The Publisher Dies Hard

I hope those of you perusing this at work when you're supposed to be, well, working, don't begrudge me the fact that I am currently on summer vacation from school. There is no doubt that one of the best things about being in education is the leisurely pace of summer. The only thing I can compare it to is being unemployed. Which reminds me...
Before I get into the story of my final days as a newspaper publisher, I should point out that I have no idea what the laws are about libel in a forum like this. I haven't researched, or asked anyone for that matter, but I guess I'm going to assume that if I talk about someone or something, it had better be true. Now, I'm not going to use any real names of the figures involved in this story, but in a small community, it is hard to disguise all that well. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I ain't trying to hurt nobody's feelin's, but I need to get this off my chest.

I had started out in Avery County, North Carolina as an alien. I made it my home. I tried my best to fix what seemed like it was broken, and along the line I made a lot of people happy and I made a lot of people angry. I've mentioned some of this before, but when I started at that paper, I did what I was told by the editor to do. After I took control of the paper, people started coming to me with information, and I ended up realizing that I was doing the work of a bona fide political machine that had been running this place, well, forever. Through the editor with whom I worked and who I later supervised, I was helping that small group of people maintain control of the county. As days and weeks passed, I heard more and more about the things they had done, and it ended up being an ongoing conflict that I chronicled weekly in my column.
This went on through two of the most interesting years of my life, and just when the wife was set to pop with number two, out of nowhere swoops General Media Conglomerate Limited Corporation, Incorporated. The week they announced the purchase of my paper and all the other local papers, I gummed up the works. I threw a 'monkey in the wrench,' as Lt. John McClain would say.
The Republican primary was on the following Tuesday, and a woman came into my office. She said she had been involved in a relationship with the Machine's candidate for some office or another. I told her I would publish a letter to the editor if she would swear that it was all true. I published it, the candidate went crazy, the machine got on the horn with my new bosses. And my corporation-saturated bosses listened to it all. They talked to their lawyers. They huddled together and talked conservatively and quietly, and they decided that they had one inherited employee that wasn't quite ready to grace the cover of GMCLCI Quarterly. They didn't have a taste for the controversy that my adopted community craved. After they took my column away, they waited a few days to see if I'd quit, but that usually doesn't go over so well when the Missus is at eight and a half months. However, before I really got wound up to suck it up and stay, they trundled into my office in Newland and gave me the proverbial axe. There was some cozy severance, and a pretend promise of a job at one of their other papers, but I knew our brief but tangled tango had come to an end. So, I had six months of baby, writing, paperwork, and straight up Michael Keaton Mr. Mom moments, all on the government. There's really nothing like it. Except, as I mentioned, summer vacation.
One more thing, if it's bugging you who John McClain is, it's not a typo. The monkey in the wrench is the hero who foiled the Nakatomi building robbery in 'Die Hard.'