Camelot always had lots of cash on hand.
Boy, did it ever.
A political boss in Logan County found out just how much during John Kennedy’s klieg-light run for the White House in 1960.
The smiling Bostonian with the beautiful wife was everywhere in the state during the West Virginia primary.
Coal tipples, school cafeterias.
Every hill and every hollow, seemingly, on pre-Interstate roads.
Sometimes, Kennedy would even stand on a chair or in the back of a feed truck, improvising in the moment if an opportunity to voice his platform was presented.
But here’s what happens in the shadows of all that glamour-glare: Tony Hylton swears that the next account you’re about to read is absolutely true.
So have a lot of other people.
Which is why the retired newspaperman wrote a fictionalized take of those times — but that’s getting ahead of the narrative.
The story and all its particulars, starting with the campaign:
In 1960, the Mountain State, in today’s language of pundits and pollsters, was a litmus test both for John Kennedy, and his father, Joe, especially.
Joe really wanted a Kennedy kid in the Oval Office, and if Jack, a Roman Catholic son of privilege, could win in mostly Protestant (and mainly poor) West Virginia, well, the patriarch reasoned, he could win anywhere.
And if the old man had to unfold some greenbacks from his jeweled, engraved money clip to do it, whaddya expect? That’s how the world works, buddy.
Vote-buying was nothing new in Logan and the southern coalfield counties — another reason why Hylton wrote his novel — and the campaign had done its research.
So when that above-mentioned boss was asked how much he might need to switch his support (and key precinct votes) away from Hubert Humphrey and in the direction of their guy, he wasn’t offended.
He scratched his chin and said, “35.”
As in, $3,500.
The Kennedy people, though, as the account goes, thought that meant $35,000 — which is about $300,000 in today’s dollars.
Two suitcases heaping with that amount were promptly delivered.
“Yeah, that was a pretty lucrative misunderstanding,” Hylton said.
Writing the book on it
Hylton isn’t dazzled so much by the money in the above tale. For him, it’s the fact the target of the bribe didn’t even blink.
That so many believe the story is another reason he wrote “Enough,” which is set in his old haunts of his native Logan County and its county seat of the same name during the time of the 1960 primary.
“I wanted to write about what happens to a town when that corruption seeps in,” he said.
And, he wanted to write about what happens when a newspaper decides, after generations of complacency, to do something about it.
“Enough,” is a novel that tells the story of Rick Hill, a young, idealistic newspaper publisher (the Lawnsville Crier) who quickly learns the entrenched politicos don’t appreciate his principled journalism.
Like a lot of West Virginians, Hylton’s character of Hill moves away for his career — only to come back, in spite of himself, even, for love of place.
With his father (who passed his principles and ethics onto his son) the Crier is bought and suddenly remade.
The 1960 campaign serves as the backdrop in Jordan County, which is Hylton’s stand-in for Logan.
No spoiler alerts — but a devastating, and deliberately set, fire takes place. A smoldering murder plot also rekindles on a deserted country road, which makes Hill fight like he never knew he could.
It’s a cautionary tale, as Hylton said, of what follows when people are allowed to be swayed, but it’s also something else: Call it a love-letter to small-town journalism and the integrity that can come with it.
Especially, said Hylton, when the current occupant of the Oval Office loves to rail about so-called “fake news” in his tweets and at his rallies.
Born, under deadline
Seventy-seven years ago, when a newborn Tony was maybe less than a month old, his father, Charlie Hylton, took him down to the real-life Logan Banner, where he worked, for a newsroom christening.
The shop foreman applied printers’ ink to the baby’s heel and toes and made a footprint — on newsprint.
Tony’s mother, Harriet Hylton, also had a Banner byline.
“I was pre-ordained,” their son said.
Charlie was a sportswriter before shifting to the news side to eventually become the Banner’s managing editor. Harriet was the paper’s community news editor.
Both wrote fast, their son said, which also meant they thought fast. Even so, he said, they still took the time to be measured and accurate.
And this was when newspapering was a contact sport.
The typewriters ran like pistons.
A rat-ta-tat-tat of clacks against a once-blank sheet of paper and the ding! of the carriage.
A dirty look from the mayor, or the bank president, or the police chief, the next morning.
The kid with the printer’s ink sole (and soul) graduated from high school in 1960 and went straight to WVU, where he majored in journalism.
He fulfilled his ROTC obligation as a public affairs officer in Vietnam and was also a small-town West Virginia newspaperman, serving as editor and publisher of the Hinton News for a time.
While in West Virginia, he was elected to the state House of Delegates.
Hylton was a public relations professional in Washington, D.C., before retiring and settling back in Morgantown.
Two suitcases, again
“Enough,” was in his head for several years, he said. He just couldn’t coax it out, at first.
“I was always working,” he said.
“I was too busy to actually write my own stuff. When I did have time, I came down with a nasty case of writer’s block. This went on for 15, 20 years.”
Then, one day, he sat down and willed the words to come. It was maybe four hours later, when Rick Hill had decided to move back and buy the Crier with his dad.
After that, it was just like the newsroom, he said. He wrote and wrote, and then wrote some more.
“I had a book.”
And a publisher: Headline Books of Terra Alta, which was named 2018 Independent Publisher of the Year.
“Enough” made its debut this past October at the West Virginia Book Festival in Charleston.
He also has an appearance this week at the Morgantown Public Library. Hylton will do a reading and book-signing at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday.
Hylton laughed and said he’s “amazed” he actually wrote a book at 77.
Now, he said, his muse keeps tapping him on the shoulder. With two suitcases full of ideas, even.
“You know what? I think I’ve got another novel in me.”
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