An Interview with Our Editor Steve Mensing

The city editor rubbed his wrist across his mouth, appearing to give some thought about he what he’d say next.  He drew in a slow breath and let it out slow. “Bill if we run this story, we’ll both be dancing for nickels in the street.”

“What?”

“Walter Annenberg owns the Inquirer.”

“Oh.”

“Great story though. Sorry. Study our masthead sometime.  We don’t want any of those people thrown in the slammer either.  Especially the guy who signs our paychecks.”

My dad felt the wind sail out of him.  His self-critical voice pecked at him for the remainder of the day.

Anyway, “Wild Bill” found more seaworthy investigative avenues over the years. His newspaper days affected my interest in news media in general.  We always had several papers landing on our porch every morning, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Herald, and a couple of others.  I became a news junkie and poured over them on the living room floor when I got home from school or on late Sunday afternoons.  I started with the sports sections first and probably spent the greater bulk of my time there.  Our dinner table was always filled with latest “scoops” and about life at the Inquirer.  Later in the very early 50′s, he moved on to run the reform campaign for Mayor Joseph Clark and then became Philadelphia’s press secretary when Clark won the election.  Journalism was always my dad’s number one passion.  He regretted leaving it for years afterwards.

Amanda Clements: Tell us about growing up.  

Steve Mensing:  I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Germantown that morphed into poverty and attended public schools.  I was an incredibly undistinguished student, often just scraping by.  Back in junior high, my parents were told I was extremely gifted by guidance counselors –  a Stanford-Binet IQ one percenter.  When my parents informed me, I was a little startled.  I had figured since I struggled with reading, I fell into the beating-two-rocks-together-to-get-a-spark category.  My parents were disappointed in my early academic performance. They didn’t know I was dyslexic and had ADD. It was only later in life that I discovered I had both.  I battled with slow reading and paying attention to anything that wasn’t engaging, and I spent the greater part of my school life daydreaming and being an athlete  – only connecting with academics during more compelling classes like American History and science.

I developed classroom strategies of getting teachers to repeat questions I missed during long bouts of reverie.  I was the guy sitting way in the back of the class, purposely hiding behind anyone I could.  My daydreams were pretty vivid–sometimes getting me to respond physically with head, hand, and leg motions.  This often drew my classmates attention.  “Sorry,” I’d whisper.  “I just scored in the Cotton Bowl.”    I had all sorts of interests though my school years, but few if any coincided with anything in the classroom.  My high school years were pretty much dedicated to playing football. During my last year in high school, I caught mono and woke up every morning during the football season feeling exhausted with a fever.  I continued playing ball and held my starting position despite losing much weight and muscle.  I developed compensatory maneuvers to make up for my fatigue and loss of strength.  I was very disciplined, at least in what interested me.   After the football season, I stayed home a lot and slept late.  I missed a lot of school my senior year.

When school year ended, I naturally assumed I failed because of poor attendance and non-producvity.  I didn’t return for my report card until in early July. I recall going to the Germantown High office and requesting it.  When I pulled the card out of the slipcase, I got a very weird feeling in the pit my stomach much like someone who snaps out of  an amnesia state in another city and is unable to recognize their new surroundings.  I reread the report  card:  ”GRADUATED – Class of 1965″.  I was 1098th out of 1100 students.  Couldn’t imagine who trailed me.  An amoeba?  Someone who never showed up for school at all?  Hey maybe it was my politeness?  Or Germantown High had a special quota system for the academically lame.

“Are you okay Mr. Mensing?” asked the secretary.

“A little surprised,” I said.

After my initial rush of endorphins cleared, I felt my academic upward mobility lifting off.  The word college flashed from the front of my brain to the back. Still happily dazed with my undeserved victory over high school, I tried piecing it together – get an understanding of my sudden good fortune of not having to hassle with GED classes in some other educational way-station.  I rode the surf toward an alien beach.

Straight ahead was the college guidance office.  Mrs. Weiss, the college guidance counselor, was packing stuff into a box on her desk.  Inspiration seized me – a long lost connection to academic life and scholarship.  The wave pushed me past the jetties to the beach.  College?  It wasn’t out of the question after obtaining high school diploma.  There had to be some college out there desperate for even a lowest end student.  Some institution willing to open the door to untapped academic talent.  I was willing – were they?  Maybe all those years of being polite and virtually silent in the rear of the class were bearing strange fruit?

“Hey Mrs. Weiss, I’ve recently been considering college.”

Her thick coke bottle lens focused on me.  She smiled, her stained dentures showing.

“And who are you?  I don’t believe you’ve been here before.”

“Steve Mensing.”

“What was your class rank Steve?”

“1098th.”

“Two from the top?”

“No two from the bottom.  But the ranking is a bit deceptive.”

Mrs. Weiss paused and adjusted her glasses. Her eyes looked enormous and serious.  “Have you considered repeating your senior year at a military academy?”

