Lake Take

Rob Zaleski, former reporter and columnist for The Capital Times, did some of the best environmental reporting I’ve seen in years before he took a company buyout this spring. When I called to tell him Madison Magazine was honoring him with an Editors’ Choice award for his series on Madison lakes and what we need to do to clean them up once and for all, we got to talking…


(Photo credit: Mike DeVries, The Capital Times)

Rob Zaleski: When I wrote [the lake series] I just decided that I was going to cut to the quick. I was going to tell all those that I was interviewing, “Let’s not be diplomatic here. What’s the problem, and what has to be done? Let’s not worry about offending anyone.”

It was amazing to me the number of people I interviewed who were willing to spill their guts out. They all had strong feelings, and I think the fact that people did express strong views really resonated with the public. And I must tell you I was very surprised.

The first story I did I compared Madison to Minneapolis. Roger Bannerman, who’s the stormwater runoff expert in the Midwest– THE guy–he’s the one who first told me about it, that Madison could use Minneapolis as a model even though [the city] didn’t have the agricultural runoff problem in its lakes.

I go up to Minneapolis quite often to visit my youngest daughter. Last summer I probably went there four times and swam laps in their lakes every time. Lake Calhoun, as I noticed in t he article, their biggest lake, has clarity levels of twenty feet right now, which is almost unheard of for an urban lake. That’s why I did that story.

There’s no question there were some local officials in Madison who were angry, who felt that the story suggested that Madison has been complacent in doing anything. And I tried to tell them, “No, I realize steps have been taken but the fact that there were thirty-nine beach closings in Madison last year, what does that tell you?

So that was very encouraging to do those stories and to get that kind of response right at the end of [my tenure at] The Cap Times. It meant a lot. Fortunately, to do a series like that you have to have the support of your editors, and Chris Murphy, the city editor, after we got the response to the first article, just said, “Keep going, keep going.”

I still have four or five people who’ve contacted me in the environmental community who have good followup stories regarding the lakes.

I’m not going to claim that that series is THE thing that’s triggered this reaction to do something about the lakes but I think it helped. It was one of a number of things.

Brennan: What were those other factors? It includes business, and I think [that] component was largely absent in the past, where maybe they paid lip service to it. The business community got involved even though their effort was community driven. The businesses realized that the lakes were their drawing card.

Because of this unified effort, last year they drew 5.5 million visitors to their chain of lakes making it the second-most popular destination in the state behind the Mall of America. It has had a staggering impact on their economy.

If you go to the lakes of Minneapolis, even on a day like today where there isn’t swimming yet, all the beaches will be packed. They’ve got bike and running trails around all the lakes. It’s a gathering place for all different ethnic groups. It’s really something to behold.

Brennan: Maybe our state tourism department should be subsidizing the lakes cleanup here… Madison Community Foundation is working with Clean Wisconsin to come up with a vision. [Dane County Executive] Falk and [Mayor] Cieslewicz happen to be two pro-environment leaders. All the se entities are starting to come together and it’s a matter of coordinating that effort.

Another factor that I think was vital in Minneapolis—they did launch a huge public relations campaign. It’s my understanding—I’d have to check my notes—but there was an advertising agency in the Twin Cities that took on that challenge pro bono, reminding average citizens of the role they play in limiting phosphorus and things like that in getting into the sewers.

Another key component in Minneapolis was they hired a guy whose job was to coordinate the effort and to prevent the inevitable turf wars that break out—different agencies wanting to take credit, different citizen groups wanting to take credit—so that they weren’t fighting each other. He told me that was a full-time job in itself to make sure everyone got a fair amount of credit and that everyone was working together. I see that as the next big step in Dane County, where everyone’s on the same page.

The thing that I found most surprising was that the citizen group was more rigorous and demanding that changes be made than anyone. And the politicians were just kind of swept along. They were surprised that the citizen group finally said, “Enough.” They reached a point in the late 1980s where their lakes were scummy and filled with weeds and people just said enough. I hope the momentum [in Madison] continues in that direction.

Brennan: Give me a brief bio of your career. I’m from Milwaukee, grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood, Bay View—home of DeMarinis restaurant, the best pizza on the planet, near the South Shore Yacht Club. My dream as a kid was always to be a sportswriter and to cover the Green Bay Packers. Lo and behold I ended up being sports editor of a newspaper called the Green Bay Daily News in the early 1970s at age 25. It was a newspaper started by striking printers at the Press Gazette. I was there for three-and-a-half years and then I went to United Press International in the mid-1970s as a general assignment reporter and night editor. I became sports editor at The Cap Times in 1981. Did that for three years.

Then I had a fascinating but at the same time nightmarish experience. I was hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1984 and had a dream job as sports editor of their new San Fernando Valley section. It was the best job I had in journalism. The LA Times was a remarkable place to work. But when I got out there I realized I could not in good faith raise three girls in Los Angeles.

[Cap Times editor] Dave Zweifel heard I was unhappy. He created a position of columnist and special projects writer, which I began in 1985. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. In the last ten to fifteen years I began to focus on ordinary people who didn’t have a voice. People who were trampled down by the system, or in their daily struggles needed a voice.

