Can Light Stay Afloat?

Indeed, Mitchell in a sense has become as much of an institution as his beloved newspaper. On days after deadline, locals are forever stopping by the office to say hello and exchange gossip. "People just naturally gravitate to Dave," says entertainment attorney and Point Reyes Station refugee Robert Powsner (whose clients have included the Beatles and director Peter Bogdanovich). "He always has a story to share."

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Dave Mitchell is sitting at his roll-top desk beneath a wall plaque that proclaims, "A newspaper's duty is to print the news and raise hell," railing about a story that has consumed him for weeks. A routine traffic stop of two teenagers by rangers attached to the national seashore had turned ugly, with the youths being pepper-sprayed while handcuffed and on the ground. The Light has been all over it, prompting the Park Service to defend its two rangers while assigning them to other duties.

Another editor might declare victory and move on, but not Mitchell. He keeps the story alive, and when the seashore's popular superintendent tries to placate the crowd at a packed community meeting by claiming to have asked the District Attorney's Office to intervene, Mitchell moves in for the kill. The Light reveals that the official has merely tried to get the DA's Office to prosecute the teenagers. (It refused.)

Such aggressive pursuit of a good story -- especially the kind of story that sticks up for the little guy -- helps explain why the Light remains such an endearing institution. "Dave isn't going to back down on a story no matter what, which says a lot in a community where everyone knows everyone else," says gonzo journalist John Grissim, who was a reporter at the Light in the 1980s and still subscribes to the paper, despite living near Seattle.

"If you live out here, the Light is required reading," says author, media critic, and West Marin resident Norman Solomon. Former Mother Jones Editor Mark Dowie, another local resident, agrees, and notes that since unincorporated Point Reyes Station has no community government, "the letters page of the Light really is our town forum."

Yet Mitchell has his critics. "Dave has a lot of people upset with him a good deal of the time," says Donna Sheehan, who once led a campaign to stop Caltrans from spraying pesticides along area highways. After deeming the Light's coverage of her efforts insufficient, she went so far as to establish a 100-watt community radio station (its studio is next door to the newspaper) as an alternative voice.

Appealing to both counterculture liberals -- only 14 percent of West Marin voters supported President Bush in November -- and more conservative ranchers, the Light is seldom dull. That's largely owing to Mitchell's penchant for the unexpected. In the early '80s, after discovering that Eleanor "Ranger" Hamilton, a widowed sex therapist who had just turned 70, was moving to town, Mitchell prevailed upon her to write a sex column. It was hugely popular (and even earned her an appearance with Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show) well before such columns gained widespread acceptance. "I don't think Dave ever altered a single word," recalls Hamilton, now 95 and living in Oregon.

Exhibiting a similarly deft touch, Mitchell decided that the paper needed a Spanish-language columnist and turned to 13-year-old Alicia Hernandez, the daughter of migrant workers. For her innocent and often poignant tales of life as an immigrant teenager, Newsweek magazine named Hernandez one of its "100 Young American Heroes."

Grissim, a former Rolling Stone editor fond of writing about surfers, strippers, and pool sharks, was living in Stinson Beach when Mitchell recruited him as a columnist. Friends with the owners of San Francisco's O'Farrell Theatre, Jim and (the late) Artie Mitchell (no relation to Dave), Grissim wrote the screenplay for the brothers' 1985 pornographic comedy The Graffenberg Spot; got himself arrested while partying with Hunter S. Thompson; and scored a rare interview with Marilyn Chambers while firing an Uzi with the porn star at a shooting range in Nevada. In each case, the Light's readers were brought along for the ride.

For 10 years, the Light has been home to Kathryn Lemieux, who produces her Feral West cartoon strip as a labor of love "for the sheer pleasure of doing something topical" in between her work as one of the cartoonists who draw the nationally syndicated Six Chix. The strip she does for Mitchell contemplates life in West Marin through animal characters, including Mavis, a cranky cow frustrated at having to produce at an organic dairy, and two mermaids with a pet shark named Fluffy who's always in trouble.