Journalist Tom Gish, "conscience of the mountains," dies at 82

As the longtime publisher of The Mountain Eagle newspaper in Whitesburg, Ky., Tom Gish was a fearless crusader on behalf of the public interest.

When local officials tried to shut the paper out of meetings, Gish launched a fight that led to the state's first open-meetings law. When he took on the state's powerful coal industry, he faced a boycott by advertisers and was shunned by his neighbors. When he wrote stories critical of the local police, his office was firebombed.

Yet Gish -- who died last week at the age of 82 -- refused to back down. His son Ben Gish, who continues to run the newspaper today, called his father "the most honest and brave man I ever knew."

When Tom Gish and his wife, Pat, first bought The Mountain Eagle in 1957, its motto was "A Friendly Non-Partisan Weekly Newspaper Published Every Thursday." The Gishes came up with a new motto: "It Screams."

After the paper's 1974 firebombing -- perpetrated by arsonists hired by a Whitesburg cop angry over editorials about police harassment of local teens -- the Gishes continued publishing from the still-intact front porch but updated the motto: "It Still Screams."

The Gishes were instrumental in drawing the nation's attention to Appalachian poverty. As Bill Bishop at The Daily Yonder remembers:

Tom and Pat wrote some of the first stories about the poverty that came with the post-war depression in the coalfields. Other reporters followed the Eagle's reporting. They would read a story in the Whitesburg paper and then trek down to Eastern Kentucky to see things for themselves. Invariably they'd wind up in Whitesburg and following Tom on a personally guided tour of the region. The War on Poverty began with stories coming from Eastern Kentucky. In reality, Lyndon Johnson's attention to the nation's poorest people was directed by reporting done by Tom and Pat Gish.

Gish was born in Seco, a Kentucky coal camp named for the South East Coal Co. where his father was a superintendent. After college he worked for a time as a wire service bureau chief in Frankfort, Ky., before he and Pat -- also a reporter based in Kentucky -- returned to Letcher County, the place of his birth, and bought the newspaper he grew up reading.

In 2004, the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky created the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism. The first recipients were, not surprisingly, Tom and Pat Gish.

(Photo of Tom Gish from the website of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues)