In June 2005, the Amity Gazette, a spoof edition, was published by the Vineyard Gazette on the 30th anniversary of the release of Jaws.
Few men are privileged to realize that the whole of their life''s work will be remembered for the making of one mistake. Today, as I retire from the editorship of the Amity Gazette after a lifetime of service to this paper and to this Island, it is abundantly clear to me that I shall be one of those men.
Francis P. Church is revered around the world for Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, and Edward R. Murrow for This . . . is London. It is plain to me that I, Harry Meadows, will be recalled in journalism classes as the weekly newspaper editor who, having learned of the killing of a woman swimmer off a town beach a week before the start of the summer season, told the chief of police: "There won't be any story about the attack in the Gazette."
What debate there was over the wisdom of this decision early in the summer of 1975 lost the last grace notes of civility after the bodies (what were left of them) began to pile up — not only that summer but, astoundingly, three summers later, and then, like something out of the Book of Revelations, nine winters after that.
It was convenient to blame the Gazette — and me — for this carnage. For awhile I tried to protest that the roll-call of death that followed the Watkins killing could not possibly be my fault alone. But finally I acceded to the advice of both my counsel and my analyst: At each anniversary of the death of the Watkins woman, I took full personal and editorial responsibility for the subsequent deaths of the Kintner boy, the Labrador retriever Pippet, the fisherman Ben Gardner, the sailing instructor with the unplaceable accent and Quint. When the awful business began again in 1978, I took responsibility for the deaths of the two divers, the water-skier and boat driver, Eddie the makeout artist, Marge the Lightning skipper, and the helicopter pilot. And at Christmas of 1987, I took on the blame for the killing of Deputy Sean Brody.
But in this, my last editorial, I feel compelled to ask a question that seems never to have occurred to any of my critics: In these rounds of massacre could we not find just a little evidence of the hand (or teeth) of God? In some sense, could we not perhaps ascribe this trans-generational roundelay with ichthyological mayhem to the realm of the metaphysical? Rather than just — well — to me?
Fine. It's all my fault.
Of all the killings, I am personally most saddened by the loss of young Sean Brody, who took up the badge of his martyred father Chief Martin Brody, only to be lost in a Yuletide attack at the harbor entrance, his screams drowned out by high school carolers at the town dock. In the tragic latter-day history of our town, this happened during a winter when we naively thought the most unusual off-season thing we'd ever seen was the heavy snowfall.
For the record, I did not refuse to print the story of the Watkins mastication because I received phone calls from six advertisers all suggesting that "Amity would best be served by letting the whole thing fade quietly away." Nor was it because Mr. Coleman, the publisher in New York, told me not to print it. I chose not to publish the story for the reason most weekly newspaper editors choose not publish stories: By the time the paper comes out, everyone in town already knows the news, and the paper runs the risk of looking foolish by getting it all wrong.
I sometimes reflect on what would have happened had Miss Watkins been attacked in June of 2005. Can anyone doubt that the world media would have embedded itself here before the shark finished picking its teeth? Our hotels would have been filled for the rest of the year, every house rented, every restaurant booked. But I know you citizens of Amity, confronting such an assault by the global press — honorable as you are — would have done everything in your power to safeguard your way of life, and your futures: You'd have posted lookouts at all the beaches, strung netting all around the Island, done whatever it took to make sure the shark never left. Why, some of you would have gotten the idea to start chumming off Toddler Beach. But Fox News would have beaten you to it.
A final thought: I was just as amused as the rest of the world by the late chief's description of me in his best-selling memoir: "Harry Meadows was an immense man, for whom the act of drawing breath was exertion enough to cause perspiration to dot his forehead. He was in his late forties, ate too much, chain-smoked cheap cigars, drank bonded Bourbon, and was, in the words of his doctor, the Western world's leading candidate for a huge coronary infarction."
Among you remaining Gazette readers, my friends will know that in 1988, I took a yearlong sabbatical themed on broad principles of abnegation and punishment — monasteries, gut stapling, decaf, the whole bit. Now I run marathons and this morning retire from the editorial chair at eighty with a second wife who won't reach half that age for another fifteen years. I walk away knowing that the heroic Chief Brody has been moldering in his grave for five years longer than that, dead of hypertension at fifty-one, and I think to myself, not for the first time: Heroism can kill you. But guilt can set you free.
- Harry Meadows, Editor, Amity Gazette
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