I just found out from a card with a picture of a laughing old man in sunglasses that we lost Mr. Pease, my high school journalism teacher, to prostate cancer.

Bob Pease was a Missourian who wrote novels and plays, coached JV football, and relished assigning banned books to his English class. When he taught our class at Buena High School in suburban SoCal, he was in his 60s, sort of a cantankerous but wise Western Wilford Brimley character.

Back then we would print stories from a 286 PC, lay them out with hot wax rollers, then drive the stacked pages down the Santa Paula Freeway, past the orange groves and crumpled mountains of Ventura County, to a citrus farm town with its own newspaper and printing press. The press shut down years ago.

One day after beating a deadline to put an issue to bed, we came to class to find that Mr. Pease had left us with a congratulatory letter he had typed up, praising us for prevailing against the odds. The last line quoted from the headline over my longhaired drummer friend Matt’s review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “‘A Bloody Success,’ indeed.”

When you are 17 and have fresh memories of middle school P.E., with its mandatory jock strap inspections and other human rights abuses, it is hard to express what it means for someone like Mr. Pease to honor you. His class was the anti-P.E., where you were a trusted professional who could slip out for important editorial duties, though Mr. Pease may not have signed off on the time the three of us, during 6th Period, drove a car out of the school parking lot to pick up the new Porno For Pyros CD, for the music page, feeling like actual Spin critics. But the journey was undertaken in the spirit of loyalty to Mr. Pease and what he stood for, which was the freedom and dignity of the written truth.

Coverage in The Buena Vista slanted towards spring dances and water polo scores, but there was space for more. And with no Web, it was heady to be in the one class where a few had been vested with the power to disseminate unauthorized ideas.

As editors-in-chief, we took ourselves so seriously that I imagined that I was John Lennon to my co-editor Daniel’s Paul McCartney. As the 4.0 Most Likely To Succeed, Daniel could be Paul, the sunny counterpart. He could devote column inches to interviewing the student body president and promulgating teetotaler values (”People think drinking is cool. But what’s so cool about stumbling around like an idiot?”). And I, as John, could write columns accusing student government of being a Vichy sham. Mostly I just wanted a girlfriend. With patience and grace, Mr. Pease put up with all this.

The last time I saw him, in 1994, Mr. Pease was stooping over a stack of English papers, probably about Brave New World, as I walked in after my first semester of college. “Met any girls, John?” was the first thing he said.

The last time I talked to him it was about ten years later and you could still write articles in the craft Mr. Pease taught us, for money. I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., waiting to meet a guy who was going to give me a stack of FOIA’d documents about nuclear submarines for a magazine article, when the urge came to phone Mr. Pease and tell him what I was up to. Suddenly there was a familiar drawl on the other end of my cell phone, as if the Pease hotline would always be there. I remember he made a crack about U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. And he told me he was still messing around with penning a Western novel, which made me happy.

This year I drove to my hometown, coming in with the sun going down on the orange groves and crumpled mountains. It made me think of a moment at the brink of summer. It was 1992 and two high school nerds in a black Camry were on the road to the printing press, with the wax layout sheets in back. The death of print news makes that feel like it was a thousand years ago. Mr. Pease initiated us into an ancient order, and whatever that means in this weird new century, I will always be grateful.

P.S. I have archived Legacy.com’s guestbook of tributes to Bob Pease here.

The following is adapted from a piece I wrote for this book.

“Cognitive dissonance” is what the psychologist Dr. Leon Festinger called the horrible grinding noise of two conflicting ideas in your head. The term is making a comeback in the world of Internet comment boards, where flame warriors use it to describe what happens when, for example, Orly Taitz, the Orange County dentist who claims the president was born secretly in Kenya, perseveres in the face of overwhelming evidence, including an actual 1961 announcement of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser.

How the “cognitive dissonance” thing got its start is sort of an amazing story, involving the mischievous university psychologist and his unwitting flying-saucer fanatic subject. The story begins on a depressing Christmas Eve in Chicago in 1954.