“Well, no.  Not exactly.  I know I could’ve done much better.  There were some missing links in my maturation process, but I’ve put that all behind me now and am more than willing to step up.  I developed an all consuming interest, something that I lacked before.  A major motivation.”

“A major motivation?” She seemed hesitant to buy what I was offering.

“I’m consumed now,” I said, clearing my throat.  “Driven.  I think I’ve found my niche in life.  I know now what I’d major in if given the opportunity.”

I quickly scanned the bookshelf behind her, noting a row of ancient Egyptian statuary.  “Archaeology.”

“Archaeology?” she repeated.  “Steve that’s marvelous.  My husband in an archeologist.  He works at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.  What excites you about archeology?”

“Some neat stuff in the ground.  Someone can score.”  My first crack at a motivation was like a bad run on a slot machine.  “What I mean is there’s a lot of valuable prehistory out there waiting to be unearthed.  Things that can solve a lot of historical mysteries.  Who knows – another Rosetta Stone for yet unheard languages.”

Before Mrs. Weiss seemed slightly confused–now she was completely baffled.  My responses were jamming her signals.  ”Well, Steve, there are still colleges in the upper Midwest and South accepting marginal students.”

I’d tell you how I got into Huron College out in South Dakota, but that’s a long twisting story suitable only for some larger publication.  All I’ve got to say is that just about every school I’ve ever attended is closed now.  Germantown High recently checked out.  Huron College – gone.  Antioch University, Philadelphia, where I got my B.A. and my Master’s in counseling closed its doors a few years after I graduated.  Apparently, I’m an educational kiss of death – the “black spot” that Blind Pew hands out at not-so-hot academic places.

Amanda Clements: I won’t trouble you more about education.  I’ve heard your interests are extremely wide-ranging and eclectic.  You’ve had a lot of interesting jobs as a young man.  Tell us.

Steve Mensing:  I knocked around a bit in my early twenties.  Lived and worked all over the West in the mid-to-late sixtie’s which I really enjoyed.  Worked in a meat packing plant in Denver stamping purple USDA marks on meat products.  Wrote briefly for an “underground” newspaper called The Solid Muldoon.  Was a bartender at the Pink Elephant on Colfax avenue in Denver, then did hitch at a small ranch in Gallup New Mexico.  Later I drifted to Silver City New Mexico.  I worked as a drilling supervisor in an open pit copper mine down the road in Santa Rita.  It was there I got really involved in reading late at night to the thrum of a drill in the background.  This was the time when I overcame my early reading problems caused by dyslexia.  I just read and read and started writing short stories.

Amanda Clements:  How did you start writing books?  Those western novels you mentioned?

Steve Mensing:  I loved telling stories.  Loved the old west, but have to admit I never read a western novel until I wrote one.  Love Spaghetti Western movies like High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josie Wales, or even the more recent: Django Unchained.  Westerns were where I really learned to write.  I taught myself and read books on novel-writing.

Amanda Clements: Changing the subject a bit.  How about your political views?  I understand you transformed from a moderate Democrat to Republican/Libertarian since you arrived in Rowan County in 2008.  I’ve heard you are very active behind the scenes in local politics.

Steve Mensing: My political interests as a kid were to the left and reflected my family growing up.  Over the years, I shifted more toward the center. Although I’m a Republican for well over a year now, I was a registered Democrat for 40 years. But I often crossed party lines to vote for the opposition.  I recall first doing that for Ronald Reagan.   On the scale of things, I likely fall somewhere in the Libertarian spectrum.  Conservative fiscally and socially moderate.

Amanda Clements: I understand you were working in the background during the past election to elect Republican county commissioners and school board members. What were you doing?

Steve Mensing:  Marina Bare, the Rowan Free Press cartoonist and ace videographer, designed campaign cards and literature and I wrote the key points for them.  John Bare had them printed up for peanuts.  A bare-bones grassroots effort.  A super cheapo PAC called the “Concerned Citizens of Rowan County”.  These cards were heavily distributed door-to-door during the upset runoff campaign for county commissioners.  I also interviewed candidates in the Rowan Free Press.  These interviews were circulated again and again via facebook sharing, emails, and sometimes even printed up by other folks and distributed.  These were more valuable tools than yard signs for gaining name recognition and finding out candidate’s stances.  Our candidates didn’t win on yard signs because their yard signs were few to start with, and those were being ripped off inside of Salisbury and out in the county.  Social media is the way to fly if want your candidates known.  Marina Bare’s RFP videos caught key moments in candidate forums. They were game changers. Name recognition nowadays is caught in newspaper interviews.  Folks read interviews and connect better to the candidates through them.  The folks running for office really need to go out and campaign every chance they get.  Door-to-door.  At the polls.

