Our Friend Jerry
By Jamie McElhatton
In the spring of 2011, the Washington Times newspaper was known for many things. Job security was not one of them. There was constant talk of closure, bankruptcy and, at best, more layoffs in an already decimated newsroom.
Every week or so, unfamiliar executives appeared on a balcony overlooking the newsroom. Like vultures, they leaned on railings, staring down as we reporters and editors worked sources and tried to make a living. My editor and boss on the investigative desk, Jerry Seper, who died last month at home on a fishing lake in Alabama at age 79, could not stand these corporate intruders.
He wanted to know who these executives were, what they were talking about and what they had planned. One thing was clear. They dressed too well to work in a newsroom. They could only be there to destroy it.
It was during one of these “suit sightings” when Jerry remembered a lunchtime conversation in which I told him about a toy I bought for my kindergarten-aged son. It was called the Sonic Explorer—a plastic toy gun with a parabola on one end and a cheap pair of headphones on the other. Point it in someone’s direction, I told Jerry, and you can hear what they’re saying. He was kind to let me think I was egging him on. I knew better. Jerry was not only up for newsroom mischief, he was its creator and executive producer.
The next day, I watched him put on my five-year old’s headphones looking to uncover the secret conversations of a dying old newsroom. When the executives made their way around the balcony, Jerry ducked behind his computer and told us to be quiet as he aimed the parabola and attempted to “listen in.” He uncovered no corporate secrets, but that didn’t matter. We laughed. We laughed at a time when it was hard to find a reason to smile.
At that moment, when the only professional worry on my mind was finding a new job—and back then, any job would do—I knew enough to grab my camera and take what I knew would be my favorite photograph of Jerry. It reveals what he guarded so fiercely.
Jerry never talked of his childhood. In this photo, he is wearing the Sonic Explorer headphones and holding this child’s toy, staring through the scope, hands clasped just so, in a way where you can tell he not only knows what it is to hold a gun, but to need to use one, too. Jerry used to be a cop; he served in Vietnam. That is not why I love this photo. I love it because I think it captures the truth of Jerry S. Seper, Sr., who was, above all else and until the day he died, a sweet, joyful, mischievous boy, out for a little love and approval.
Jerry reminded me of my father, an airline pilot who died in 2005. My father and Jerry had a lot in common. They were standout high school baseball players. They served in the Navy on aircraft carriers; Jerry as a rescue diver, my father, a pilot. They were kind. They were funny. Both were born in August 1943. Neither had much use for the sentimental. They both gave me well-intentioned, fatherly advice, which I ignored the way sons often do.
I was a reporter for nine years at the Washington Times. I quit twice. The first time, I figured I would get out before the inevitable next round of layoffs. I left to get away, not because I really wanted to cover procurement at a federal trade publication. Jerry told me I’d be back in a regular newsroom. He said I wasn’t cut out for trade publications. I thought if I worked hard I could do it, I tried to tell him.
“Relax,” he said. “It’s a compliment.”
Sure enough, the trade publication world was not a good fit: “I had to write three stories this week on a General Services Administration contract vehicle called OASIS,” I complained to Jerry in an email, just weeks after I took the new job. “It made me want to shove pencils in my neck.”
He told me to buy a turtleneck.
Only half joking, in subsequent emails and conversations with Jerry, I hinted at maybe coming back to the Washington Times. He warned against it: John Solomon, a journalist at the Associated Press and Washington Post, and the former editor of the Washington Times, was back in charge of the newsroom and had brought along a few reporters from an internet publication he created called the Washington Guardian.
Jerry wasn’t sure whether the investigative desk would be around much longer. Editors came and went. These changes were hard. They reminded me of the big nor’easters on the Jersey Shore where I grew up. Not just for the bluster: Before every big storm, you always wondered what all would be swept away by the time it was over.
