Jim Mashek

NATIVE TEXAN WAS ONE KIND SOUL ON THE MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST

Twenty-eight years ago, give or take, after a long night at the bar, in a cramped press box or in front of a computer terminal, I applied for a job at the daily newspaper on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

It was for a sportswriting gig, of course, because that’s what I’d done the better part of two decades, and I sure didn’t want to give up on daily journalism and sell insurance, dig ditches or sell aluminum siding over the phone.

It was a job I wanted. Needed. Badly.

It was all I thought about, really, after nearly three years on the United States/Mexico border, in Brownsville, Texas. This was right before NAFTA became a reality, when life in the Rio Grande Valley had a wild, wild West feel and, at least to me, seemed a lot more like Mexico than Texas.

And we ain’t talking Cancun, Acapulco or Baja, if you know what I mean. The border culture was pretty unique onto itself.

And it wasn’t a great place to be a sportswriter, because of the lack of high-profile sports, the oppressive heat or newspaper wages at that particular time or place. (On that front, for the record, I’m fairly certain little has changed.)

They brought me in for an interview, and I spent a couple nights at a relic of a weathered motel on the beach in Biloxi, Mississippi while interviewing for the gig, a vague job description given the size of the newspaper and a sports staff of six guys, including a couple really weak links.

Still, I needed the job. I was beyond nervous.

The sports editor, a friend in the business from my six years in Baton Rouge, during the ’80s, and a former colleague from that Louisiana newspaper showed me around the Coast over those two days, and, wouldn’t you know it, two out of every three of those places served alcoholic beverages. Or so it seemed.

So sometime on a typical Monday, I’m guessing right before lunchtime, my buddies took me to the newsroom, an open area with cubicles for reporters and a handful of offices, two for the editors at the top of the food chain, and a compact darkroom for the photogs, next to the sports department, and the entrance to the break room.

One of the offices was for the executive editor, a guy who I’d been warned about, from mi compadre and newspaper man extraordinare Charles Corder, who passed away last summer at the tender age of 62.

The executive editor was bright, I guess, but beyond a little peculiar. He liked college sports, particularly the Ole Miss Rebels, which happened to be his alma mater. The sports editor was a Mississippi State guy, an erudite fella from Tupelo, who liked to get some dinner and have a couple of pops while sharing a few jokes and newspaper war stories that had stood the test of time.

And time was passing slowly, almost coming to a crawl. I kept it pretty close to the vest in the executive editor’s office, just me and the sports editor and the fidgety little guy who was trying to get a feel for my persona.

It certainly wasn’t Mainstream Mississippi, if you get my drift.

I probably had outsider written all over me.

I was a wise-ass from outta town, a journalist’s son who was born in Dallas and raised in Houston and metro Washington, D.C. Went to college at Western Kentucky, about an hour’s drive from my Mom’s childhood home in Tennessee. If I kept it real with this guy, I mighta wound up with the gutter punks on Jackson Square in New Orleans or maybe gotten a job working the door at an uptown bar in the Crescent City, where a childhood friend worked in the restaurant business.

So I managed to keep the lion’s share of my opinions to myself, believe it or not, because I’d been given the impression that it was my job for the taking. (I’d heard that before, mind you, at two or three larger newspapers in the South, so I was taking absolutely nothing for granted.)

Then, after a quick detour to pee in a cup for a drug test, the wily, wisecrackin’ sports editor introduced me to Andrea Yeager, the newspaper’s warm and personable managing editor.

I guess you could say we hit it off immediately.

Andrea had worked her way up the chain at the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper, putting in the hours and using her people skills to get the most out of her newsroom, which numbered around 40-45 people at the time.

She hailed from Baytown, Texas, which, coincidentally, was where I got my start at the newspaper business, a gig with a three-man sports staff at the Baytown Sun, which printed six days a week under the chemical glow of the Baytown Exxon Refinery. Everybody and his dog worked there at the time, and I could tell Andrea was glad she had broadened her horizons after graduating from Sam Houston State University in Huntsville.

