Going to War in Hollister

They set out to tell some tales of the contemporary West, to chronicle what happens when a small farm community starts to turn big.

Tracie Cone and Anna Marie dos Remedios wanted to write the story of Hollister, their adopted home. The old cowtown was fast becoming just another Silicon Valley commute village, wincing with growth pains--clogged roads, flagging sewers, crowded schools.

Two big-city journalists, Cone and dos Remedios had a notion they could be Hollister’s voice. Maybe its conscience too.

So late in 1999, they bought San Benito County’s threadbare free weekly newspaper, the Pinnacle. They quickly elevated the quality of its news, stiffened its journalistic backbone, challenged local brokers of growth.

The paper won awards and fans. Cone and dos Remedios couldn’t make it through the grocery store without neighbors chatting up stories. In go-along, get-along Hollister, folks affectionately called them “the girls.”

But the plot took a startling turn last October. A Web site smeared Cone and dos Remedios as “the filth from up north,” a homosexual duo bent on transforming Hollister into Sodom and Gomorrah. A click on Cone’s name called up links to lesbian smut pages. The paper’s muckraking columnist, Bob Valenzuela, also got smacked: He was falsely accused of being a child molester.

Suddenly, Cone and dos Remedios were under attack for their sexual orientation. Yes, they were gay. Never had it been a secret, but never had it seemed to matter.

In the weeks that followed, everything changed. Cone and dos Remedios came to learn some painful truths about love, hate and small-town newspapers.

“We thought it’d be so much fun doing what we love in a place we love,” Cone says today. “We didn’t anticipate how hard it would be.”

*

Tracie Cone, 44, got to know journalism growing up in Orange County, where her father operated a Linotype at the Register in Santa Ana.

The newsroom was a mysterious realm on the other side of big swinging doors. Don’t go through them, her father would warn: All those people are crazy. Cone pushed through nonetheless, working at the Miami Herald and then the San Jose Mercury News.

Her partner for the last six years, Anna Marie dos Remedios, 31, broke into the news game soon after college, becoming an accomplished photographer.

The pair were ensconced at the Mercury News when they came to Hollister in 1996 on a hunt for horse property. They bought a boot-shaped 5-acre plot on the edge of town and joined the community. They made friends and volunteered for charities, all the while making the one-hour workday commute to San Jose.

Johnny’s, a local pub, became a favorite haunt. The bar was established a half-century ago when Hollister hosted a motorcycle rally that inspired the Marlon Brando movie “The Wild Ones.” Any evening, bikers belly up between ranchers and high-tech commuters.

The women befriended all comers. On Thursdays, they crooned at Johnny’s karaoke night, noticeably mismatched: Cone, a tad over 6 feet, is a head taller than dos Remedios. Both bought Harley Davidsons, ripping across the endless San Benito County back roads.

Hollister’s plain charms embraced them--the established downtown shops, the farm fields, the easy acceptance of all comers. Yet the rural allure seemed threatened by growth. In the 1990s, the city swelled by 79% to nearly 35,000. “We didn’t want to see it become Silicon Valley,” dos Remedios said.

Their chance to join the growth debate came when the Pinnacle went up for sale. Although friends cautioned about the financial risks, the lure of independence and opportunity proved too great. They quit the Mercury News and dived into community journalism.

Dos Remedios went from shooting the San Francisco 49ers to documenting the football heroics of Hollister’s San Benito High Haybalers. She also ran the financial side of the 16-employee paper. Cone edited and wrote everything from briefs to crime stories to hard-hitting editorials.

“They’re impressive people,” said Seth Irish, a former mayor. “And the paper is exceptional. They print both sides of the issues. That’s something new around here.”

Tossed on the stoop at more than 18,000 households, the weekly gained a solid foothold.

The two women learned fast that small-town journalists walk a fine line. As a big-city reporter, Cone noted, “you never ran the risk of meeting someone you wrote about at the grocery store.” In Hollister, “you will see that person that week. It makes it awkward sometimes.”

But the Pinnacle didn’t shy from tough stories. The paper’s sportswriter reported that the high school girls softball coach allegedly was inflating his own daughter’s statistics. The paper campaigned to point out the growing death toll on the two-lane highway to Silicon Valley. And always, they challenged the pro-growth establishment.

“They’re not afraid to take a stand,” said Rick Maddux, a downtown jewelry store owner and fan of the paper. “That takes courage and a lot of guts.”