I love writing about ordinary people. It reminded me of my youth in a blue-collar, lower-middle-class neighborhood. Those are the people I’m comfortable with and those are the ones who don’t have anyone looking out for them.

Brennan: What happened at TCT? You were asked to reapply for your job? What I’m telling people is that I was very disappointed by what happened. I wish them all the success in the world because some of my best friends are still there. Like Doug Moe, I was disappointed that I had to reapply. Not only that but quite frankly, none of the new jobs that were created had my name on them as far as I was concerned. And so the buyout was fairly generous—I had been there twenty-six years. But as I told them, I’m looking forward to a second career now. I sure as heck am not done reporting and writing in the Madison area.

It’s unfortunate what happened. I wish I could’ve stayed there under the same circumstances but obviously it’s a different operation now. I could’ve reapplied but the five-and-a-half years that I worked for UPI was the only journalism job I really didn’t like and the reason is the motto at UPI is “a deadline every minute.” You’re constantly feeding that beast. I prefer to do in-depth stories. That’s where I think my strength is.

Most anybody who’s worked for the wire services would tell you that the journalism is somewhat reckless. I’m not convinced that the web is the wave of the future for daily newspapers. That’s another two-hour conversation! I think it’s going to play a role but it’s not going to be the wave of the future. They’ve got to find a way to draw more average people to the web.

The people who are reading newspapers on the web are still the eighteen- to thirty-year olds. The majority of those are males and they’re only being selective in what they read. To me, blogs—Mike Ivey at The Capital Times described it we—are just commentary without the facts. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming on forums. Average people are intimidated by that.

I think the long-term future is probably going to come back to TV somehow. But I still think there’s a place for in-depth reporting and it’s probably going to be unfortunately almost all of it in magazines.

One of the first things I did after I left The Cap Times was take out a subscription to the New York Times. Thank God they’re still around and I hope they always are. … Now the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is get my New York Times and go to a coffee shop. I gotta tell you, it’s wonderful.

So what are some other memorable stories that made a difference in someone’s life? I can tell you the craziest reaction was to a column. Sometime in the early 1990s I was looking at the AP wire and saw that South Dakota was bracing for a tourist boom because of the success of Dances With Wolves. It was a slow news day and I wrote a column poking fun at South Dakota, warning tourists that if they’re expecting to see Kevin Costner sitting next to a stream in the Black Hills it’s not going to happen. I was basically saying that South Dakota was a nice state but it was one of the dullest, most "blah" states in the union and it’s shocking to think that tourists were going to be flocking there in large numbers.

Someone in Madison, who was from South Dakota, sent that column to a disc jockey in Rapid City. The way I was told, the disc jockey read it over the air all day on a Saturday. I was flooded with hate mail. It was unbelievable. There was a fifth-grade class in Pierre that spent its whole writing session [on it]. One guy threatened me. We got phone calls from taverns in the middle of the night. How they got my number I have no idea.

It got so bad. I still have the boxes in the basement. I ended up getting over five hundred letters. It went on for over a month. To try and appease all these people—TV stations were calling and interviewing me and wanting to know how I got to be this horrible person—The Cap Times ended up running a full page of hate letters. It was funny at first. But when it continued on and on… it was bizarre.

Out of over five hundred letters I got one applauding the column. It was from some little old lady who lived out in the middle of nowhere who said she was from Wisconsin. She had met a guy from South Dakota, gotten married, and he had dragged her out there. She had been living in hell ever since. She thought I was right on and she actually said that she was writing the letter in her attic and that if her husband knew if she was writing it he would kill her. She signed it Myrtle from Aberdeen.

Brennan: Any others? A series I did about five years ago on how Wisconsin lost its democracy and fell prey to corporate interests, a trend that began with the election of Gov. Tommy Thompson in 1988; a piece I did in 2006 on the devastating effects of coal-tar sealants on the environment, after which the Dane County Board banned the use of such sealants in the county; and a story I did in 1990 on the 25th anniversary of unbeaten Monroe High School's victory in the 1965 state boys basketball tournament—the last year before the tournament was divided into various classes.

As for my most enjoyable interview, it was one I did in 1990 with a man named Pete Tollefson, who several hours earlier had gone on strike and was about to lose his job—after 21 years—as a bus driver for Greyhound. We met over coffee on East Washington Avenue, and he was one of the most charming, decent people I've met—and he was absolutely heartbroken at the thought of never being able to drive a bus again. (He'd grown up on a farm in Mazomanie and said he'd had only one dream from the time he was 9 or 10: to drive a big, shiny Greyhound bus.)

Brennan: What are you missing right now? As a columnist, for twenty-six years I could get up two or three times a week, see something on the news or hear about something and I could write about it or I could go out and find someone who was linked to a major story. Or someone would contact me. Most of my stories actually came from readers who heard about someone who was down and out or something that was happening. And so all of a sudden for the first time in my adult life I wake up in the morning and while this is great, I don’t have an outlet for my feelings, for my views. It’s very strange. And that’s why, sometimes in the next couple months I’m just hoping that I can start writing again.

We do too, Rob. We do too!