The sports editor left me on my own with Andrea, perhaps recognizing that we had a few things in common, and certainly aware that the executive editor, a sneaky, quiet type, knew a rabblerouser when he saw and/or heard one.

And I really needed the job.

There was no need to put up any defense mechanism with Andrea Yeager. She was genuine, she had a kind smile, she liked the clips I’d sent to the newspaper before the job interview. She put me at ease, made me feel welcome, and whatever apprehensions I had from the executive editor seemed to fade in the rear-view mirror.

A day or two after getting back to Texas, I got the call from the Coast newspaper.

They wanted me to come on board. It was a big, big relief. My parents were thrilled. My newspaper buddies got in touch, one way or another. Even my ex-wife seemed happy about it.

The demographics at the new job were kind of unique, particularly because after a year or two, my main beats were the Magnolia State’s two Southeastern Conference schools, Ole Miss and Mississippi State, as well as the downtrodden New Orleans Saints. I wasn’t the Saints beat writer, but I’d get to go to just about all the home games, writing columns and the occasional feature story. Helped out with the preps, too, of course, and everybody on the staff had to be versatile, which meant working inside, on the desk, editing copy and “getting the paper out.”

At which point more than half the newsroom often migrated to the bar, either the Village Sports Pub, about a mile from the newspaper plant, or my personal favorite, Timothy O’Sullivan’s, an eclectic little place fashioned from some military barracks of another era.

(There wasn’t a kitchen, but they did serve some killer red beans and rice on Mondays, per the New Orleans/Gulf Coast tradition, and occasionally had other culinary offerings.)

Both places stayed open well past 2 a.m., sometimes when sunrise was approaching, and I was kind of a nocturnal soul in those days.

I had to forge my own kind of role there, and I got a chance to do non-traditional stories, in addition to the meat-and-potatoes stuff that comprised a sports section in those days.

Andrea Yeager was my biggest fan in the building.

And the feeling was mutual.

Her door was always open, she always had an open mind. She loved newspapers as much as I did, and her understated personality was more than a little welcome.

She was nobody’s tyrant.

But it was her newsroom.

After three or four years, Andrea decided to ditch the notorious demands of the job, starting a family with her husband Allen. She held a handful of different jobs over the years, but still wrote for the newspaper’s food section, and she was a welcome visitor any time she showed up in the newsroom.

Her successor was a veritable nightmare, too. Napoleon in a skirt. Clueless beyond belief, when it came to a sports section. (And pretty much everything else, too.)

We stayed in touch, over the years, and the executive editor was shown the door after I’d been on the Gulf Coast for five or six years. Andrea toiled at the Barnes and Noble, just north of Interstate 10 in Gulfport, and sometimes I’d see her while picking up some Starbucks on my way to Starkville, Oxford or another SEC destination in a rental car.

Andrea always seemed to be smiling.

She had the kind of disposition that brought out the best in other journalists, and after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, 11 years and change after I arrived in Mississippi, I’d pretty much taken ownership of the place.

(What wasn’t to like. It was 90 minutes from the newspaper to the French Quarter and the Louisiana Superdome, and maybe two hours, the other way, to my favorite watering hole, the Flora-Bama in Orange Beach, Alabama, and Perdido Key, Florida. Yes, it straddles the state line. And as you may know, its reputation precedes. Anyway …)

Andrea was a Texas girl, through and through, and even though we only worked together for three or four years, she was one of my biggest fans. I was more than a little outspoken, and, admittedly, sometimes kinda caustic. My writing wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but ask any sports columnist, and the cardinal rule is to NEVER BE BORING.

Have an opinion, for the love of God.

And I had more energy than I knew what to do with.

My brain doesn’t stay rested for too long.

As fate would have it, the second executive editor at the Biloxi-Gulfport paper, a hulking, 6-foot-4 former Marine who seemed to think he invented the newspaper, wasn’t big on dissent or contrary opinions. I leaned on my parents, on how to deal with this tyrant, but the truth of it is I always had trouble with authority figures.

In the newspaper business, mid-level management is filled with average-at-best writers who were willing to put in the work. And as the business began its death spiral, in the final two or three years of the George W. Bush administration, newsroom layoffs became more and more frequent all the time.