*

Among the paper’s biggest critics was Councilman Joe Felice. The two-term lawmaker grew incensed over stories he considered slanted, editorials that questioned the pace of growth. One editorial by Cone labeled a development decision by Felice and his pro-growth allies “moronic.”

Even more than the news coverage, Felice loathed Pinnacle columnist Bob Valenzuela.

Valenzuela, 61, is a burly and balding man with long hair and white beard, a Hollister original who owns the town’s last independent video store and delights in skewering community players in his iconoclastic column, “Thoughts While Not Shaving.”

The columnist ripped Felice for opening his arms to developers and for criticizing residents who had sued over new home defects. Valenzuela even reported that Felice had once threatened to punch him out.

“I have always enjoyed writing the truth and only the truth about Mister mucho, macho Felice,” Valenzuela wrote in one column.

Felice wasn’t alone in criticizing the new owners of the Pinnacle.

“They use Bob to do all their dirty work,” said Ignacio Velazquez, who pulled his downtown restaurant’s ad business from the Pinnacle after repeated jousts with the paper. “They want to control the town.”

Richard Ferreira, a Hollister developer, said the Pinnacle uses “the numbers game” to seed the community with misconceptions. Though growing fast in percentage terms, he said, San Benito County actually saw fewer total homes built in the 1990s than surrounding areas like Monterey and Santa Cruz.

“These women came down from the big city,” Ferreira said, “and now they want to close the gates.”

Cone said that Hollister was at war over development long before the Pinnacle changed hands. “All we’ve said is slow down, then proceed in a logical manner,” she said. “I’d be the most foolish newspaper owner in the world if I said, ‘Don’t grow.’ ”

The fight reached a crescendo last October, as the City Council considered a 677-home subdivision planned on Hollister’s edge. Though the Pinnacle editorialized against it, the council approved the project.

During the debate, the paper’s photo intern kept trying to snap a picture of Felice as he propped his head on his right hand. But every time she focused her camera, the councilman seemed to raise his middle finger.

Felice later insisted to friends that it was an inadvertent gesture. But the newspaper ran one of the shots.

So there in the hometown paper sat Joe Felice, flipping off anyone who happened to look.

*

The anonymous e-mail hit a week later. Cone saw it at day’s end. Sent to just about every prominent Hollister resident with an Internet address, the message announced a new online Web site.

Cone called up the page. At first it seemed a simple parody. But then it got worse.

Filth from up north.

Sodom and Gomorrah.

Lesbian porn.

The Web site played into the couple’s worst fears.

At the big-city papers, Cone had scrupulously shied away from stories on gay issues. “I didn’t want to be identified as the gay reporter.”

In that vein, Hollister seemed to work for them. No one had ever uttered a bad word about their sexual orientation. The prevailing attitude toward homosexuality seemed an unspoken rule: Don’t bother asking. Most folks didn’t even know they were gay. And it didn’t seem to matter to those who did.

“I’ve gotten to know the girls, and I like them,” said John Hodges, the county clerk. “As far as them being lesbians, they say they are, but I don’t know. . . . They don’t act like it.”

Always before, Cone and dos Remedios had felt accepted simply as the town’s newswomen. Would they now be known as the lesbian newswomen?

Soon the attack broadened to include the bogus accusation against Valenzuela.

The women found themselves in an awkward spot. They were true believers in free speech, but the pair wanted the Web site to go away. An anonymous attack, they reasoned, didn’t belong in the marketplace of ideas. On the other hand, filing a libel and defamation lawsuit seemed out of character: Usually, newspapers are the ones on the receiving end.

But the Pinnacle publishers decided they had to turn the tables. They filed a $6-million defamation suit in federal court to ferret out the identity of their attacker.

They had never avoided big news, so they couldn’t justify ignoring their own travails. Cone hired an independent Florida-based freelancer to write the story for the Pinnacle. The night before the article came out, “We cried and cried,” Cone said. “We never thought we’d put our personal lives on the front page.”

A few odd events began to stoke other fears.

The women returned home one night to find their horses running loose, the paddock gate open. About the same time, the newspaper’s main computer mysteriously crashed, as if a hacker had invaded.

They hired security at the paper’s strip mall offices overlooking a Taco Bell. Sheriff’s patrols kept tabs on their house. A friend loaned them a pump-action shotgun. But they never loaded it; they hoped to scare off interlopers by just cocking the gun.

