To some of those who read our stories about Charles Spencer Jones, the Vietnam War helicopter pilot whose name was left off his hometown’s war memorial, we published a simple, artless tale, devoid of any significance that would justify its presence on Page 1.
To those readers, the story concerned one soldier who came home from war in a box like thousands of others, a stone memorial much like those on a hundred other courthouse lawns, “a tit and a tat” between Lawrence County’s fiscal court and its Veterans of Foreign Wars.
“Why does it belong on the front page?” asked one reader.
It shows the biases of the liberals at The Courier-Journal, charged another. “Admit it,” he said. “It’s about race.”
Of course it is.
The story is at least partly about race because Jones, the first African American to graduate from Louisa High School, was the county’s only black resident to die in Vietnam. Local veterans groups objected to including him on the memorial because he died of a heart attack, not combat — although at least three others who are listed on the monument also died from illness.
The story is also about Vietnam, an unpopular war whose veterans have struggled for recognition and appreciation.
It’s a story fraught with conflict and irony, key components in many page-one stories.
And it’s a change-of-pace story that evokes emotion and conversation.
From the moment regional editor Gideon Gil discussed it in The Courier- Journal’s morning editors meeting, the story was bound for the front page.
The controversy had surfaced in The Big Sandy News, the weekly newspaper serving Lawrence County. The paper published a story about Lawrence Fiscal Court voting in January to allow Jones’ name to be added to the memorial. That got county residents, especially veterans, stirred up.
Courier-Journal Eastern Kentucky reporter Judy Jones came across the controversy when she was making routine beat calls, asking contacts in each county, “Is anything going on?”
Her Lawrence County source said, “This may not be a story but….”
Judy Jones (who is no relation to the pilot) talked to people on all sides and wrote a story that appeared in the Feb. 19 Courier-Journal. Then she covered the meeting when veterans persuaded fiscal court to reverse itself and vote against adding Charles Jones’ name to the memorial.
By then, other media had jumped in, including The Lexington Herald-Leader and a television station in neighboring West Virginia. “A lot of the local people found it odd that it drew such statewide attention,” said Jerry Pennington, editor of The Big Sandy News.
But the story evoked strong feelings and some reaction.
Judy Jones got calls from Vietnam vets who remembered Vietnam’s crushing heat and humidity and the suffocating stress helicopter pilots faced ferrying troops and covering perimeters. Charles Jones’ heart may have failed when he was off duty, they said, but he’s a casualty of war.
For the veterans, the story was not about “the race thing,” said Judy Jones. “It’s about Vietnam and how are we ever going to heal from Vietnam?”
In Louisville, however, Beverly Watts, executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights, read the story and saw enough evidence of a racial issue to ask her staff to look into fiscal court’s decision.
Judy Jones thinks the story is about Vietnam and race. It’s about “worthiness” she said. “Did he die in a way that was worthy of honor?”
Pennington looks at his divided community and concludes that perhaps those who sought to honor Charles Spencer Jones have succeeded.
“They were trying to get recognition for Mr. Jones,” he said. The controversy has achieved that, whether his name goes on the monument or not.
Most days, Courier-Journal editors’ strongest bias is to put interesting, meaty, provocative stories on the front page.
With the story of Charles Spencer Jones, I’d say they succeeded.
