A picture is worth a thousand lives

By Dan Drewry: Publisher

It’s Wednesday morning, March 7, and it’s a beautiful early-spring day in western Montana. The snow’s in full retreat, tiny black calves are stretching wobbly legs, and I saw the first red-winged blackbird of the season on my way to work yesterday. It’s a great time to be alive.

And it’s a lousy time to be dead, especially if you’re in the springtime of your life and die in an alcohol-related auto accident.

In the past few weeks, five young people lost their chance to see that red-winged blackbird. One died in Mineral County early one morning swerving to miss a deer on Highway 135.

Two died near Ronan in a small car upside down in a frozen pond. And two more were killed outside of Plains early Saturday morning as they walked along Highway 200. In each accident, alcohol is allegedly involved.

And kegger season hasn’t really begun. In all reality, the toll is going to rise as the weather warms and senior-itis hits our high schools.

The lure of an illicit party on a warm Saturday night, for many young people, is nearly irresistible.

It’s a lure that probably won’t be overcome by a small-town newspaper publisher’s column.

I look back over three decades of newspapering to a spring day in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, in the late 1970s. A teenage boy had been out with his friends, dropped the last one off, and started to drive the last couple of miles home.

He never made it. The cops estimated he was going at least 100 miles per hour when his car veered off the road, hit a tree, and was torn in half. His father went out looking for his boy the next morning and found the wreck and his dead son.

We ran the photo on page one, of course. It’s news of the community and a graphic warning of the consequences of stupidity behind the wheel.

When the grieving dad called me, he wasn’t angry. He was hurting.

“Why did you run that picture?”

Don’t drink and drive. Don’t let your kids drink and drive, or drink and ride with a drunk. Because we don’t want to run that picture. We want you to watch the red-winged blackbirds for many springtimes to come.