really count. We haven’t seen a fight here in high school yet this school year. Find that in another high school.”

Weingarten observed all the wrong things, Huckaby says.

“He went to a bar, a casino and a cathouse and judged us on the basis of that. I could go to Watts and write about Los Angeles, but that wouldn’t be the best part of that town. … He went to the edge of town. I don’t live on that end. And every town has a dump—what, you don’t have a dump?”

The only positive part of Weingarten’s article was when he finally came to the part of town with homes, schools and churches, Huckaby says.

“That’s where I live, and he didn’t spend much time down here. I think he’d have seen a different town.”

At a gathering of Nevada Press Women in January, Lorrie Baumann was honored for her contributions to a small-town newspaper and for exhibiting “grace and professionalism under fire.”

The group’s president, Shayne Del Cohen, spoke on First Amendment freedoms and cited the attacks and firings of some U.S. journalists after Sept. 11. The sealing of presidential papers and the U.S. attorney general’s nix on the Freedom of Information Act are actions that attack the basic foundations of an open society, Del Cohen said. “The firing of Ms. Baumann was indicative of a third trend—alienation of business people as advertisers dictating story content and placement, a muzzling that appears to be an endemic danger.”

After Baumann was fired, Weingarten told a fellow reporter from The Washington Post that he felt terrible.

"[Baumann] was fired for having had the bad judgment to speak frankly and express her opinions honestly and find some humor in her circumstances. This doesn’t feel like a great moment for American journalism.”

In fact, in a subsequent column, Weingarten wrote an open letter to Lee Denmark, applying for the position of editor at the Battle Mountain Bugle, promising to work hard to make the paper a success with the local business community.

“We could institute a ‘pay-for-play’ policy on our ads,” Weingarten suggested. “When a business buys an ad, it also gets a news story. The bigger the ad, the more suck-uppy the story. For a full-page ad by the Shell station, for example, we’d run an accompanying article asserting that a poultice of Vaseline and Shell gasoline cures cancer.”

Baumann is not bitter. She doesn’t regret her chat with Weingarten. She credits Weingarten with writing an unexpectedly meaningful piece.

“The Armpit of America is not an idea that you think is going to be that powerful,” she says. “This was a silly idea from the beginning. … Everyone [in Battle Mountain] knew what he was doing and that he was a humor columnist. What we see here is that if you take a silly idea and say things that are true, it becomes not silly.”

The community’s reaction to the story proved that journalism is not a futile endeavor, she says, and that a good story can be a catalyst for change.

“He showed us that the written word has power,” Baumann says. “Look what happened. It’s amazing. It changed lives. He changed my life.”

“He got you fired,” I say.

“I regret the change, but there’s no denying that he changed my life. … There’s the reminder that it is possible that what we do really matters.

“If I were on the Pulitzer committee and looking for a chance to reward journalism that makes a difference, I’d have to think about the power that this story had. That’s what good journalism should do."