What does it take to snag an interview with former Harrisburg Mayor Stephen Reed?
Persistence, yes, lots of it. It also helps to learn some of the elusive man’s habits, like his tendency to show up at an area social club in the wee hours of the morning.
That’s how Dan Webster tracked down his subject. After months of sending the seven-term mayor letters, knocking on the door of his Midtown townhouse and asking intermediaries for help, Webster found out about Reed’s peculiar habit of popping into the Harrisburg Maennerchor each Sunday at 2:30 a.m., drinking three light beers over ice, then leaving precisely one hour later.
So, he cruised into the North Street club in the middle of the night.
“He said ‘you’re stalking me,’ and then he said that other reporters have tried and failed,” said Webster about his first interaction with Reed at the Maennerchor bar. “We stated who we were and what we wanted to do.”
What Webster wanted to do was this—get an interview with Reed and make it the cover story for the just-released issue of Local Magazine, which Webster founded and runs. A quarterly publication, Local dives deep into a chosen community, attempting, through a couple dozen stories, to capture the lifeblood of the place.
The recent, 138-page issue, focused entirely on Harrisburg, has stories on subjects as diverse as Neato Burrito, life in Allison Hill, the Bridge Club of Harrisburg, The MakeSpace and the city’s many rundown bars.
Some stories have a high quirk factor, even when they’re about ostensibly serious subjects. Can’t bear to read anything more about the incinerator? Well, how about if the trash started talking to you? You’ll also discover what happens when an email interview with the governor gets fed through the snark chipper.
“We had fun with some of the political stuff,” said Webster, a former managing editor of TheBurg. “But, for the most part, we wanted to tell more honest stories about Harrisburg than the CNN and Gawkers of the world.”
Local’s feature story offers a Reed-eye view of recent Harrisburg history, along with Webster’s first-person narrative of the interview, a lot of news background and an undertone of irreverence. Clips from old Patriot-News stories pepper the piece, breaking up the text and providing visual interest.
As Webster recounts, Reed refused, as a condition, to answer anything about his “personal life,” though he did manage to get some information about his youth growing up in Shippensburg and Harrisburg.
Otherwise, Webster details chronologically the hopes and successes of the early years; the increasing controversies—and public complacency—as Reed won term after term; and the city’s inevitable debt crash after decades of over-borrowing and over-spending. The tragicomedy of Reed’s pharaonic building schemes is fully detailed, as is Reed’s obsession with saving the city incinerator.
Webster’s conclusion? Reed was pleasant and polite, if “mildly defensive” about his legacy. In general, he seemed to give honest answers, with two exceptions.
Webster said he didn’t believe Reed’s statement that he pushed for the incinerator upgrade because it was better for the environment than a landfill. Through the incinerator retrofit, Reed was primarily trying to protect the cash cow that the incinerator had become, Webster said.
“I felt he meant he couldn’t float bonds anymore if he didn’t have the incinerator,” he said.
In addition, he didn’t believe Reed when he said he had no personal interest in Wild West artifacts. Reed, after all, attended countless auctions throughout the country, spending about $8.3 million in public money to buy 11,000 items for the oddity of building an Old West Museum in Harrisburg.
“I felt some of his answers were odd and contradictory,” Webster said.
In the end, Webster said he believes his staff captured the essence of Harrisburg perhaps more accurately than places like Asbury Park, N.J., Roanoke, Va., and Jersey Shore, Pa., which were profiled in previous issues.
In part, that’s because Local is based here, so the staff could write from a deeper level of knowledge and meaning. But it’s also, he said, because of the unique nature of their hometown.
“There’s this groundswell of people who don’t want to give this place up,” he said. “That mettle is something we also write about. This is a hardy place.”
Find out more about Local Magazine and order a copy of the Harrisburg issue at www.localmag.us.
