Agents spent much of Tuesday hauling Western-style artifacts from the home of former Harrisburg Mayor Steve Reed.
In early 2014, TheBurg’s former managing editor, Dan Webster, conducted an interview with a man who had virtually disappeared from the public eye: the long-serving mayor of Harrisburg, Stephen Reed.
The interview was the result of months of hard work and persistence by Webster, who, after letters, phone calls and visits to Reed’s house, finally cornered him in one of his usual haunts–a barstool of Der Harrisburg Maennerchor on North Street at about 2 a.m., the seven-term mayor sipping his usual drink of a light beer over ice.
Reed didn’t know Webster and, at first, was put off by the young man’s tenacity. According to Webster, Reed said to him something like, “Oh, so you’re the guy who’s been stalking me?”
But, after some conversation, Webster persuaded Reed to sit for a lengthy, wide-ranging interview that covered everything from his biography (though no questions about his personal life were allowed) to the city incinerator debacle to the Old West museum that Reed had proposed. Webster later published portions of the interview in his magazine, “Local,” a Harrisburg-focused issue released about a year ago. The cover featured a portrait of Reed, grinning slyly, a caption overlaying the picture and asking the question, “Sinner or Saint?”
On Tuesday, I thought about Webster’s story as I stood across the street from Reed’s Cumberland Street home (along with the rest of the media scrum), watching agents haul away items such as saddles, a statue of an Indian, a totem pole and a stuffed coyote. The bounty would have fit perfectly into the “Old West” museum that Reed had wanted to build, for which he had spent millions in public funds to acquire thousands of artifacts.
In particular, I kept remembering when Webster asked Reed why he wanted to build a Western-themed museum in the unlikely location of Harrisburg, Pa. His response:
“Everybody assumes that I must be a collector of those items. I never was. I never was. I do collect stuff, WWII-related stuff, some Vietnam and old books. Just people assume, ‘Oh, he’s building museums related to his hobbies.’ No, actually, I wasn’t. But, in this town, a well-spun lie will trump truth or fact any day of the week.”
In his story, Webster cast doubt on Reed’s veracity by mentioning that his old city hall office was filled with Western-themed artifacts, including his “two prized possessions”: Wyatt Earp’s card table and Doc Holliday’s revolver.
And now we know that his personal home also was loaded with objects from the American West. After the faded, chipped green door opened, the Cumberland Street house spit out three truckloads of artifacts, including a spinning wheel, a whiskey barrel, statues, antique-looking furniture, Western-style clothing, horse-riding gear, Indian ceremonial items and box after sealed box of other things.
The house’s contents didn’t surprise a few of the veteran reporters. Rumors had circulated for years that Reed’s house was jam-packed with artifacts, though, until Tuesday, no reporter I knew had ever seen them. In a 2009 interview, Patriot-News reporter John Luciew asked Reed directly if any city-owned artifacts were inside his house.
“Never have I kept city- or authority-owned anything at my house, other than my pager,” Reed replied.
Luciew also asked about the reimbursement that Reed had requested from the Harrisburg Authority for artifacts he said he had purchased with his own money years earlier.
“These weren’t personal items,” he said. “There were items I had purchased for the archives and museum projects. These were delivered here (to the city) from the beginning. They were never anywhere else but delivered here.”
Emerging from his house yesterday, Reed–the non-collector–told the media gathered outside that the artifacts seized by agents the day before were, indeed, his personal property. He then went on, as he did with Webster, to offer reporters a lesson in lying.
“A well-spun lie repeated often enough becomes almost gospel truth,” he said before the cameras when asked about reports of corruption during his lengthy tenure in office.
After speaking for a few more minutes, Reed got into his car and drove off, saying that he was under a court-imposed order not to talk to the press and, in any case, was on his way to meet his lawyer.