The business was changing, and the advent of social media made just about everybody a reporter. Provided they wanted to be one. But lots of reporters started losing their jobs, while newspaper management threw nickels around like manhole covers, getting less from less and pretending the readers didn’t notice the decline in quality.

And now, pretty much everything is tied to the Internet.

Sometimes you get on there to vent, to let off some steam, to share a coupla laughs with a friend or two.

Sometimes, when you’re a newly minted senior citizen (ahem), you go there to fight the sheer boredom.

So on Tuesday morning, the day after the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, I logged onto Facebook and stumbled into a post from former newspaper colleague Tim Isbell, an exceptional photojournalist and a great guy, that hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks.

Andrea Yeager, the warm-but-wise editor with a heart of gold, had died at the age of 70, roughly a decade or so after the passing of her beloved husband, Allen.

My jaw dropped in disbelief. Teared up a little bit. Wistful that I never got to meet her granddaughter, Lillian.

I’ve exchanged a handful of calls and text messages with former colleagues from the Biloxi-Gulfport newspaper, all of them forced into an early retirement, like myself, and we all seemed to agree that Andrea was good people. She had a HUGE heart. She volunteered with the humane society on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and then I remembered she had sent me a comment to this web site, a message about my missing puppy, Piper, a 20-pound canine with a cute face, human-like eyes and unbridled energy.

I’d been in an automobile wreck on Interstate 165, between Owensboro and Bowling Green, on September 10, 2021, a collision with the guardrail outside the southbound lanes, in Ohio County. Piper was in the back seat, and she usually rode up front. The passenger side’s doors wouldn’t open, so I absentmindedly opened the door on my side of the car, a 2006 Honda Accord with plenty of pickup.

Piper, still attached to her leash, bolted out of back seat and onto the highway, before I realized what had actually happened.

I jumped out of the car in pursuit of her, the little black dog that can run like the wind, and tripped on one of the highway grooves to keep drivers alert. Sustained a couple hairline fractures, on my ribs, along with some bruises and scratches. Piper, on a dead run in the median of the highway, quickly disappeared over the horizon.

The Ohio County Sheriff’s Office worked the accident and gave us a ride to the police station, the hot September sun still burning bright while I cried my eyes out by the sight of Piper running away from the mangled car.

The Bowling Green/Warren County Humane Society had put a microchip in Piper, before I adopted her, and she had an ID bracelet hanging from her collar. I started putting up missing dog notices on Facebook and Twitter, and before long, it seemed most of Western Kentucky knew she was on her own, in the wild.

After a few days, I managed to write something for jimmashek.com, sharing my pain about Piper’s disappearance. It was theraputic, of course, to pen my thoughts about Piper, a sweet dog with lots of personality. I was having nightmares, regularly, when I did manage to sleep.

I got a few emails over the next day or two, not surprising when you consider how much we love our pets. I’ve always thought dogs understood the human condition, but I hadn’t had my own dog in three decades.

THREE.

It wouldn’t have been fair, to the dog, given how much traveling I did as a sportswriter and columnist.

Then on September 15, five days after Piper went missing, I got a message from Andrea Yeager. It went up in my comments section, and it read, in part:

“Jim, once again, I was caught up in your poignant article about Piper. Made me think about reading some sportsstories when you were in Biloxi. You made even sports stories come alive …

“But, this story had me crying, being the dog and cat lover I am. I feel your pain, and knowing you, how distraught you are. I am praying you find Piper; losing a pet is so painful.”

Yeah, I cried when I read it. Again. The water works came pretty frequently for me, in mid-September. Then, on Monday, September 20, 2021, I took a phone call from a young woman in Whitesville, Kentucky, about 10 miles from the site of the wreck.

“I think I’ve got your dog, I’m pretty sure,” she said.

Piper came home, that night.

My prayers were answered, and I’d like to think Andrea Yeager’s kind words had something to do with it. Karma, after all, is a powerful thing.

Andrea, we love you. Your reporters and photogs, your copy editors and feature writers. Your newsroom.

You will be missed.