Russell, who was on vacation, driving his R.V. COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. Since joining the Times in 2014, he has covered the military community from the ground up. Dave Philipps reported from Colorado Springs and Tim Arango from Los Angeles.
This represented an increase of 3.2% since the 2007 general election and an 11.4% rise since the …
High schools often have Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs in which students wear uniforms to class once a week and can earn credit for learning about science, leadership and fitness through a military framework. That has created a broad gap, easily seen on a map. Dave Philipps covers veterans and the military, and is a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. “It’s saving me,” he told Arango.Butz is not your typical newspaper owner. BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president. “We would have to fall off the face of the earth to make one of those papers on a normal news day,” Lee Adams, a county supervisor, told Arango.Arango trains his focus on Butz, but he also manages, in 1,700 vibrant words, to pull off a triple-feature profile: an adventurous man; a weekly “ink on paper” publication founded in 1853 during the Gold Rush and which once, legend holds, published a few stories by a hungover Mark Twain; and a little mountain town with an Old West feel that now thrives on fly fishing, mountain biking and tourists interested in its history.Arango is a gifted storyteller with a flair for description, an ear for dialog and an eye for vivid, telling details. This is where I am today.’ Good pay check. And that’s not a paraphrase, but a direct quote.” Arango sketches in that romance, along with some idiosyncracies that are familiar to any newsroom rat. More and more, new recruits come from the same small number of counties and are the children of old recruits.COLORADO SPRINGS — The sergeant in charge of one of the busiest Army recruiting centers in Colorado, Sergeant First Class Dustin Comes, joined the Army, in part, because his father served. “His position was, it’s a losing proposition and someone who’d want it would be crazy,” Mr. Butz said. "Hansen refers to Bridges as a "renaissance man," who paints, does ceramics and writes music. Military service was once spread fairly evenly — at least geographically — throughout the nation because of the draft. Instead, the best predictor is a person’s familiarity with the military.“Those who understand military life are more likely to consider it as a career option than those who do not,” said Kelli Bland, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Recruiting Command. Recognizing it cannot sustain recruitment numbers by relying only on the South and military communities, the Army has tried to broaden its appeal. His wife, Yumi Hogan, a Korean immigrant who speaks fluent Korean, was on the phone in the middle of the night recently, he said, helping to secure the final deal with two South Korean labs. Don Russell, the hard-drinking, chain-smoking editor with a blunt writing style who had owned and run the paper for nearly three decades, was retiring, and he seemed happy enough for the paper to die with his retirement.And then one night Mr. Butz was watching “Citizen Kane” on cable and thought, Still, Mr. Russell, an old friend of Mr. Butz’s, was a reluctant seller. The 2011 elections was the last election Erdogan attended as a prime minister. High in the Sierra, Downieville, Calif., was about to become the latest American community to lose its newspaper. Mr. Butz, a fourth-generation Californian and a former computer programmer and labor economist for the state, readily admitted that he had no idea what he had gotten himself into, and it did not help to learn that the paper’s publishing software was from the mid-1990s.One of the first things he said he would do after buying the paper was ban smoking in the office, but next to his keyboard was a package of unfiltered cigarettes and an ashtray.“The front page is blank,” replied Jill Tahija, the paper’s only other employee, sitting at an adjacent computer.Ms. Having sold his car for $4,600, and then some of his wife’s jewelry, and having loaded his smartphone with photographs of his five children, all that was left for Haider Abdella to do was say goodbye. Now two of his four children say they want to serve, too. The next day, he joins his distribution manager for the 90-minute drive to the printing plant, then crisscrosses the county filling vending machines with copies, dropping off bundles at shops and gas stations, and making collections.His first edition covered a local poetry competition, the impending census, a local government meeting. But here he was, a freshly minted newspaper proprietor, having stepped in at the beginning of the year to save The Mountain Messenger, California’s oldest weekly newspaper, from extinction.The Messenger was founded in 1853.
It has about 700 subscribers and a print run of 2,400 copies, just below the county’s population.“I’m not going to lose a million dollars but I know I’m going to have to subsidize some of it,” Mr. Butz said.