R.I.P., Dave Mitchell

June 17, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

David Mitchell. Pic by Bob Albano, lifted from *The New Mexican.*

My last boss in the newspaper game, David Mitchell, has gone west. He was 90.

Dave found me roaming the streets back in the summer of 1988, about six months after I got laid off by a chain of weeklies in the north-Denver metro. I was one raggedy-ass mutt back then, but he must have seen some potential I didn’t realize I had, because he hired me to work the copy desk at The New Mexican and afterward gave me the run of the newsroom until he himself got the shove in 1991 for pissing off the big boss, owner Robert McKinney.

I was running out of options and unemployment compensation when Dave summoned me to Santa Fe for an interview. A job I thought was mine at the Ventura County Star-Free Press in California had gone to somebody else, and while New Mexico was short on ocean views, I was in no position to be picky about locale, or much of anything else.

So I was decked out in my best looking-for-work kit when I walked into Dave’s newsroom, coat, necktie, the works, hoping to make a good impression. He was clad in Santa Fe casual, gives me the up-and-down, and says, “You didn’t have to get all dressed up for us.”

Well. Shit. Lost dog comes home.

Dave wasn’t just a newsman, he was a “news” man. As in “Fuck a bunch of features, bring me the news.” Old school. Tough but fair, and hard to impress, especially when he had one foot on your chair and was leaning over you like a ton of bricks getting ready to fall, daring you to feed him some weak line of bullshit.

I think I managed to impress him exactly once, when I was still on the copy desk. A story about a potential school-superintendent hire seemed oddly familiar to me, and then I remembered where I’d seen it before.

“This is from a Marx Brothers movie,” I told the city desk. The city desk didn’t believe me. The library was just down the street. I was right. A school-board member was having our reporter on. Dave gave me a $50 bonus and another long look, the kind that you’d give to a little green man who just stepped out of a flying saucer parked on your lawn.

When the Ventura paper got back in touch to offer me that job I’d been so sure was mine, until it wasn’t, I said thanks all the same, but Dave Mitchell pulled me off the breadline when I had nothing in my pockets but a pair of hands, and I’ma dance with the one what brung me.

I eventually escaped the copy desk and just sort of wandered around the newsroom, working for Pancho Morris on the sports desk, and Denise Kusel at the weekend arts magazine Pasatiempo, dusting off my reporting chops to write some cycling copy, taking some snaps with a camera Pancho laid on me, even helping with a redesign of the newspaper that introduced me to the wonderful world of Apple products.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slowly working my way towards a whole new career, as a freelancer. And shortly after McKinney sacked Dave over a series of stories looking into environmental hazards at Los Alamos National Lab, with my mom slipping into dementia up in Bibleburg, well … I got right after it. Herself and I had been married less than a year, the publisher had been asking pointed questions like, “Are you still here?” and I figured it would be best for all of us if I were not.

I was already freelancing cartoons and copy to VeloNews in Boulder. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News came next, co-founder Marc Sani being a Santa Fe riding buddy. These steady gigs lasted for a lot longer than they should have, and they led to other work too, like my stint with Adventure Cyclist, whose editor Mike Deme brought me aboard not for my touring expertise — I didn’t have any — but because he liked the way I wrote.

So, thanks, Dave. I don’t know where I would’ve wound up if you hadn’t taken a chance on me way back when. But it sure as shit wouldn’t have been here, happily married, safely retired, and with a couple bucks in the bank too, typing up some memories on a Mac in New Mexico.

In Memoriam: William F. White Jr.

May 25, 2026May 29, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

She was set to retire in a couple of weeks. He was going to buy her a grill and show her how to use it.

But then what seemed to be a minor bout with some seasonal bug — fatigue, shortness of breath, surely nothing to fret about — became something else altogether.

They went to the ER instead of Home Depot. And seven days later, he was gone.

• • •

William F. White Jr. of Smyrna, Tenn., died May 17 of complications from bone cancer. He was 77.

Bill met my sister-in-law Heather F. Pigeon nearly four decades earlier, when a mutual friend introduced them at a Ruby Tuesday in Antioch, Tenn. He and Heather hit it off, and would’ve gone out together the very next night. But that was Bill’s birthday, and he had plans with his parents. So their first date got pushed back a week.

Two years later, on Aug. 4, 1990, they were married in Oak Ridge, a couple of months after Herself and I tied the knot at Hyde State Park near Santa Fe.

Bill was a Nashville boy. He was born there on March 4, 1949, and graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1967. Then Uncle Sam sent him on a road trip. He served in the U.S. Army from 1969 to ’72, including a year in Vietnam with the 1st Signal Brigade, 1st Infantry Division (The Big Red One). He was based first in Saigon as a typist before being sent to the field to disassemble signal towers.

Back in the States with an honorable discharge, Bill attended Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, graduating in 1977 with a business degree and the nickname “Wild Man.”

In 1985 he joined Horizon Wine and Spirits, going on to win many sales awards over a 30-year career. The owner of one store on his route said he always looked forward to Bill’s calls because he was the only sales rep he liked.

