The first time I encountered Glen Sheppard, I was an upstart reporter at a small weekly newspaper in the northern Michigan community of Mancelona.
That’s when the phone rang.
“This is Shep at The North Woods Call,” said the gruff, no-nonsense voice on the other end of the line. “They’re screwing up the Cedar River.”
It seems the Michigan Environmental Protection Foundation had filed a civil action suit against the Antrim County Road Commission in hopes of halting two culvert replacement projects on the pristine trout stream. The plaintiffs wanted bridges installed over the river, while the top brass at the Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) had approved the large steel culverts to be placed in the water.
Shep wasn’t about to accept this sitting down. He believed that extensive excavation in the stream bottom would introduce many tons of silt into the Cedar and harm the fishery resource. He urged me to visit the site, take photographs and do a story—which I gladly did.
After 35 years, I don’t recall today just how the conflict was resolved, but I still remember the passion in Shep’s voice and his steely determination to protect the river. It was that way whenever he called with story ideas.
Later, during the mid-1980s, I attended two gatherings for North Woods Call subscribers that Shep hosted at the DNR conference center at Higgins Lake—ostensibly to get-acquainted with incoming DNR directors Ron Skoog and Gordon Guyer. When one subscriber questioned the Call’s editorial stance on some conservation issue, the response was classic Shep.
“If you don’t like it,” he said, “buy your own damned newspaper.”
Given this legendary combative personality, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I visited Shep’s home several years later. The first thing I noticed was a sign next to his door that said something like this:
“If you knock and we don’t answer, it’s because we are either busy, or don’t want any visitors. So just go away!”
Fortunately, Shep was expecting me and answered the door in good cheer. I found both he and wife Mary Lou quite hospitable and easy to talk to, although perhaps somewhat suspicious of my motives. After all, I was there because he had hinted in a column that he might be ready to retire and turn The North Woods Call over to someone else.
That, of course, was easier said than done.
I’m not sure he really wanted to step aside. He certainly didn’t want to surrender The Call to just anyone and I was asking way too many technical questions to suit his style.
“Someone who is going to continue The Call’s tradition will have to be an aggressive risk-taker,” he said. “Sure, you need to set goals, but to hell with analyzing the odds before deciding to take the risks.”
He conceded that this is not the way in today’s high-tech corporate world, but declared, “The Call ain’t about high-tech.”
Besides, he said, he didn’t know the answers to most of my questions and couldn’t rightly say why the newspaper had survived for so many years without more attention to textbook business practices.
“I would know these things if I were more prudent,” he admitted, “in which case The Call would have died years ago.”
Instead, Shep lived by a lesson learned from his military rifle company commander more than 50 years earlier when as a young soldier he questioned the wisdom of charging a hill without proper reconnaissance.
“You’re telling me that discretion is the better part of valor,” the commander reportedly said. “Discreet cowards cower. Get those rifles up that hill!”
I’m still not sure what to make of all that—I’ve never been one for blind foolishness—but I probably ignored a fair number of traditional business principles when I took on the uncertain task of resurrecting this newspaper.
“We have had a lot of people look at and crave The Call,” Shep told me during one of our discussions, “but none that I judged would carry on its mission. I think you could.”
That’s as close to an endorsement as I ever got from him.
In the end, my business instincts were probably too cautious and his personal identity with The North Woods Call too strong for us to reach a satisfactory agreement while he was at the helm.
Shep insisted that discretion could not sustain The Call’s contribution to conservation for another half-century and left me with three words of advice:
“Just do it!”
Well, I finally did, though not in the way Shep envisioned. Turns out, that was the easy part.
Now I’m learning to harness my natural discretion and live with the risk.
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