They took some solace in phone calls of support from battered small-town publishers across the country. The Pinnacle certainly wasn’t the first little paper to face repercussions. Advertising boycotts had literally shut down some weeklies. Small papers in the Midwest and South had been firebombed.

And folks in Hollister stuck up for the women. To some, the community’s image as a melting pot, a place of tolerance, was at stake.

“Hollister is maybe not as liberal as some places,” said Larry Nicholson, a building contractor. “But folks here believe in fair play.”

A legal fund raised $3,000. Even foes voiced outrage over the Web site. A prominent Silicon Valley law firm offered its services for free. A couple of computer techies helped with the electronic sleuthing.

Within weeks, that trail swerved from a site server to a phone company and finally to a numbing revelation.

The Web site had been created via a high-speed computer phone line in Hollister. A phone line connected to the home of Joe Felice.

*

Felice by then had retired from office, opting not to run last November in the face of the community’s growing drawbridge sentiments about growth.

From the get-go, the women suspected the ex-councilman. The best clue was right in the Web site.

It borrowed Bob Valenzuela’s Pinnacle mug shot, the one showing the columnist flashing a peace symbol. But the photo was digitally altered so only Valenzuela’s middle finger was raised.

Felice didn’t put up much of a legal fight, and in May admitted creating the Web site and delivered a written apology. He also paid $50,000 to Cone, Valenzuela and the newspaper, money the Pinnacle donated to charity.

Despite the public apology, Felice later wrote a letter to family and friends denying wrongdoing. Felice, 35, said he had conceded the lawsuit to avoid the expense of a courtroom battle. He called the Web site a “satire and parody” not nearly as offensive as one of Valenzuela’s weekly columns.

Felice would not comment for this story.

A few civic leaders say they understand what might have prompted Felice to retaliate.

Tony LoBue, elected to the council in November, said Felice seemed targeted by the Pinnacle, in particular by Valenzuela. LoBue considers the columnist “heartless.”

“My mother passed away six months ago, and I missed a couple meetings,” said LoBue, 26. “You’d think he’d have the human decency to leave me alone. But there were things about me being stupid, items suggesting I was bought out.”

Given his own experiences, LoBue concluded, “Joe Felice was driven to a point where he felt he had to respond.”

At the paper, Cone frets there could yet be “a long, slow fallout over this.”

A month ago, when a big client pulled his ads from the Pinnacle, Cone called to ask why.

The advertiser, owner of an out-of-town business with an outlet in Hollister, said he wanted to avoid the paper because of its anti-growth politics.

When Cone countered that the Pinnacle stood for smart growth, the advertiser didn’t argue. Instead, he concluded the conversation with a curt observation that Cone felt explained everything: He had read all about them in the newspaper.

In town, the women haven’t heard a bad word, not a slur. Cone and dos Remedios joke that they still feel like a gay pride parade strolling down Hollister’s main street. But they haven’t lost faith in their adopted hometown. On Valentine’s Day, a downtown boutique owner asked dos Remedios if she was shopping for Tracie. It seemed a sign of acceptance.

Even so, Cone finds herself second guessing a few of her own news decisions. A year ago, she ran an innocuous brief on a San Francisco gay event. This year, she passed. Even something so tiny “could resonate too loudly” with some segments of the community, Cone feared. “People might read into it: ‘Oooh, there they go. Pushing their gay agenda.’ ”

Cone also found herself taking every wrong word about the Pinnacle, every testy phone call or letter, as a personal attack. She went to a therapist but jettisoned that after one session. Instead, she determined to toughen up on her own.

This month, they launched a new edition to serve Gilroy and other small cities on the southern flank of Silicon Valley. Hitting more than 30,000 new readers, it has been well-received.

But the past casts a long shadow. A letter arrived a few days ago from a Gilroy man claiming affiliation with the “Confederate States of America.” He had no qualms about getting personal.

“So, you FREAKS have decided to pollute Gilroy with your leftist, anti-gun, pro-gay rag,” the letter read. “Your kind are freaks, not families. . . . Keep fooling yourself that society accepts your kind.”

Cone and dos Remedios brushed it off. The bruising experience of the past year may have shown they were naive. But they didn’t fold.

“I don’t think anything,” Cone said, “could destroy us now.”