I was also involved in getting boots on the ground for door-to-door campaigning.  Our folks were pretty passionate about our candidates. This made a difference, especially in the runoffs and the November election.

Amanda Clements: Since moving to the South you’ve become more conservative, whereas your wife is still liberal. With our nation in such a red vs. blue divide and seeing as we are in a mostly conservative area, what can you tell us about achieving successful bipartisanship with others?

Steve Mensing: You mean how do I get along with my wife on politics?  Pretty well.  It’s no big deal with me if someone holds differing beliefs about anything.  On the local level, our views differ very little.  On the national stage, the space between us widens.  I have friends and associates from all over the political spectrum.  The bottom line for me in politics is transparency and honesty – it all starts there.  Watch your money, think of future consequences of where you spend your money.  Government generally does a sub-par job in running business: case in point, Fibrant.  Keep your regulations to what is essential but recognize that great harm can be done with no regulations.  Think of mine safety.

Amanda Clements: How did you feel about being installed at the Rowan County Commissioner’s Press Table over two months ago?

Steve Mensing:  It gives a little more respectability to our rag.  I got a call one morning from Mike Caskey and he suggested the Commission Chairman was all for me sitting at the table.  I said okay.  It’s not too much of a different perspective from where I sat up front.  I still get to talk with my buddies after the meetings.

Amanda Clements: Are you at the City Council press table?

Steve Mensing:  No, I seldom get down to city hall much unless something large is brewing.  My work schedule with Emoclear.com, really my first love workwise, and other projects holds me back.  Mostly, I watch city council meetings by the video feed from city hall.  The Rowan Free Press has been critical of a number the city’s directions such as Fibrant, the central office going to 329 S. Main, and their hanging onto the Rowan County Airport after forcibly annexing it.  The city’s master plan for downtown with its “build it and they will come” philosophy is incredibly short-sighted.  Our city needs to develop more attractions first before folks will start trooping downtown or elsewhere in the city.  If they draw in more attractions or build them, they will have developers rushing  in here to build hotels, larger retail, and the like.  Right now, our limited history and beautiful historic district homes are not enough of a draw.  Real attractions being built first are more likely to draw people.  Branding and marketing non-entities are not pulling in people.  The competition elsewhere offers far more.

The city really hurts its ability to attract business and retail with their byzantine gauntlet of codes and regulations.  It’s awfully expensive and time consuming to get by all those codes and regulations and to build downtown.  Those barriers need to be turned off.  They harm the downtown area to no end.  They have a chorus of shop local NIMBYs who resist big box retail and anything corporate.  The overwhelming majority of shoppers are not into bric-a-brac and junktiques.  The businesses struggle downtown. The restaurants and bars carry downtown, but the retail is doing diddly.  Shops open and close with regularity downtown.  It’s pretty empty down there most days.  It shuts down early.  Some parts of South Main are in dire need of bulldozing.

Amanda Clements:  It’s public knowledge that you have city workers bending you and your staff’s ears about what is going on in various city departments.  Could you tell us about this?

Steve Mensing:  With a small city like Salisbury and its government, it is impossible not to hear what is going on.  In reality, no secrets exist in Salisbury.   At least not for long.  Even if city workers were not supplying information, we’d still hear it from local business persons, attorneys, folks in the justice system, bankers, politicians, and residents.  Almost every other day, we learn things through a growing grapevine.  After a while, we know who the trustworthy sources are and who spreads rumors. We fact-check all of our sources.  I really appreciate those sources within the city who tossed us leads.   They know we keep their confidences.  They are motivated to come forward because their jobs are in jeopardy due our city government’s condition.  Fibrant put a major hurting on the City.  You can’t hide the brilliant fireball of a nuclear blast.  Fibrant sizzled and then keeled over during their soft roll-out, and it left the city and its taxpayers with an enormous debt.  The city needs to find a creative way to get it off the taxpayers backs.

Amanda Clements: Steve, seeing as we are in the era of the 24 hour news cycle, most Americans are getting their news updates online.  Even social networking is getting in on the act.  What do you think of paper newspapers surviving?

Steve Mensing:  Paper newspapers surviving?  Slim to none.  I see zero future for paper newspapers, especially small city newspapers.  They will eventually all go digital when people get more and more used to getting their news online through their PCs, Apples, notepads, laptops, e-readers, and smart phones.  It’s too expensive to print newspapers and distribute them.  Print matter on paper is dying rapidly.  Look at how many big city papers are keeling over.  Small city papers are on the endangered species list.  They will be forced by costs to go all digital.  That’s where the readers are stampeding.  And readerships will not pay high prices for those services in a highly competitive field.  People are re-habituating themselves to computers, notepads, e-readers, and smart phones for their news.  Same for books and magazines – all digital within the next 5 to 8 years.

Amanda Clements: Thanks so much.

Steve Mensing:  Well thank you, Amanda.