Albion Munson

Albion Munson is 63 year old bachelor who is the publisher and editor of the Valley Standard, the only newspaper in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, headquartered in San Jose, California.  Weighing only six pounds more than he did at twenty, Albion is a night-drinker.  He never wakes with a hang-over.

Born in 1868, in Salinas, California, Albion was the only child of Thomas Munson and Marcella Staley.  Thomas Munson was a Civil War deserter who escaped to California when it became apparent that the Confederacy would lose.   Albion’s father was rabidly anti-Yankee, and blamed all personal failures on the Union government’s biased interpretation of the United States Constitution.  When Albion turned fourteen, his father announced his return to the south, and promised to send for his wife and son.  Albion’s last memory of his father was hopping a freight train in Salinas as the sun set over purple-tipped lettuce.

Marcella Staley, the youngest of five children of a family grocery store owner, only finished grammar school.  Upon her husband’s departure, she worked in her family’s store for a frustrating number of years.  On impulse, she asked the manager of a local bank who shopped regularly at the store for a job.  Forty years later, an assistant bank manager, she remained unmarried, and until she day she died, never tired of complaining to Albion about deadbeat, damn-lying, men.

Albion worked in the lettuce and artichoke fields as a child with both white and Mexican migrant workers; excelled in school, and made friends with one of the most successful Salinas Valley farmers who instilled in Albion an absolutist view of the individual rights of property and business owners.  This relationship got him admitted to a prestigious private university.  While Albion was earning a degree in English, he obtained a job at the Valley Standard and, upon graduation with honors, became the youngest editor of a California newspaper.  Two years later upon the death of the publisher, Albion purchased the tiny newspaper and built circulation predicated on a reporting bias that mirrored the yellow journalism of major California newspapers.

Albion works indefatigably, assuming additional work-load when clerical staff, reporters, columnists, or pressroom employees regularly quit or are fired.  Impeccably turned out in the latest fashions, Albion is known for his ink-stained hands set starkly against sharp- white-shirt-cuffs.  While initially, the ink appeared as the result of setting type, even occasionally running the printing press; it now results exclusively from Albion’s obsessive editing of every news galley.

A workaholic, Albion does not suffer fools gladly. He also has an idealized vision of the family he is psychologically and emotionally incapable of establishing himself.  He sketched a crude drawing of a smiling, red-cheeked family of four next to a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables against the backdrop of the Valley of the Heart’s Delight, and commissioned an artist to draw it.  Upon completion, he placed the idealized family on billboards at both the north and south ends of the valley, as well as prominent locations along main roads and highways with the legend: Welcome to the Valley of the Heart’s Delight across the top, and Donated by Albion Munson, Publisher, Valley Standard, along the bottom.

Quick to fly into blinding rage at any challenge, real or imagined, when a Mexican donkey-cart driver pulled in front of his new Model T in 1907, he chased the cart down; drove his car at the donkey spooking it; sent a twenty-year-old Mexicana flying, and caused the death of the driver who was crushed under the heavy cart.  A young sheriff’s deputy, Alfred Ackle, asked Albion to tell him how to report what had happened. From that moment on, Albion Munson was Alfred Ackle’s political mentor.

Taken by the beauty of the young Mexican woman, Albion approached her, and heard her mutter “perro loco.”  When he asked Ackle to translate, Ackle responded nervously; “Mad Dog.” 

Behind his back, Albion will be called “Mad Dog,” the rest of his life.  He rather likes it.