This was the night 44-year-old physician Dr. Charles Laughead stood outside a house in the western suburbs of Chicago, desperately watching the skies for his 6 p.m. ride, while he and his followers sang carols. Five years before Plan 9 From Outer Space, reporters were having a field day with the doctor and his series of failed predictions. But tonight was really going to be it. He planned to be on another planet at this time tomorrow. One headline read: SECT EXPECTS TO LEAVE EARTH TONIGHT.

They had staked everything on the prediction of the allegedly clairvoyant Ms. Dorothy Martin, 61. At 6 p.m. the creatures Laughead affectionately called “the boys upstairs”  would land in space pods to evacuate Man from a flood that would turn Cook County into a seafloor. A crowd of reporters, spectators and hecklers gathered to take in the futility.

* * *

“I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead had said, preparing for one more attempt to leave Earth. “I’ve taken an awful beating in the last few months, just an awful beating.” Worst was he’d lost his job at the medical school. Alien rescue or not, his boss didn’t like that Laughead was stressing out students by claiming the U.S. was about to become an archipelago.

BELOW: Story from the Chicago Tribune, January 1, 1955–one of my favorite news heds.

Where the hell were the space pods? This wasn’t the first time the cosmos had left him swinging in the wind. Yet he persevered in a way that fascinated the Stanford psychologist Festinger. The psychologists got such a kick out of this that they planted a mole in his group to write down the details, laying the groundwork for Festinger’s landmark 1956 book When Prophecy Fails.

An earlier due date had come and gone already. The first time, some of the UFO people cried. Not Laughead. He got on the phone with reporters; he sent a press release to newspapers across the country, explaining opaquely: “Due to the confusion which has arisen from the prophecy, we have decided to unite forces to complete the prophecy.”

Because of press coverage, the phone was ringing off the hook with jokesters claiming to be the spacemen. One identified himself as Captain Video. Laughead’s daughter tried to tell him that Captain Video was the TV character who sewed a thunderbolt on his jumpsuit. But Laughead wanted to keep open the possibility it was a coded message. Everyone was so coiled up for first contact.

A second jokester phoned and invited everyone to his party across town. Mrs. Dorothy Martin, the matriarch of the UFO group, said this was it, this was the message.

“Put your coats on,” she said, and led a delegation across town, only to return, disappointed. The other humiliations had included a reporter’s cheap shot in the Chicago Tribune, observing that the Laughead kids must not think the flood was coming, seeing as how they’d set up ornaments in the living room for Christmas morning. And as the night grew long, other practicalities mounted: If the Earth wasn’t going to be doused, what was Dr. Laughead going to do about presents?

The phone rang and this exchange took place, transcribed by one of Festinger’s researchers:

REPORTER: Dr. Laughead, I wanted to talk to you with reference to this business about—you know—your calling the paper to say you were going to be picked up at six o’clock this evening. Ahh, I just wanted to find out exactly what happened…. Didn’t you say they sent a message that you should be packed and waiting at 6 P.M. Christmas Eve?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No.

REPORTER: No? I’m sorry, sir. Weren’t the spacemen supposed to pick you up at 6 P.M.?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, there was a spaceman in the crowd with a helmet on and a white gown and what not.

REPORTER: There was a spaceman in the crowd?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, it was a little hard to tell […]

REPORTER: […] Did you talk to him?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No, I didn’t talk to him.

REPORTER: Didn’t you say you were going to be picked up by the spacemen?

DR. LAUGHEAD: No.

REPORTER: Well, what were you waiting out in the street for, singing carols?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, we went out to sing Christmas carols.

REPORTER: Oh, you just went out to sing Christmas carols?

DR. LAUGHEAD: Well, and if anything happened, well, that’s all right, you know. We live from one minute to another.

REPORTER: […] Uh, well how do you account for the fact that they didn’t pick you up?

DR. LAUGHEAD: As I told one of the other news boys, I don’t think a spaceman would feel very welcome there in that crowd…

Keep reading →

I’ll soon be using this Web site to serialize King of America, the online version of my book about the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, his Washington Times and a galaxy of politicians embarrassing themselves. More on that in a bit.

Here’s a preview, a passage on previous meltdowns foreshadowing this last week’s stormy departure of editor-in-chief John Solomon.

King of America is adapted from a previous version, Bad Moon Rising, published by PoliPoint Press in 2008 and available on Amazon. Didn’t like the title.