One night in August, 1984, Steve Reed, then a first-term mayor of Harrisburg, left city hall around 10:30 p.m. and drove to his Cumberland Street home. He was hungry, having skipped dinner, so he parked and walked a block over to the Midtown Tavern, a neighborhood bar. There, he got a table by himself, ordered a burger, and took out some office papers and started working.
A short while later, a young woman approached him. Reed, describing the incident several months later, recalled her presence as confrontational; according to him, she suggested it was a “disgrace” he was sitting there. The young woman remembered it somewhat differently. “I’m just one of those talky people sometimes,” she said, noting she’d recognized Reed from appearances on television. “I asked him if he was the Mayor and he said yes. I asked him why he wasn’t home watching the Olympics like all other patriotic Americans.”
The woman soon left and rejoined her friends, among whose number was someone Reed recognized: Steve Corbett, a former columnist at a weekly shopper called The Guide, and the host of a local radio talk show and editor of a free weekly paper called the City News. A Susquenita High School alum, Corbett had first met Reed as a teenager, when the two crossed paths at area parties. As a journalist, Corbett had become a relentless antagonist of Reed’s. A typical column, published in The Guide that February, assailed the installation of a rowing machine in city hall, where “in the spirit of Jane Fonda, Victoria Principal and Richard Simmons” Reed could “row, row, row his little heart away.” At the City News, after a Reed spokesman adopted a no-response policy towards Corbett’s inquiries, Corbett started running a mock-column called “The Mayor Speaks.” The headline ran over several blank inches of paper.
Reed suspected Corbett was putting his companions up to some kind of prank. A few minutes after the first woman left, another woman from the group came over to Reed’s table. She tried to talk to him, but he rebuffed her. “I simply said, in a very firm but polite manner, that I don’t know what kind of game is taking place but I was not interested in engaging in whatever it is that they are attempting to prove,” he said. It’s not clear what happened next, but within a few minutes, Corbett was hectoring the mayor with a string of obscenities. A worker at the city incinerator, at the bar having a beer, said he heard Corbett tell Reed, “You think you’re too God-damned good to talk to the people.” In the mayor’s version, Corbett shouted “various words such as asshole, hell, son-of-a-bitch” and “a certain four-letter word.” He added, with characteristic meticulousness, “People in the bar were becoming, in some cases, annoyed.” (These and other witness quotes are taken from court documents; Reed, through a spokesman, declined to comment for this article.)
To many, the whole exchange must have seemed like a fight over nothing. A few beers into the night, a detractor of the mayor’s decided to heckle him at a neighborhood bar. Yet Corbett insisted he was standing up for his principles. At some point in the confrontation, Reed, apparently in reference to Corbett’s radio show, said something to the effect that the First Amendment and the Federal Communications Commission didn’t protect what he said in a bar. Corbett later said he “took umbrage at the fact that Mayor Reed could take it upon himself to decide where the First Amendment applies and where it doesn’t apply.” (Reed claimed he said simply, “Mr. Corbett, the FCC does not protect you when you are in here.”)
In any case, the disruption caught the attention of the cook, who came out of the kitchen to see what was going on. Soon the Tavern’s owner, Pete Milonopoulos, got involved, and shortly thereafter, both Corbett and Reed left. As they parted in front of the bar, headed in opposite directions on Second Street, Corbett shouted an elliptical farewell after the mayor: “Good night, Stephanie.”
Milonopoulos didn’t view what had happened as a serious confrontation. “Everybody left,” he later testified. “Everybody was cool.” Yet a few hours later, Corbett was back home at his apartment, drinking and dancing, when the phone rang. It was a Harrisburg detective. “The cop said, ‘Corbett, what did you do to the mayor up at the Midtown Tavern?’” he recalled. “I said, ‘I didn’t do anything to him! Why?’” The officer explained that the mayor was pressing charges. A preliminary hearing was set for the end of the month.
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Corbett now lives in Scranton, where, since 2006, he has worked as a talk show host at WILK-FM radio. The station is located off a state highway, tucked behind a gas station and an Arby’s. One afternoon in September, I met him there. Corbett is tall, with a graying Beat-poet beard, glasses, and a voice that is animated, grainy, on-air-argument-ready. He wore a pinstriped double-breasted suit jacket, an untucked white dress shirt and jeans. A pair of boxing gloves dangled from a lamp in his office—before he was a journalist, he worked as a counselor and boxing instructor at the Camp Hill prison. “I hung up my gloves, literally,” he said.
