photo by Matt Rose

In an age of dying newspapers, Cathy Mitchell remembers their glory days—when a young couple running a small weekly could take on a powerful cult and win.

by Jess McCuan

All great journalism careers should start with a good story. Cathy Mitchell’s began at age 24 at a pay phone in the middle of nowhere. She had been turned down for jobs by both The Washington Post and The New York Times, and she was standing next to a four-lane highway in Leesburg, Florida, talking to the editor of the town’s small paper, the Leesburg Daily Commercial.

“I said—‘Hi, my name’s Cathy Mitchell. I have a master’s degree from Stanford in journalism.’ That’s as far as I got,” she recalls. “He screamed—‘You’re hired!’”

It was 1968 and Mitchell, by then a well-traveled Southerner who had every bit of Nellie Bly’s gumption but chose the revolutionary garb of her own era, showed up at the offices of the Daily Commercial wearing a short brown miniskirt. The editor and publisher, at first incredulous at their stroke of luck finding such a well-educated woman to join their staff, took one look at Mitchell’s miniskirt and decided she could only have the job if she promised to dress more conservatively.

She promised. She also agreed to take on one of the most difficult assignments they could have given any reporter, much less a young woman from out of town, covering the cops beat. At the time, the county sheriff was one Willis V. McCall, a notoriously brutal character with a national reputation who bragged about killing more black people than any man alive. (To this day, Southern newspapers still rehash McCall’s misdeeds, and as recently as 2007, the Orlando Sentinel reported on a controversy surrounding a decision to remove McCall’s name from a county road.)

Mitchell found Leesburg law enforcement officers to be a tight-lipped crew, so squeezing them for information for her daily stories was no easy feat. She struggled, and unfortunately, that first six-month beat turned into a crash course on how to turn the barest scraps of information from reticent cops into interesting daily stories. Ironically, ten years later, when Mitchell and her then-husband David ran a small community newspaper of their own, lucky tips from local police officers helped them write a series of stories that won journalism’s Holy Grail, the Pulitzer Prize.

Mitchell’s first newspaper gig—as the pretty little brunette covering Leesburg cops—was no picnic. In addition to being an object lesson in information-gathering, it also turned out to be a lesson in gender equality on the job, a subject she found both fascinating and infuriating, and one that she would tackle in various ways throughout her remarkable career.

In the beginning, their goals were to eat and avoid the draft. Cathy met David Mitchell in her journalism master’s program at Stanford in 1967. They had a class together, and David thought she was cute, though he later noted, in a book they co-wrote, that she was a “frumpy dresser.” They married a few months after graduating, and David started looking for teaching jobs to avoid being drafted. An old Florida State roommate of Cathy’s said there were teaching jobs in Florida, so the Mitchells drove around the state looking for them. David landed one in Leesburg, but the town’s stifling atmosphere and conservative racial views were intolerable. Both Mitchells were relieved when they landed jobs elsewhere—even if elsewhere was a small private college in northeastern Iowa.

Two Iowa winters later, the Mitchells were not so relieved. David, by this time 26 and unable to be drafted, wanted a journalism job. He got one at a daily newspaper in Council Bluffs, Iowa, The Nonpareil, but stayed only four months. He landed another at the Union Democrat in Sonora, California, and Cathy, playing the good wife, followed along, taking teaching and writing jobs where she could. When David got hired as a reporter for a northern California weekly, The Sebastopol Times, the paper also hired Cathy as a features writer and then features editor. But shortly after the paper sold two years later, the new owners fired both Mitchells.

In 1975, with some inheritance money from David’s mother, the young couple decided to buy a newspaper. After a few months’ search, they found one they could afford—the Point Reyes Light, a tiny weekly in Point Reyes Station, California, a mostly-rural area 40 miles north of San Francisco. The paper, named for a lighthouse on a picturesque stretch of Northern California coastline, had only 1,700 readers. For the first few months, to get their new operation off the ground, they literally lived at the paper, sleeping on a foldout couch in a back room and waking up often at 6am when people called the newsroom. They stayed up 48 hours straight to get the first issue out the door. “We bought this little newspaper, the Point Reyes Light, as much as anything to prove to people that we could do journalism,” Cathy says.

The mix of love, drama and old-school newspapering that both Mitchells recall from the Light’s early days could come straight from the 1940s movie His Girl Friday. The movie stars Cary Grant as a hard-bitten Chicago newspaper editor who lures his ex-wife and star reporter Hildy Johnson, played by Rosalind Russell, back to him with the promise of writing one last scoop. Only in the Mitchells’ case, it was often Cathy who played the role of editor and David the star reporter.

