No Wonder It Won a Pulitzer   

Harry Levins was in his son's garage in Denver with a cigar, coffee and the morning paper when he saw the news. His hometown paper, the 206-year-old Vermont daily where he got his start, had won the Pulitzer Prize.

"I was so proud," says the St. Louis Post-Dispatch senior writer. "God, that was a good paper. It still is, as far as I can tell."

Levins is not alone in his feelings for the Rutland Herald. Employees past and present express real affection for it. Winner of this year's Pulitzer for editorial writing, the Herald, circulation 22,000, seems to be a romantic journalist's ideal small paper. Publisher John Mitchell, whose family owns the paper, is willing to spend on coverage, such as three year-round reporters in the state capital. He's willing to take vitriolic criticism from readers and advertisers rather than tell his editors to downplay polarizing issues like civil unions for gay couples, which the winning editorials supported. His papers (Mitchell also owns the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus) get and keep good editors and writers.

The Herald's standards make it "the best paper in the state," says Tom Slayton, editor of Vermont Life magazine and a Herald alum. The joke in Burlington, the state's largest city and home of Gannett's Burlington Free Press, is that if you want to know what's going on in Vermont, read the Rutland Herald, says Peter Freyne, columnist for Burlington alt-weekly Seven Days.

The paper has launched the likes of Levins, Newsday Editor Tony Marro and New Yorker writer Jane Mayer. It has also held onto talent. David Moats, 53, author of the winning editorials, has been at the paper nearly 20 years.

"This newspaper is a great place to work," says Acting Managing Editor Stephen W. Baumann, who oversees a staff of about 40 editorial employees. He and others note that the paper's circulation is larger than the city's population of 17,000. "People feel that this is a special place," Baumann says.

Two people in particular have had a lot to do with making it that way: John Mitchell's father, Robert W. Mitchell, who bought the paper with a partner in 1947 and served as publisher until his death in 1993, and Kendall Wild. Wild "really knew how to inspire young, idealistic, underpaid people to go out and bust their ass to get a story," Slayton says.

Soon after he became managing editor in 1962, Wild hired three Rutland schoolmates: Marro, Levins and Frank Hinchey, now a veteran reporter with Ohio's Columbus Dispatch. Then, as now, many young staffers at a paper that size would come from other places and move on. Wild made an effort to find local talent that would be more inclined to stay.

"You can do a lot with smart people, and I never liked to have them get into a rut," Wild says.

"The only problem with Kendall Wild," Levins says, "is I thought all MEs were like that. Not one has ever come close." Marro, who subscribes to the Herald and calls it a "terrific small paper," likes to tell about Wild's fondness for throwing paste pots at reporters when they made mistakes.

But relations between management and workers haven't always been good. Employees went on strike in October 1980, staying out for 14 months. When the paper hired replacement workers, a lot of longtime staffers lost their jobs.

John Mitchell, who had been named publisher of the Times Argus a year earlier, says the division was a result of staffers' trusting a young strike leader over management. After the strike, he says, "we worked very hard on management and trust. We're still working hard at it." Mitchell became publisher of the Herald after his father died.

Moats says the elder Mitchell set the standard with his editorials during the eras of McCarthyism and civil rights. That legacy of independence gave him a "certain comfort level," Moats says, when he was writing in favor of civil unions. The winning editorials spanned the period between the Vermont Supreme Court's ruling that same-sex couples deserve the same legal benefits as those available to heterosexual couples to the governor's signing into law a bill that established civil unions for same-sex couples. "The statewide community of Vermont was in a sort of perilous state" over the issue, Moats says. "I had the sense that it was important to frame the whole question in a way that the state wouldn't end up tearing itself apart."

Mitchell, whose office is right next to Moats', made "only supportive comments," Moats says. Mitchell says the debate was as difficult within the paper as outside it. "We have some gay employees who everybody knew [were] gay. Those relationships were tested.... There were some words spoken and feelings hurt."

Kendall Wild retired in 1992 after spending 15 years writing editorials. He still fills in regularly for vacationing staffers, including Moats, and describes the news staff as "quite a lively bunch." Wild's influence is felt even when he's not there, Baumann says. "This sense of Kendall pervades this place."

And though Wild no longer throws paste pots at reporters, he still lets them know when they slip. In April, Levins sent a congratulatory note to Moats and misspelled his name. His former editor called him with a suggestion: "Maybe you'd like to try that again." Needless to say, he did.