Corbett got into writing early, and from the beginning was something of a provocateur. An avid reader, he started a paper at Susquenita called the Hairy Messenger. It had a peace sign logo and “took shots at everything, including the teachers and the educational system,” he said. After graduating Penn State, with a degree in community development, he worked odd jobs and wrote occasionally for the Harrisburg Independent Press, an alternative paper. In 1978, while working at the prison, he wrote a column for the New York Daily News about threats he’d been getting from an inmate. It was titled “Keep Your Kids Away From The Windows, Buy Yourself a .38.” “They did not take kindly at the prison—I was a state employee—for one of their drug and alcohol prison counselors to advocate shooting the clients,” he said. He was fired, but he appealed the decision, and his travails caught the attention of a local reporter named Richard Halverson.
Halverson was the editor of The Guide, the flagship paper of a publishing and printing company called Fry Communications. At the time, it was printed on broadsheet, with a newsstand price of 15 cents, and ran to a dozen pages. Its writers typed up pieces on IBM Selectrics in a dimly lit, wood-paneled basement office on Second Street, across from the governor’s mansion. Most of its content was what you’d expect from a shopper—business briefs, events calendars and lifestyle stories like “Renting may be wiser than buying a house” and “Some cuts of lamb are frequently ignored.” About half of each edition was taken up with classifieds and full-page ads for local groceries. But on the front of every issue was something completely different. Running alongside its signature graphic, a sketch of the capitol dome under a twitching proboscis, was an investigative column called “The Nose Knows.”
By the late ‘70s, Halverson had established the “Nose” as an institution. Tall, heavyset, with unkempt sandy brown hair, Halverson “had a voice that ranged from light bass to an almost shrieking falsetto,” Robert Kapler, who worked under him as a cub reporter, told me. The Harrisburg journalist Paul Beers once wrote about the “bifocal vision” that left capitol and city reporters oblivious to one another’s beats, but Halverson wrote about it all: tax delinquent properties, plush contracts between city hall and downtown firms, waste and abuse in various state departments, the peccadillos of candidates for district justice. Kitty Williams, who started at the Guide as a proofreader in the 70s, told me, “If there was a township supervisor using equipment for his own property, he would expose them for that.” “He had it in for the bad guys in Harrisburg and he spared no expense going after them,” Kapler said. “He turned a shopper into an investigative shopper.”
Shortly after Kapler was hired, in the fall of 1979, Halverson approached him with an idea. A few months after the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island, Halverson had picked up a tip from two former guards of ongoing weaknesses in the plant’s security system. He wanted Kapler to assume a false name and apply for a security job to check it out. “I thought he was kidding,” Kapler said. He wasn’t. Kapler followed through and, after succeeding in getting hired, managed within three weeks to infiltrate a control room and snap photos with a Minox spy camera. The Guide ran the story in February, and it immediately made national news.
Kapler described Halverson as a mentor who taught him the tricks of the trade, a man with a “wicked, offbeat sense of humor” but also a “real moral sensibility.” But in his columns, he could be bitter and sarcastic, even scathing. “He was feared, he was hated, he was mocked,” Corbett said. He could also be deeply homophobic. One 1981 piece expressed sympathy for State Street residents over the “trash and litter left behind largely by the homo-whores that infest their otherwise decent neighborhood.” The article went on to cite rumors the street was a well-known place for “making homosexual contacts,” and urged residents to take down license plate numbers and “send them to the menfolks’ wives and mothers.”
Halverson hired Corbett in the wake of the prison incident, but then fired him again soon after. “I really didn’t have the turnaround ability that he needed at the time,” Corbett recalled. In 1981, however, Halverson left to take a job as investigative editor at a newspaper in Ohio. The following year, the paper brought Corbett back as a staff reporter under a new editor, Diane Miller.
They arrived at the Guide during “an exciting time to be a journalist,” Miller told me recently. It was the post-Watergate era, when reporters and readers alike had a strong appetite for investigative reporting. “We weren’t exactly a scandal sheet, but we weren’t afraid to tell the truth, either,” she said. “People actually read it.” She wrote an odds-and-ends column called “Harrisblurb” and a food feature called “The Merry Muncher.” Corbett, meanwhile, took over the “Nose,” where he quickly showed a talent for making trouble. “I did the softer stories for the most part,” Miller said. “And tried to rein Steve in. And keep him from getting shot.”
