A dog, a small-town journal and passing on a dream

By Mike Weland

I can’t remember what I wrote. I can’t remember when I wrote it — but that’s nothing unusual when you’re a small-town general news reporter, a euphemism for does it all. What I do remember is how that pixie with a smile to light up the darkest room overcame so much to chase a talented big brother so she could listen and learn. She looked up to him, and Teigan didn’t seem to mind. Few beyond her family saw how much she had to contend with to grow into a cross country runner, a Badger cheerleader, a budding young journalist.

Legally blind in one eye, physically challenged, Piper Banning, her mom, Katie, and dad Jesse began coming by my home at the top of the South Hill of a weekend several years ago. Not so much for me, but for Copper, the bestest dog in the world, stuck in the house with me all winter. Thanks to Piper, Copper got to romp in the snow.

Then Piper answered a dream of mine and took on perhaps the scariest high school job imaginable. A freshman, she accepted my offer to “be my legs” as 9B.News Badger sports reporter.

And she’s grown into it. It’s not easy to harass coaches for their stat book, for a quote, for the insight, which is sadly what it takes for a local sports reporter to get the information they need from most coaches to write the story. How much more daunting for a student, harassing coaches who might also be their teacher?

Piper Banning is one of the strongest and most persistent people I’ve had the privilege to know. It may be hard to believe, but I’m 66 and I look up to her. By her example, she taught me that not being able bodied isn’t a handicap, it just means you have work a little harder, think a little deeper and be more creative.

And if you know Piper, you can’t help but admire her parents, who support her but don’t carry her, encourage but don’t push, impart strength so that Piper can face whatever stands before her on her own terms.

If you know the Bannings and I, you might have noticed we’re poles apart in philosophy, politics, religion. But we are the best of friends. We share a mutual respect that is all too rare these days.

I’ve been reporting news in Bonners Ferry since May, 1991. It wasn’t easy deciding to pass the baton. What was easy was deciding to hand off to Katie, Jesse and Piper Banning. They aren’t trained journalists. Neither am I. But they share with me a love of the community and the awareness that news is going to happen that people need to know about, and when it does, they have the dedication to be there to get that news out as it unfolds so readers have the best available information to help them respond.

As with many other jobs, the majority of a local journalist’s career is spent filling white space, trying to maintain interest so that when the big news breaks, its to you people turn. We don’t earn near what our big city counterparts do, few of us are known beyond the boundaries of our coverage area. But I contend no one in journalism is as essential as the small town or community reporter, who brings the important details no regional news source can provide. During my tenure I covered Ruby Ridge, the bad winters of the late 90s, the fires, the floods, the North Hill Mudslide, major collisions, heavy storms. I warned of less than scrupulous people who attempted to prey on my neighbors

I was among the last live local broadcasters on KBFI early this century when it was purchased by a regional station, the board went dark and satellite replaced the DJ, bringing All Talk quackery and negligible local content. It wasn’t always that way.

Four families, recognizing the importance of local news, delivered in time to matter, went in together in the 1970s and bought a tower and a 100-watt transmitter, trucked it in from Oregon, licensed it and launched KBFI.

Back then, there were no repeaters or translators to bring in radio or TV signals from Spokane, but there was an inordinate amount of news and information they knew would be beneficial if it reached people in time. That little station never got the community support it deserved, advertisers were few and fickle, pulling their advertising at a whim if what you broadcast didn’t match what they expected to hear, but it was there, broadcasting an eclectic blend of music depending who was at the board, ready to spring into action any time local news broke.

Those four families, only two of whom I remember — Pete Wilson and Muff Howe, largely funded KBFI themselves, providing a public service disguised as a business. But the founders of the station got old. Pete Wilson was the last of the four, and I am honored that I was among the last of the local broadcasters.

I came to Bonners Ferry to be a news reporter after freelancing and six years as cops and courts editorial assistant at the Spokesman Review and Spokane Chronicle, and I worked at both the Bonners Ferry Herald and the Kootenai Valley Times before trying my hand at radio.

My intent when I arrived here had been to build a clip file a get back to a daily as a reporter, but I found home in Bonners Ferry and my calling in local news.

While working at KBFI, I learned the value of immediacy during the awful winters of ’96 through ’98, sitting alone in a small office all day and at times through the night, me, a busy scanner and a quiet telephone, talking to a microphone, often not knowing if anyone heard. I learned after the fact that people did hear, trusted what I said in my little box in the Creamery Building, and based on what I said, they went out and saved lives and protected homes and property while I sat in a warm and dry booth behind a microphone, talking into the night.

The moment that crystallized for me the value of timely news came on one of those dangerous snowy winter nights of the ’90s. KBFI typically went off the air at 6 p.m., but Pete had no objection to my staying on the air if its was getting “newsy.” That’s what the station was there for.