Sometime in 1978, the Mitchells grew suspicious of a drug rehabilitation commune called Synanon, which had a large residential facility near Point Reyes Station. One week as the Light was preparing to go to press, David got a tip from a local sheriff’s deputy that he should look into a police report about a former Synanon member being beaten by current members. After sniffing around, Dave realized other local papers had been intimidated about running Synanon stories, fearing they would be sued by the multi-million-dollar operation, which had many attorneys and a habit of suing newspapers. Thus began the Light’s series of investigations into Synanon, now widely recognized as a cult.

During the Light’s year-long initial investigation, the community got behind the Mitchells’ efforts. Synanon members had armed themselves with rifles and semi-automatic weapons. Some community members knew of children who had tried to escape the compound. “People were coming in the door all the time to tell us about it,” Cathy says. “It was a very exciting time. You just kept going with it.” After they recruited Berkeley sociologist Richard Ofshe to join their team, what emerged on the Light’s pages was an in-depth exposé on an organization that not only sued but also threatened physical harm against anyone who spoke out against it.
At some point, after Synanon members attacked a Time magazine lawyer and put a rattlesnake in another attorney’s mailbox, Cathy remembers the local sheriff’s department running patrols out to the Mitchells’ house at night. But the patrols themselves made it impossible to sleep. “At some point I said, ‘Stop running the patrols,’” she recalls. “They said, ‘But you’re in danger.’ I said, ‘I don’t care. Stop running the patrols.’ It was too scary.”

In April 1979, the Point Reyes Light won the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Public Service for their Synanon stories, mainly because the Mitchells and Ofshe had been so gutsy. In all, they wrote 210 articles about Synanon. The much larger San Francisco Examiner, by contrast, had cut back its coverage of Synanon after libel threats. “We showed people you didn’t have to be as big as The New York Times to affect things,” says Dave Mitchell.

It was only the fourth time in history that a weekly had won the Pulitzer, and the Mitchells basked in the limelight. They were named California newspaper publishers of the year. With Ofshe, they wrote a book about their investigation, The Light on Synanon, which was turned into a 1984 CBS television movie, Attack on Fear. Amazingly, though Synanon did sue the Mitchells for libel, the Light countersued the cult, saying letters it sent out disputing the Light’s reports had damaged the newspaper’s reputation. In 1984, the cult settled the matter by writing the paper a check for $100,000.

But years of round-the-clock newspaper work had strained the Mitchells’ marriage. “The investigation was the reason the marriage lasted,” Cathy says. “Once the investigation fell apart, all the fissures that existed became really, really clear.”

The Mitchells separated in 1981 and sold the Light, but by then, Cathy was a journalism star. She took a teaching post at UNC-Asheville and became its first full-time professor of mass communication. In between teaching, the State Department sent her to far-flung locales like Calcutta and Abu Dhabi to talk about the importance of journalism. She’d had teaching jobs before, but as a full-time academic, Cathy could write at length and really dig in. “When you write for the newspaper, everything has to fit into 16 inches,” she says. She had always been interested in gender in the news business and in pioneering newswoman like Margaret Fuller, who joined the staff of the New York Tribune in 1844. With UNCA economics professor Pamela Nickless, Mitchell helped found UNCA’s women’s studies program in the mid-‘80s, and in 1995, she wrote a book about Fuller.

She believes there’s still a glass ceiling in publishing, and in most professions. “Young women have to figure out how to function in a man’s world,” she says. Mitchell had something of a headstart at this, growing up a tomboy in Tennessee and Florida with her brother and his rowdy friends. “Asserting my equality was a survival mechanism,” she says. “One little boy would come knock on the door and say can Cathy come out and wrestle?” Though her soft Southern accent might give the initial impression of a Southern belle, people who know her well know better. “Cathy did have her ‘Southernisms,’” says Dave Mitchell, explaining that her bits of wisdom about polecats and other critters sometimes baffled people in the newsroom. “She was quite capable of exuding Southern charm while at the same time making her point.”

Today Mitchell, who is 64, hopes to end her career with as good a story as it began with. After retiring from teaching two years ago, she has been working on a novel told from the point of view of a dog named Star, modeled after her own 14-year-old Boykin spaniel, Lily. She has always loved dogs and now has time to volunteer with Boykin Spaniel Rescue, a South Carolina nonprofit that helps the dogs find new homes. Mitchell worried that she would get bored in retirement, and occasionally, driving around Weaverville, she sees police cars at accident scenes and wishes she could hop out of the car with a notepad in hand. But she also seems completely at ease with her career and accomplishments, personal and otherwise. “I have lived a blessed life and continue to lead one—I’ll never say otherwise,” she says. “My mother-in-law used to say, ‘You are so lucky.’ And I said no, I earned this by my choices. I won’t let people tell me that this was luck. David and I could have just crumpled in the face of Synanon. Many times I could have crumpled, but I didn’t. It’s not my nature.”