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spending a lot of his time huddling with the suits at the corporate offices in Traverse City. We had a few blue-haired ladies who freelanced now and then. It was next to impossible to put out a six-day-a-week paper with such a tiny staff. I filled a lot of the paper with wire-service copy and barely rewritten press releases.
    Joanie had written most of the stories on my screen, including the one at the top, slugged BIGFOOT. I punched the story up:
     
By M. Joan McCarthy
Pilot
Staff Correspondent

A glass case on Clayton Perlmutter’s kitchen table contains what some might consider to be a bizarre treasure. Perlmutter’s prize is a three-inch-thick mound of hardened brown feces, which the retired house painter claims came from a Sasquatch, the mythical “Bigfoot” creature rumored to roam the woods of northern Michigan.

But some people think Perlmutter is the one who’s full of it.
     
    I couldn’t help but smile, both at the lead paragraph itself and at the unlikelihood that it would run in the
Pilot.
We did our best not to put fecal matter in the paper, at least intentionally.
    “What’s so funny back there?”
    “Nothing, Tillie,” I said.
    The
Pilot
and other papers in our area ran stories every few years on Clayton Perlmutter and his Sasquatch Institute. Invariably, the stories ushered readers through Perlmutter’s dank garage, where he kept his collection of blurry photos, scratchy audiotapes, footprint casts, and maps of Sasquatch sightings. And they quoted Perlmutter about his one-man campaign for a state law that would prohibit the killing of the Sasquatch.
    I had expected Joanie to file something equally harmless. Reading her story, I saw I’d been mistaken. She quoted zoologists from Harvard and the Smithsonian discrediting the notion that the Sasquatch had ever existed. She cited a retired local photographer who said he’d helped Perlmutter doctor snapshots of a brown bear. The real news showed up halfway through: For years, Perlmutter had been getting state money to support his organization. In his grant applications, he had said he was maintaining a museum.
     
Documents obtained by the
Pilot
under the state Freedom of Information Act show Perlmutter has garnered at least $32,235 in eighteen state grants since 1985. In periodic reports to the state, Perlmutter has said only that the state money had been used for “sundry uncompleted research projects.” When asked, Perlmutter said he had “no obligation under the First Amendment” to address these matters.
     
    I loved the story, even felt a pang of jealousy at Joanie’s ability to nail it. But I doubted it would fly with the corporate guys. It wasn’t just their usual skittishness that was giving me pause. My job was on the line. The bosses at NLP had balked at hiring me after my abrupt departure from the
Detroit Times.
Only Henry Bridgman’s personal guarantee had persuaded them—that and a year of probation. One bad slip and I could be gone from the
Pilot
—and maybe the whole newspaper business—for good. I didn’t like it, but I decided I had to let the NLP lawyers vet Joanie’s story. That created another problem. Expecting something tamer, I’d planned to splash the Bigfoot story across Saturday’s front page. Now I needed something else.
    Up front, Tillie was leaning against the counter with the
Detroit Times
spread before her. A bluish cigarette haze hung around her bleached-blond head.
    “Hey, Till,” I said. “What’s in the news?”
    “Aren’t newspaper editors supposed to keep up with the news?” she said.
    “I suppose.”
    “Indeed. Well, it’s all Monica all the time.”
    “Who’s Monica?”
    “She’s a little hussy who worked in the White House,” Tillie said. “She had a little thing with the president. He stuck a cigar in her you-know-what.”
    I cringed, less at what Tillie said than at having to hear it from her. “Her last name’s Lewinsky?” I grabbed a phone book. “I need a favor,