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In July, the state attorney general announced the preliminary results of a long-running probe into the origins of Harrisburg’s debt crisis, which began to consume the city in Reed’s last years in office and had all but bankrupted the city by the time he was gone. Reed, mayor of Pennsylvania’s capital for a remarkable seven terms, now faces corruption charges for alleged crimes spanning several years’ worth of risky borrowings and profligate purchases. A month earlier, news crews had surrounded his home—the same Cumberland Street property where he’d been living in 1984—to record as investigators hauled out artifacts and relics the state claimed had been purchased with public funds. (Reed and his defense team have maintained that everything removed was his own property.)
As the sense of an impending indictment grew, it became commonplace to ask how the alleged crimes could have continued for so long, and whether local media had failed to live up to their duties. Chris Papst, a television reporter who recently published a chronicle of the debt crisis under the blood-and-guts title “Capital Murder,” posed a version of this question during an appearance on WITF’s Smart Talk in June. “Where was the media?” he asked. “Why were they not doing more in trying to find out what this man was doing to the city?” The city’s current mayor, Eric Papenfuse, repeated this claim the day of Reed’s arraignment. “I think the media failed horribly in this case in Harrisburg,” he said.
Such views have the benefit of hindsight. In fact, the available record suggests that Reed, throughout his tenure, had the sort of checkered relationship with the media that is typical of public officials. “Mayor for Life,” a WITF television documentary from 1997, after Reed was elected to his fifth term, provides a fascinating and subtle portrait of his dealings with the press. Much of the documentary explores Reed’s image as the savior of a city devastated by the flood of 1972 and the social changes of the mid-century. One of its main interviews is with Henry Young, a former editor of the Patriot-News, who paints a picture of an ambitious and dedicated politician he predicts will stay in office “til he dies.” “He’s a very difficult man to get to, but yet he’s one of the kindest people, on a one-on-one basis—among the kindest I’ve ever met,” Young says.
At the same time, the piece uses a cunning selection of quotes and footage to hint at the double edge of Reed’s political successes. In one clip, a young radio DJ heckles Reed near the Walnut Street bridge over his efforts at City Island. “You know what we need to do, Mayor?” he asks. “We need to get and erect a huge statue of you looking over City Island, because that is your island.” Reed smiles gamely, but demurs. “I don’t want anything named for me, I want nothing built for me, and that’s been a policy of mine since I’ve been in public office and it’s gonna stay a policy,” he says. The documentary, cannily, leads into the exchange with a piece of B-roll showing a giant billboard at the island ballpark: “Mayor Steve Reed and the Citizens of Harrisburg Welcome You.” In another clip, Reed discusses cynics who doubt his projects will succeed. “And yet after it’s done and turns successful, it’s like it all evaporates,” he says. “And it’s suddenly like, ‘Who could ever have opposed this?’” He flashes a smile. “Well, I keep clippings,” he goes on, chuckling. “And I can tell you who did. I can tell you every S.O.B. that did.”
Towards the end of the piece are scenes from a 1996 city hall visit by a local Boy Scout troop. They’ve come to present Reed with a popsicle-stick replica they’ve built of the Walnut Street bridge, which Reed observes is timely—a portion of the bridge was destroyed by ice earlier that year. One scout asks about the “toughest part” of being mayor. Reed points to the end of the room, where a handful of news photographers are holding cameras. “Right here is my biggest problem,” he says, to laughter. “You see these folks gathered around here? This is the news media. And they’re a royal pain in the neck.” He chuckles, then adds, “No, I’m just kidding.”
Under Corbett, the “Nose Knows” column harried Reed early and often. The stories tended to follow the same pattern. Some source within city hall, named or unnamed, would tip the paper off about the latest gossip or grievance, which Corbett would then use to flog the mayor and his department heads. Waste of tax dollars was a constant theme, though the treatment was often inconclusive, and could border on the petty. In June of 1982, Corbett devoted a pair of columns to a squabble over a florist Reed may or may not have hired to prepare floral arrangements around city hall. The first column quoted the florist herself, who described her circumstances as “kind of hush hush” because the city workers’ union wasn’t happy about the position. But the next week, the paper ran a lengthy rebuttal from Reed, who said he’d read the original article with “amazement”—he’d explicitly turned down a request to create the florist position a month before, he said.
