The Crescent City Harbor, as seen from the Battery Point Lighthouse.
By John Murphy
Yesterday I was surprised to learn the Del Norte Triplicate newspaper in Crescent City has closed.
The Triplicate was one of California’s oldest small-town papers, founded in 1879. It served the northern-most county in the state.
My significant other in the late 1980s was from Ashland, Oregon. Ashland is a beautiful town, not far from the California border. It is home to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Southern Oregon University. It also boasts Lithia Park, designed by the same guy who laid out San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Anyway, my significant other had relatives in Crescent City and one day we visited them. It was a long, winding trek out to the coast. We had lunch with them, and they loaded us up with smoked salmon. Good stuff. I’m sure I must have read the Del Norte Triplicate while I was there. I’m sure it was a fine publication.
I knew someone who worked at The Triplicate in the early 1990s. She was the ex-girlfriend of a friend. She was on a bummer after the break-up and took a job at the Triplicate. She’d get off work and drink wine and knock herself out with Sominex every night, then go to work the next day. That’s no way to live, kids.
The name Crescent City popped up again a few years later when I landed at the Victor Valley Daily Press. There was a kid boxer in Victorville, who was knocking everyone out. I wrote a story about him. Seems his older brother murdered someone and was locked up at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City. I heard all about the notorious super max and its infamous “SHU” (solitary housing units).
At Pelican Bay, 1,500 occupants of the SHU spend 22.5 hours a day alone in windowless cells that are 7 by 11 feet. The other 90 minutes they get to exercise in concrete pens. It’s no picnic.
The greatest wish of the grandmother of the young Victorville boxer was to be able to buy a van so the family could drive to Crescent City to visit their inmate grandson. Sad.
Well, the Del Norte Triplicate is gone now, shuttered the way so many other small papers have been. Not enough subscribers or advertisers … the typical lament.
There is the usual handwringing about the community losing an important watchdog – someone to keep an eye on the unscrupulous politicians and other charlatans who will surely run wild with no reporter to watch them.
That’s all good if the newspaper is really a watchdog. But in my experience too many are so stripped to the bone, that all they’re watching is the bottom line. It’s almost enough to make me reach for a glass of wine and a Sominex.
Main Street Dog 