Two Guns and a Weekly

"You know how to train a mule?" drawls pistol-toting Editor Dan Hicks Jr. between drags on a dead briar pipe. "First you got to hit him over the head with a two-by-four to get his attention. That's what I did to Madisonville. Now they know I'm here and won't go away. As long as I've got a typewriter and a piece of paper, they can't put me out of business."

Some have tried. Shotgun blasts have been fired through his office door. He has been beaten up. Angry, anonymous voices constantly threatened him over the phone. Last January somebody poured gasoline under his newspaper's back door and set the building ablaze. Such attacks have moved Hicks to pack a .25 Colt automatic in his billowing pants and sometimes mount a special night watch with a Winchester .30-.30. But he still prefers to do battle with the same weapon that provoked the harassment—the weekly Tennessee newspaper he took over in 1967, the Monroe County Democrat (circ. 6,000).

Hicks has wielded it effectively against a wide range of targets in and around the county seat, Madisonville (pop. 3,500). Writing virtually all of its 16 to 20 pages himself (his mother handles the society page and his wife reads proofs), he has forced the indictment of a county road supervisor for embezzlement; the collapse of a local Ku Klux Klan movement; the closure of a sleazy club for underage drinkers; the upgrading of the local school board; the proper outfitting of the volunteer fire department, and improvement in the water supply.

The Democrat's hammerings at local ills have earned Hicks national honor. Last year, at the annual conference of weekly-newspaper editors, he won two awards for courageous leadership. But in Monroe County, birthplace of Estes Kefauver and a haven for bootleggers, Hicks is no hero. Even those who support him in some of his crusades are apt to turn against him when they discover he plays favorites with no one. "It's tough to write about an old friend who's on the board of deacons at church with you," says Presbyterian Hicks. "But you have to treat all people alike and never back down. You start lying, and the next thing you know it pyramids and falls down of its own weight."

Hicks, with some financial backing from three partners, bought the Democrat three years ago for $60,000. Within a year, his stories on apparent corruption in the county roads department had led to the indictment of the supervisor for embezzlement. On the first day of the trial (which ended in a hung jury and has yet to be reheard), Hicks was brutally beaten in front of his office by two teenagers, one a preacher's son. According to an informant, both admitted having received $30 and a gallon of moonshine to do the job. At their trial the prosecutor muttered: "If they'd been offered $50 to kill him, they probably would have."