Other times, the topics were more consequential. In December of 1982, a white Harrisburg police officer, Richard Pickles, shot and killed Joseph Leon Marks, an unarmed black man, who had been fleeing from police in a stolen car. Police said Pickles had fired after Marks reached between his legs and lifted a shiny object that Pickles mistook for a gun. Corbett wrote about the controversy the following spring, as City Council faced the “hot potato” of a vote on Pickles’ firing. He reported that Reed, according to a “reliable source,” had met with the council president and Pickles’ lawyer to try to broker Pickles’ resignation, thus sparing council the controversial vote. A mayoral spokesman later denied this, but the story had captured the political delicacy of a simmering racial controversy. (Pickles, incidentally, is a central figure in the criminal charges facing Reed—he took trips to collect artifacts Reed had purchased, which prosecutors have characterized as an illegal use of his salaried time.)
By the time of the Tavern incident, Corbett was writing about Reed less as an investigative reporter and more as a rabble-rouser. In early 1984, he claimed in one column that he’d found the mayor’s direct office number in a barroom stall. He printed it, urging readers to give Reed a ring and report back on their results: “We’re sure he’ll be glad to hear from you, because he’s a mayor of the people, by the people, and for the people.” In the City News, in addition to the blank “Mayor Speaks” column, he also printed a serialized novel, “Dancing at the Mayor’s Ball.” It was billed as a work of fiction—Corbett invented an author, Murph Jameson Cooney, who he said deposited the installments each week in a beer box on his doorstep. But the characters had real-life analogues, and Corbett used the feature to air city hall rumors he could never prove. His neighbors called it “Dancing on the Mayor’s Balls.”
The City News covered more than just city hall. “I opened it up to every voice I could find that had something to say in the city of Harrisburg,” Corbett told me. His girlfriend wrote a column on navigating bureaucracy, called “Cutting Red Tape.” Nathaniel Gadsden, the pastor of Imani African Christian Church and the founder of a local writers’ workshop, wrote a column on African-American issues. “It was doing things that no other paper was willing to do,” Gadsden said of the City News. Corbett was “fighting for people’s voices who weren’t being heard,” he added.
Yet Corbett’s focus on the mayor was personal and unrelenting. At one point, I asked him: what was his beef with Reed? “I thought he was a lousy public servant,” he said. “I thought he was egotistical to the point of becoming a public menace.” He suggested, with a nod to the pending criminal charges, that time had vindicated his instincts. “I’m a very astute judge of humanity and character,” he said.
But this, too, has the benefit of hindsight. When I asked for an example of a specific thing Reed did, in the time Corbett was covering him, that could have forecast his recent fall from grace, he said he couldn’t remember—it was all too long ago. Nonetheless, he told me, “I absolutely saw it. And other people saw it. But no one challenged him.”
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“Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” the journalist Janet Malcolm wrote in her 1990 book, “The Journalist and the Murderer.” Malcolm was concerned with the betrayal by the reporter of his or her subjects, who answer the phone and consent to interviews despite knowing, deep down, their version of events will come out warped in the published story. You don’t have to take Malcolm’s thesis as literally true to appreciate its keen summation of the problem. Assuming we want journalists to be more than stenographers, where should we draw the line between interpretation in the public interest and unfair distortion?
Corbett learned early that he wanted to be a columnist—that, as he put it, he “had something to say.” These days, in addition to his daily talk show, he also writes a blog and records the occasional video commentary for a feature called “Corbett Cam.” His tone in these venues is much like it was the “Nose”: skeptical, sarcastic, and unceasingly critical of people he thinks have let the public down. He recorded one segment in the wake of the “Kids for Cash” scandal, in which two Luzerne County judges were convicted of handing down harsh sentences on juveniles in exchange for kickbacks from the builder of two for-profit youth detention centers. At the time, the developer, Robert Mericle, had not yet been sentenced for his role in the affair. In the video, Corbett stands outside one of the centers and holds up a toothbrush, saying he hoped to drop it off for Mericle, who he suggests should serve time there. Then he sticks it in his mouth. “You need to get this putrid stench, rotten taste, out of your mouth!” he shouts as he scrubs.
“There’s great value in great, straight reporters. But you need more than that,” Corbett told me. He felt that the media, particularly at the local level, had gone soft. “Frankly, more people need to walk that edge a little more often,” he said. “I think that the press has to be a hell of a lot more aggressive than what it is.” He also had little patience for people who failed to understand that commentary, like just-the-facts-ma’am reporting, formed an essential part of a healthy fourth estate. “I say to people, when they say, ‘That’s your opinion, that’s your opinion’—Yeah, it’s my opinion, dumbass,” he said. “I’m saying to you, they give a Pulitzer for commentary. That goes to columnists. What do you think columnists do?”
