In the usual media circus at the upcoming annual Fancy Farm political picnic in Graves County next month, the leading speakers, U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell and Democratic challenger Secretary of State Allison Grimes, are unlikely to remind their west Kentucky listeners that many of them seem to feel ignored these days, except at election time.
Compared to publicity about the problems of Appalachia and the daily news focus from the urban “Golden Triangle,” some folks on the far reaches of the west, no longer known as “the Gibraltar of Democracy,” meaning the politics, complain they are forgotten.
In Owensboro Monday, the funeral of John S. Hager, attorney, newspaper publisher and civic activist who died at 86, was a reminder of how important he was in an era when the region’s politicians dominated Kentucky’s public life.
Although Hager never ran for office, he was an influential confidante of Owensboro’s Wendell Ford, of utility executive J.R. Miller who managed Ford’s campaigns for governor and the U.S. Senate, of attorney Morton Holbrook, a counselor for Miller and Ford, and of Kentucky House Speaker House Don Blandford, who pushed through the Legislature reforms for governance and education.
John Hager and his brother and partner Larry were special friends of mine and of Len Press, the founding director of KET who created the “Comment on Kentucky” show which I hosted for three decades.
We admired the Hagers’ respect for journalism as a public trust to promote the good of the community. Long before the Messenger was cited as one of the top five “small city” newspapers in the U.S., I thought it rivaled The Courier-Journal for quality and vigor.
The Hagers’ concern for better education extended to KET, to which they were generous contributors.
When I lived in Russellville and owned weekly papers in western Kentucky, the Hagers supported Owensboro civic leaders who built a regional Boy Scout camp in Logan County. Our gratitude surfaced when a young Wendell Ford carried Russellville in a race for lieutenant governor over an opponent backed by the courthouse political machine.
John Hager’s editorial campaigns for constitutional reform and low-cost higher education drew statewide notice in an earlier more progressive era before Kentucky stalled out in legislative deadlock over taxes. When Ford became governor and then U.S. senator, John’s name was always mentioned in the circle of Ford’s prominent Owensboro friends, but John confined the paper’s editorial views to the editorial page.
His concern for honest journalism was also reflected in a more balanced account of the news and by printing opinions that disagreed with his—a practice, that was ahead of a lot of papers 40 years ago. His paper was a farm league for talented young journalists who became stars at the Courier-Journal, including Robert Clark, Ed Ryan and Bill Cox.
In Larry Hager, I found a mentor about the production side of newspapers. If John always looked for the next best young reporters to hire, Larry always tested the next best technologies, and he generously explained them to this Russellville friend who was pathetically challenged by the printing process.
When the time and tide of a new era in media was washing away the local ownerships of newspapers, the Hager brothers were almost unique in American community journalism. They sold to outsiders, but they created local foundations to give back substantially to causes their paper had always supported in Daviess County. They didn’t leave town, either.
David Adkisson, now president of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and a former Owensboro mayor, remembers meeting John Hager the first time when he was 22 and working for the Owensboro Chamber. John was the age of David’s father but accepted an invitation to lunch. This turned into a memorable discussion of a book on ethics John had read, by a college professor who had taught Adkisson. Eventually John hired Adkisson’s friend David Boeyink, a Harvard Ph.D. in ethics, to bring a fresh perspective to the editorial page and who remained John’s close confidant even after he left to teach at Indiana University.
“Of course I was impressed with John’s intelligence and influence,” Adkisson recalls.” But the trait I admired most was his constant desire to improve the community and himself. He was on a quest for knowledge until the very end, and on a spiritual journey to become a better human being.”
In Owensboro and beyond, we have lost a friend who made our “old Kentucky home” a better place to live.
--Veteran journalist and author Al Smith, formerly of Logan County and now of Lexington, is writing a new book about Kentucky, to be published next year.