From time to time, one encounters a person or institution whose fabled reputation is not a bit inflated or sullied by fakery. In a perfect world, these paragons would be showered with honors and resources. In the real world, they have to struggle along like the rest of us.
That's the situation in which we find the Point Reyes Light and its owner, David V. Mitchell.
The weekly Light (circulation about 4,000) is the newspaper in rural western Marin County that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for its reporting on Synanon, a drug rehabilitation program that had evolved into a violent cult.
Mitchell, who has owned and operated the paper in a nearly unbroken stretch since 1975, has never let the Synanon series stand unchallenged as a high point. The Light is a crusading newspaper whose lofty standards often stand as a reproach to the timidity and blandness of much bigger publications.
The question is how long this unique enterprise can continue. As a recent article in SF Weekly disclosed, Mitchell has kept the Light financially afloat out of his own pocket for the last few years, drawing down a $300,000 bequest inherited from his father in 1984. This year the paper is expected to lose about $30,000, a rate that will leave the 61-year-old Mitchell out of cash before too long.
The article has galvanized some local fans into action. Tom Sebastian, a local marketing executive, has offered to help attract ads from major retailers such as Home Depot and Safeway. He's also hoping to recruit a few well-heeled neighbors to shore up the Light's balance sheet by making small, silent equity investments.
That's a sign of the importance of the Light to residents of the 14 communities of sparsely populated West Marin.
"Many people have said the concept of West Marin is itself a creation of the Light," Mitchell told me this week in the converted Point Reyes Station creamery that houses its offices. (He wasn't taking credit; the paper existed for 27 years before he bought it with his then-wife, Cathy, in 1975.)
A lean 6-foot-4, Mitchell has the kind of long, bearded face that would look dour if it weren't so often animated by the telling of a good story.
His eyes gleam as he describes the relentless efforts he and his two young reporters have undertaken to get to the bottom of an August incident in which a couple of U.S. park rangers pepper-sprayed a pair of local teenagers whom they had already handcuffed -- and who have never been charged with wrongdoing. Among other scoops, the Light has unearthed allegations that one of the rangers has a history of unprofessional conduct.