Corbett’s exchange with Reed at the Tavern presents a puzzle. In a hearing at the end of August, 1984, a magistrate, Joseph Solomon, found Corbett guilty of disorderly conduct and harassment and handed down a $150 fine. Corbett held a news conference, at which he announced he’d appeal. That might have been the end of it—Corbett had shown himself willing to make a scene, and Reed, wary of further spectacle, might have dropped it there. Instead, he persevered. The appeal would be heard the following March, a little more than a month before the mayoral primary.
For the most part, Corbett seemed to view the episode as a giant farce. “We had a great time at trial. A great time,” Corbett told me. The county judge heard testimony from a spate of witnesses—Reed, Corbett, the Tavern’s owner, a cook, a waitress, two bystanders, and three of the friends from Corbett’s table. “You have an argument with some goof in the bar, who happens to be the mayor, and he convenes his police department to file charges against me?” he told me. “I mean, that was ridiculous!” He recalled that Milonopoulos, the owner, was poured a glass of water upon taking the stand. Rather than have a drink, he dipped his fingers in it and blessed himself. “I laughed so hard I almost fell out of my chair,” Corbett said.
Alongside the farcical elements, however, there were also serious currents. Whatever the level of Corbett’s transgression, the case amounted to a sitting mayor seeking a criminal conviction against one of his critics in the media. Corbett’s lawyer, questioning Reed on the stand, tried to establish that the mayor was aware of Corbett’s opinions and had instructed his spokesman not to respond to any of his inquiries. (“I recall no such instruction,” Reed responded.) Reed, in turn, sought to brush aside any suggestion that he cared about Corbett’s criticisms. “When you are in the business of government,” he said, “you get used to the fact that there’s always going to be someone out there like Steve Corbett doing what they do.” That was no excuse for Corbett’s conduct in the bar, he went on, which “transcended every bound, I think, of the criminal statutes of this state.”
And then there was the question of Corbett’s farewell, in which he called the mayor “Stephanie.” When he was about it asked in court, Corbett responded, “In my mind I decided if he wanted to act like a spoiled little girl, I would at least bid him a fond adieu, more or less.” But Milonopoulos heard something more malicious. He testified Corbett also told Reed to “go find a boyfriend.” Corbett told me he picked up the nickname from gay men he knew in the neighborhood, but that he didn’t mean it as a reference to Reed’s sexuality. “I was using it in a mocking manner, the way the gay guys in the neighborhood used it in a mocking manner,” he said. He also described his behavior as the recklessness of youth: “Obviously, as you look back, you mature,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t make statements like that now.”
If Corbett and his columns caused Reed any real trouble, it didn’t last. A county judge upheld the guilty verdict, and a second appeal by Corbett went nowhere. In 1985, Corbett and Reed briefly wound up in court again—Corbett was running a stunt campaign for mayor, and Reed’s team sought to throw out his nominating petitions. Corbett prevailed, but by that point he had gotten a job at the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader. He soon moved out of Harrisburg for good.
The “Nose” never came back to The Guide, and as the years progressed, Halverson’s “investigative shopper” reverted back to just an ordinary shopper. Diane Miller departed not long after Corbett, after offending an advertiser with a column about shopping for cars. “I was just honest, I was completely honest,” she told her bosses. She got a job at the Patriot-News, and worked there for several years. The Guide is still printed weekly, but is now mailed free to postal customers in the region. The coupons and sales that used to run as inserts now run on the front page. Troy Williams, the paper’s general manager, told me, “Now there’s nothing to read in the paper. It’s just a marketing tool now.”
In earlier days, Reed, when discussing the press, seemed to view it as a vehicle for disillusionment—as a force forever taking the bloom off the rose of American democracy. “It’s hard to find heroes in American politics today,” he said, during an interview for the WITF documentary. “Anybody who looks like an up-and-coming, or somebody who comes across today in American politics as being a selfless servant, genuinely committed to public causes and good, becomes a target. And the media just hammers at that person, and hammers, and hammers. So we’re denied having heroes today. We’re not allowed to have them.”
The statement can be viewed any number of ways—earnest, presumptuous, self-aggrandizing, naïve. For better or worse, it’s probably also true.
