From the day he could afford it, Gutshall ran a half-page ad for the Sixth Street Gym every other Sunday, and, once he started his monthly Fight Nights in the spring of 2010, he also advertised that event in a smaller space all through the week leading up to them. Through these dealings he struck up a warm acquaintance with John Parrella, the somewhat eccentric editor-in-chief of the Record and Courier, which was actually a fairly large paper, circulating not just within Broxton but to a sizable population surrounding, and employing some one hundred people.
Parrella was forty-nine years old and had been Editor-in-Chief for eight years at the time Gutshall purchased the Sixth Street Gym in 2008. He came up from nothing, oldest son of a school custodian; his mother died of skin cancer when he was nine. He had a natural sharpness and a nose for business, though, and he stayed mostly clean through high school. He worked his way through six years of college and then clawed his way to the top of the ladder at his hometown Record & Courier with remarkable efficiency, winning more than one power struggle along the way. Taking the oversight of the paper in 2000, Parrella answered to no one; there was, true, a Board of Directors as with any corporation, but Parrella called the shots, and the paper's readership and profitability grew sharply under his leadership.
One of Parrella's many quirky decisions was made shortly after Gutshall took over the gym, when he hired Olin Pond as his executive secretary. To say that no one in Broxton had ever heard of Olin Pond was an understatement. Pond simply materialized out of the ether, and one Monday morning in 2008 he was sitting at the large desk that separated the Editor's office from the rest of the newsroom, surrounded by his work and his personal effects, looking and acting as though he was born there. Parrella's previous executive secretary, a fiftysomething woman named Denise, had been a remarkably talented obstructionist. It took Parrella two years to put together enough of a case to justifiably fire Denise, which was necessary because she had instantaneously—by nine-thirty Monday morning—followed through on her promise to file a discrimination suit that Parrella would spend the next two years defending himself against, both in the courtroom and in public. In the end he won out in both arenas, as every time Denise opened her mouth she proved the claim of every human being that had ever met her that she was just this side of a lunatic.
On the heels of that lawsuit, it came as even more of a surprise that Parrella hired a male into a position that was filled almost universally by females. John Parrella was no discriminator; as his attorney, Carl Williams, pointed out often during Denise's assault, he had seven major departments—World News, National News, Local News, Sports, Life, Layout and Editing, and Advertising—and all of them except the Sports department were headed by women, a ratio nearly unheard-of in newspaper circles. Parrella, who wrote editorials on a near-weekly basis, wrote in his typically ultra-blunt prose on April 9th, 2009:
This didn't happen because I set out to hire women, understand. If all of the best people available to head my departments had been men, I assure you that I would today be employing six men out of my seven department heads and would not hesitate for a second to hire them. As it happened, the best candidates were women, and I hired them. I could not possibly care less what race, gender, color, religion, social status, or lifestyle type you may be. If a one-eyed sewer rat showed up at my office and proved itself a better writer than anyone else I was employing, you can bet that today's front-page story would include “By Carl the One-Eyed Sewer Rat” in the byline.
Parrella didn't run his office in any recognizably common style, and as it happened, what he called his executive secretary would in many other companies be called an office manager. Denise had been responsible for most everything that happened in the office. Parrella preferred to steer the direction of the newspaper, insisted on seeing every page and reading every word, every day, before the paper went to publication, and used whatever extra time a day offered him to maintain his connections around the city and the newspaper industry. As such, he did not want to be bothered with the happenings in his office, and delegated to his secretary almost everything. If he hired somebody, from a new feature writer all the way down to a janitor, Denise went through the résumés and pared them down before he ever saw them, and sometimes even conducted interviews. If a writer had a problem, Denise was the person they had to go to. Parrella was never, or almost never, personally rude or even condescending toward his employees; he simply didn't have the time to run his office, and so he permitted his secretary to rule with an iron fist if she so chose.
That was why Denise had to go, and why Parrella finally fired her one spectacular Friday afternoon, when she could be heard on the next floor down screaming and ranting. When Parrella first came on, he retained her from the previous administration, and it took some years before she developed into someone he felt he couldn't trust.
He actually didn't fire her until he already had her replacement lined up. He mentioned to his friend Trent Gutshall that he was having real problems with his secretary and planned to fire her soon, and Gutshall told him he had another friend from out of town that was an experienced secretary looking for work. Parrella got a number and made a call, and a week later he met Olin Pond at a local Chinese restaurant, not wanting Denise to have any idea what he was planning.
It was, Parrella recalled, an active interview. Pond shook his hand but never smiled, but then, neither did Parrella. “I explained to him what I expected of my secretary,” the editor recalled. “He sat and listened until I was done, and then said 'You can call the position a mailroom clerk if it makes you happy, but you're looking for an office manager.' I said, yeah, so what are your qualifications? He went down the list—it seemed like he knew every computer program ever conceived by man—and then went and told me that frankly, if I wanted the secretary or manager or whatever to stay out of the writers' way, stay behind the curtain and make sure everything got done on time, he was my man, but if I wanted a micromanager to harass them on my behalf, he could recommend eight or ten people he didn't like that would be great for that job. It sounded like sarcasm, but there wasn't a touch of irony on his face. That was Olin Pond.
“I told him, you're qualified, but I don't really want to hire you, and here's why. Denise is going to raise a ruckus—she's already starting, actually—and you're going to take crap every day because a secretary's supposed to be a woman. I can probably find a woman just as qualified as you are and save myself the headache. He said, 'fine, hire somebody inferior for all I care. If you don't want to hire the best candidate because you're worried about getting panned for hiring a male, I don't want to work for you, anyhow.' Looked me dead in the eyes and told me exactly what he thought. It was the most honest interview I ever had. Before or since, I've never interviewed anybody that didn't care in the slightest about impressing me. I told him he struck he as a jackass; he praised my correct appraisal. I thanked him for his time, not really in a sincere way, and left.
“Funny thing, though. I fired Denise the following week, spent the week interviewing fifteen applicants, and then decided Olin was the guy I needed. I knew he wouldn't be popular around the office, but I knew I could trust him. He was the most direct, honest man I ever talked to.”
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