September 29, 2014

Experience Proves Valuable

September 29, 1983, was a particularly dark day in southwest Minnesota history.  On that Thursday morning, the lives of two area men were taken and changed irrevocably for yet two others.  It was thirty-one years ago Monday that Ruthon bankers Rudy Blythe and Toby Thulin were gunned down at the rural Tyler farm home of Steven Jenkins and his father, James.  The two then fled the state, prompting a nationwide manhunt, and ended up in Texas where the elder eventually committed suicide.  

The dramatic story was grim and ruthless most definitely, but of course it had to be told.  And the job of reporting those stories, at that time, was my father's, Lew Hudson, a veteran news reporter for the Worthington Daily Globe.  In all the years since and the countless stories he has written, his recollection of that fateful day on the news front remains one of my most cherished.

Catching drift of the double murder in the small Lincoln county rural countryside on the late September morning, and with a 11:00 a.m. deadline, the newspaper reporter found himself scrambling for a story to print. He was finding not much cooperation from the law enforcement officials who were busy with their own task of dealing with the slain men and chasing and apprehending the fugitive Jenkins and his son. 

And they weren't talking. 

So he enlisted the help of a young reporter at the Globe, Michel Pates.  "I told him we were going to have to find someone  other than a sheriff or policeman who knew something about what had happened and we had to do it fast," he remembers.  There are always people, Hudson related, who have seen something and are eager to tell what they know.  "All we had to do was find that person," he said.

Hudson followed the reasoning that in a farming community there were two places where people gather daily:  the bank and the farmer's elevator.  Calls to those locations in both Ruthon and Tyler led to nothing but dead ends for both reporters.  But before ending his final call, Hudson asked a bank official for the names of 2 or 3 farmers who lived in the area near where the alleged shooting occurred.  He started making calls once again.  After two misses, the third was the charm.  

"Bingo, I got a farmer who said he had just come by the scene."  Asking for anonymity, the farmer related what he had seen, which was a body lying in the road ditch and another  near the house, and added that the law enforcement officials on the scene revealed the names of the victims, Blythe and Thulin, to him.  He also verified that Steven and James Jenkins lived on the farm.  

"With deadline fast approaching I started writing," Hudson says, while Pates continued to call law enforcement officials in search of additional information. He turned up the fact that the fugitives, driving a white pickup truck, had been spotted by officers in Luverne but not apprehended. 

As the action continued to unfold, the newspaper presses prepared to turn and Hudson told his editor, who wasn't keen on the fact that the story was unverified, that he'd have to trust him.  "I trust my sources," he said, "because they have no reason to lie." It was one of the few times, he said later, that the newspaper had to go with a story that had no official verifiable source.  "There are always people who know things and good reporters learn how to find them," Hudson maintains.

Young reporter Pate later told his mentor that he had learned more about reporting on that day than all the years he spent in journalism school put together.  

We all learn by experience, but amassing that experience can take many years. 

Trusting the wisdom of someone who has that experience, well that could be one of the smartest things that you ever do.