“Solomon has brought his Guardian boys over,” Jerry told me in an email. “That can’t be good. He introduced his whiz kids today and they both look to be about 13 years old.” (Jerry didn’t take as much to reporters right out of journalism grad schools, at least not until after he got to know them. He liked reporters to have some dents and dings and hard miles.)
The paper’s funding started to dry up. Another holiday round of layoffs gutted the newsroom. Outside media reporters called to get newsroom employees to speak openly about Solomon. Among those still left in the newsroom, maybe only Jerry went on the record. He told the Columbia Journalism Review in 2012 that Solomon’s previous initiatives had put the paper in a “near death spiral.”
I thought Solomon would be livid at Jerry and get rid of him. To his credit, he kept Jerry and his small team around, even through more layoffs. Before long, Solomon came to me with assignments and tips. Sometimes, these tips panned out. Other times, it became a challenge to push back and say that a story was just not there. Jerry helped me with that. Solomon likely had other worries.
Print ads were declining fast, and newsrooms were dying. Most did not seem to be going into the ICU quite as fast as our newsroom. As print ads dried up, the number of “clicks” online stories received became a hugely important metric to papers and, in turn, one could surmise, to one’s job security.
Solomon sent staff emails congratulating reporters on stories that generated a lot of web attention. Some newsroom employees were tasked with creating internal communications to find all of the “pickups” from other media outlets crediting our reporting. The message seemed clear: stories that got clicks mattered, and so did the reporters who got those stories.
But there is another side of life in the newsroom. There are the stories you never see. Some of these are stories reporters fight for that editors and lawyers decide against running. Then, there’s the other kind.
To fully appreciate a journalist, you have to know not just what they put in the paper, but what they fought hard to keep out of it. If you work in a newsroom, sometimes these are the occasions people who knew and loved you will talk about when you are gone.
I remember a few stories, but the one I will tell happened in September 2009. Conservative media icon Andrew Breitbart’s website, BigGovernment, was about to launch with a series of videos from right wing undercover activists. The videos showed mid- and low-level employees of the community organizing nonprofit ACORN saying embarrassing, stupid and potentially illegal things. Just before the launch, the Washington Times was given an exclusive look into the story, on embargo.
Even now, it’s hard to explain. Usually these sorts of things came from higher up. In short, though, I was assigned to write a story on Breitbart’s story, not to compete with Breitbart’s new website but rather to draw attention to it. This is what media executives like to call the “echo chamber.”
After digging into the story, I told Jerry I had concerns. “Alright, what is it this time, McElhatton?”
Creating an echo chamber was one thing, I told him, but the Breitbart story relied on undercover audio recordings of ACORN employees in Baltimore that appeared to violate Maryland’s two-party consent law for recording private conversations. This was something we would never dream of doing in the first place.
I told Jerry the only way I would do a story is if I could lead it by reporting that these undercover so-called journalists appeared to be violating wiretapping law, a concern that an expert I interviewed had told me was well founded. I also was concerned that if I resisted the story there was a possibility of blowback from Solomon.
Jerry sighed. He’d heard enough. Though I knew he could have ordered me to do the assignment, instead, he took it on himself. He called home and told his wife Myrna to put dinner in the fridge. It was going to be a very long night.
I felt terrible. I was acting like a child. I wanted to kill the assignment, not shift the burden to Jerry. But here he was, taking the hit for me.
Maybe out of guilt, I offered to hang around the newsroom. Jerry said he could always use the company. Throughout the night, I sat and listened as he fought my battle inside and outside the paper, even arguing over the phone at one point with the late legendary Breitbart himself.
As their conversation got heated, Jerry had Breitbart on speaker phone. I will never forget Breitbart screaming at him.
“Do you know who I am?” Breitbart erupted. “Do you know who I am!?”
Jerry acted like he’d never heard of him.
“How do you spell that… … B-r-i-g-h-t … “
I don’t know who hung up first, but I know after the call was over, Jerry and I laughed.
“What a jackass.”