I spun up music, gave our advertisers a little bonus airplay and listened to the scanner, putting out news of socked-in roads, slide offs and more. Then came a page to respond to the home of an elderly couple on the Westside Road. The wife reported her husband had gone out to bring in firewood a considerable time ago and hadn’t yet come in. Every deputy was on a call, every ambulance crew engaged. Help was at least half an hour away, and judging from the urgency in the dispatcher’s voice told me the couple might not have that much time. I broke into the song that was playing and relayed the call, not knowing if anyone was still listening.

It seemed like forever, but about two hours later the phone rang. “It’s a good thing you got word out when you did,” a man said.

He said he found the elderly man fallen while carrying an armload of wood, unable to get back to his feet in the thigh-deep snow. He got the man, clearly hypothermic, back to the house, where the worried wife has shivering, the house getting cold after she’d burned the last stick of wood. Their rescuer wrapped the man in blankets, retrieved the wood the man dropped and got a good fire going. He brought in more wood to stock the house, shoveled the walk and cleared a path to the woodshed and plowed their drive.

“I think they’ll be okay, but I’ll keep an eye out. Anybody else needing a hand?”

Even while working as county planning and zoning administrator after KBFI, I wrote news.

Lon Woodbury had the idea of using the internet as a news media, and I was privileged to help him launch RuralNorthwest.com, to my knowledge the first dedicated news site in the region. I helped develop the county public information office and created and ran the first official Boundary County website, and eventually launched my own news website, newsbf.com, with a coverage area limited to Boundary County and a dedication to getting news out as it happened, in time to matter.

In 2012, I had a fairly significant stroke, brought on by high blood pressure. At Kootenai Medical Center, I taught myself to type one-handed, I left a week early against doctor’s orders because there was an election and no one else to post results for the county.

I am not a business man, I am a reporter. I never paid much attention to sales except to appreciate those who have continued to support not just me or my opinions, but the importance of local news: Pro X Building Supply, JB’s Les Schwab, Skywalker Tree Care, Boundary Community Hospital, Boundary Tractor Yamaha, Cloud Eleven Mountain Farms, E.L. Internet and the Pearl Theater. I am sincerely grateful, and I would be grateful for your continued support that I may continue to serve my community for as long as I’m able at a less hurried pace as reporter emeritus, a position graciously allowed me by the Bannings.

The last ten years have been difficult for journalism and I took a beating over my political opinions, having seemingly gone from being a trusted voice who didn’t shy away from the hard or controversial stories to being a liberal with TDS. The best compliment I received came at the end of a long series I wrote soon after my arrival concerning Boundary Community Hospital that shook a lot of people. In the midst of it, our late mayor Harold Sims accused of tearing down the community just to make a name for myself, and I couldn’t deny it — I still saw Bonners Ferry as a stepping stone, and I did have a few offers. I shocked myself by taking none of them.

Things changed for the better, Bill McClintock took over as CEO and construction began to rebuild the old hospital into what you see today. Coincidentally, at about the same time, BCH maintenance supervisor Ray Holmes and his wife Beth, acquired Dr. Fry’s old office on Chinook Street, the first hospital in Bonners Ferry and birthplace of many of her finest citizens.

Ray and Beth restored the old house into a work of art, situated across the street from Dr. Troy Geyman’s Bonners Ferry Family Medicine, where Katie Banning works.

After the dust started settling at BCH, I attended a hospital board meeting under new management as work was getting under way on the new hospital facility. I wasn’t the board’s favorite at the time, and the silence before the meeting was tense.

“You know,” one board member finally said, “you were hard on us, but you were fair.” As I stammered for something to say, he continued.

“And you were right.”

In the tumultuous political climate of the last ten years, being a journalist has become far harder, far less rewarding and far more rancorous. My editorial position angered a lot of people. I lost many of my advertisers, though readership continued to climb.

I don’t write this as a complaint or to toot my own horn. I hope only to convey an idea of my experience as a small town journalist covering news of Bonners Ferry.

It’s not about left or right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican. We all have biases, even and maybe especially journalists. But a good journalist is able to set bias aside in the interest of earning trust by being right, as in correct, even if the majority disagrees, even if the truth hurts.

A credible journalist puts their name and contact information up front. You’ll notice Katie, Jesse and Piper’s names and email addresses on each page.

And in working with Katie, it’s clear she feels the same as I do about being right, as in correct.

Stepping away from a calling isn’t easy, but I am no longer physically able to keep up the pace, to live up to my responsibilities to those who choose to open 9B.News to find out what’s going on in this wonderful place we call home. I am blessed to have found in Katie a kindred spirit. I am blessed to have such wonderful friends as the Banning family. I am blessed to hand them a dream I’ve worked hard to create and know it’s in good hands.

It is my greatest hope that the community gives the Bannings the support they need not only to provide Boundary County its premiere source of accurate and timely news, but to lift their 9B.News to the next level and make it a viable business with the resources and staff necessary to provide Boundary County residents even more of the news you need, in time to matter.