In the end, somehow Jerry got us out of having to do the story. He never complained, either. And ACORN eventually became engulfed in scandal—through no doing of our own.
When I consider my time as an investigative reporter in Washington, I think about how if there was no Jerry Seper on the desk that night, a cheap hit, garbage story could’ve gone out in the face of our very own code.
It is for this reason, and many others, that I often tell myself that I did not leave journalism, it left me—even though Jerry never did.
That was Jerry for you. He was loyal. He was a friend. When Jerry fought for you, you fought for him. You did your stories, the ones the editors wanted you to do, whether they asked or not, but then you found the stories that mattered most, the stories that reminded you of exactly why you became a reporter and why you could never imagine doing anything else for a living.
Our team found kids being failed by a broken juvenile justice system, and we did not let up. We found an old man locked up whom the courts had forgotten all about. We found people being ripped off by for- profit colleges that promised a new life but plunged students into debt. Years later, the clicks don’t matter. These were Jerry’s kind of stories.
We talked about stories every day as he held court in the cafeteria. Mostly, he told the same anecdotes over and over, and we laughed. He could make anything funny. I won a third place environmental reporting award one year. From then on, anytime I’d make my way down to the cafeteria, he’d yell, “Uh oh, everybody! It’s McElhatton! Better separate your recycling!”
At lunch, he talked about retirement constantly, counting down days. But I never thought he meant it. He belonged in a newsroom. I never thought he’d really retire, just like I never thought my dad would ever stop flying airplanes. But one day, Jerry finally did it. He moved to Alabama with Myrna and left a “gone fishing” sign on his work desk.
After Solomon returned to the Washington Times, so did I, even though Jerry told me not to go backwards in life. Sure enough, without Jerry around, my second stint at the paper was a far shorter one.
I became a private investigator. I told Jerry about my work because back in the cafeteria, he and I had always talked of starting our own PI firm, J&J Investigations. Talks never got far. We’d bicker about who’s “J” should be first.
Jerry and I stayed in touch, just not enough. It seemed I was always reaching out when I needed something: a reference, a job or someone to tell me it was all going to be OK. Somehow, when he said things would turn out alright, you believed him.
I wrote to him a while back when I needed a personal reference to coach my son’s T-ball team. “A good reference? Are you kidding me,” he wrote. “You were nothing but trouble.”
I saw Jerry once in Alabama. It was after Myrna died. Jerry and I still talked once in a while, maybe a few times a year. He was still telling the same stories he regaled us with at lunch in the cafeteria. He talked about his three children, his days as a police officer and all the times he had to come scoop me off of some D.C. street to take me to the emergency room after I crashed my bicycle.
The last time I heard from him was on June 14 of this year, 2022.
“Happy Flag Day,” he wrote.
I am so sad I never reached back out. It’s not because I didn’t know what to say, it’s because I knew what had to be said. I was nervous. I wasn’t sure how to go about telling Jerry about the enormous, deeply personal but ultimately life- saving changes underway in my life. I worried about what Jerry would say. It was an awful mistake that I cannot undo. I knew better.
As I looked through old emails and files in the days after I heard about Jerry’s passing, I realized nothing would have mattered to him, except whether I was good to my family and good to myself. I would’ve told him I was trying like hell.
“That’s all you can do, Jimmy,” he’d say.
When I left the Washington Times, I emailed Jerry to let him know how much I would miss him. He was so much more accomplished than I was as a reporter, but he made you believe you were the best there ever was. He made you believe in yourself. He made you think you could change the world, and then you did.
I told Jerry he would always be my friend.
“Life is going to work out for you. You have the talent to do whatever you want,” he replied, “whether it’s writing a news story or picking up garbage.”
God damn, Seper.
I loved him.
I loved him like a father.
(Jamie McElhatton previously worked as a reporter at the Washington Times. A private investigator and organic grocery store worker, they live in Alexandria, Virginia.)