It saddens me to say that Bill and I didn’t really get to know each other well — Herself and I saw more of Heather than Bill, even after he retired in 2015. But I can see why that store owner enjoyed visiting with him. For a wild man and a sales rep, Bill was remarkably laid back.

We did have some things in common. More hair than was deemed respectable Back in the Day®. Nicknames. And nicotine. Bill kicked the habit after taking a work-sponsored smoking-cessation class — the only one of the 20 men in the class to finish it and kick those butts to the curb.

But his sport of choice was golf. Bill originally played in the men’s league at the Old Fort Golf Course in Murfreesboro, but finally shifted to the senior league, quipping that he “couldn’t hang with the young boys.”

An Eagle Scout (Troop 121, BSA, 1964), Bill also enjoyed hiking Tennessee’s state parks, visiting local farmers’ markets, and cooking. In recent years he’d tried his hand at baking, and cinnamon muffins became one of his faves. Heather loved them too.

• • •

Bill is survived by his wife of 35 years, Heather F. White of Smyrna; a brother, Donald White, and sister, Linda White, both of Nashville; in-laws Beth and Darren Morgan of Woodsboro, Md., the two of us here in Albuquerque; and Magdalene, an 18-year-old tabby cat. Bill and Heather parented eight cats in the years together and fostered many more.

He was preceded in death by his parents, William F. White Sr., and Nannie (Nan) Louise Whitfield White.

Funeral arrangements are pending. In lieu of flowers the family suggests donations to Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee or WMOT Roots Radio.

But don’t anyone start a GoFundMe for the grill. Heather will buy that herself.

R.I.P., Augie Meyers

March 24, 2026March 24, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Augie Meyers rocking the Vox with Doug Sahm and a revived Sir Douglas Quintet in 1975.

Augie Meyers, whose work on the unheralded Vox Continental organ gave the Sir Douglas Quintet its signature sound, and drew the admiration of Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Willie Nelson, Tom Waits, and Your Humble Narrator, has bid us all adios. He was 85.

I was just starting to find my own musical way in the Sixties after the old man got us transferred to Randolph AFB at San Antonio, Texas. My folks were into the big bands — Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, etc. — but there was this whole new rough beast slouching toward America’s AM radios, and local boys Doug Sahm and his sidekick Augie were riding it.

“She’s About a Mover” was getting a lot of airplay in San Antone back in 1965. And while I didn’t know diddly about Tex (folks on base were from wherever) or Mex (beyond the little taco shop just outside the main gate), Augie’s Tex-Mex fingers grabbed me by the ear and held on tight.

Tweedle … deedle deedle deedle. …

Sahm left Texas for California because of course he did. Meyers eventually followed, and in 1969 we got “Mendocino,” which brought that old Sir Doug sound back to this newly and only moderately hairy (with a covert assist from a Mexican barber) would-be-hippie kid, now in Colorado Springs.

It was fun stuff to listen to; made you want to get up and move around. According to his New York Times obit, Meyers liked the Vox sound, “reminiscent of a merry-go-round or a circus calliope,” because “it could cut through the guitars onstage.”

Meyers would join Sahm again in the Texas Tornados, with Freddy Fender and Flaco Jiménez. He was the Tex-Mex supergroup’s last surviving original member, until March 7. Peace to him, his family, friends, and fans.

R.I.P., Gregg Bagni

March 17, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

The Bagman cometh. And he bringeth … *cheerleaders?*

Gregg Bagni was too much for this world. Possibly because he was not of this world.

Or so he said, anyway. Ack ack ack.

The former Schwinn pitchman and Dispenser of Alien Truth has returned to the Mothership after a snowboarding accident in British Columbia, according to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. He may have been 72, but it’s so hard to tell with these extraterrestrial types. I mean, just look at Doctor Who.

Like the Doctor, Bagni had been known to get around and about. In November 2009 he emailed to mention, among other things, being fresh off a little spin through the Dolomites — 650 miles with nearly 68,000 (!) feet of climbing — in the company of Clif Bar’s Gary Erickson.

I had skipped Interbike that year, so I don’t know what Bagni might’ve been up to in Sin City. But if he had been there, it would’ve been something. That was the one sure thing at Interbike, year in and year out. The Bagman would be up to something, and his act was always worth the price of admission.

For Schwinn’s 100th anniversary he hired 100 Elvis impersonators to march down the Strip, led by Fr. Guido Sarducci.

In 2003 he was stalking the show with what I described in BRAIN as “a large, garishly painted wrestler who will be delighted to tie you into a granny knot while the Bagman snaps away with his Polaroid.”

And way back in 1999 — I think it was 1999, anyway — he drove a herd of cheerleaders to the VeloPress booth, where I was to be signing copies of my freshly minted collection of VeloNews cartoons, “The Season Starts When?”

I have no idea whether I was on his schedule. I do know that I didn’t want to be doing any goddamn book-signing, in public, unarmed, where all my many enemies could relish my humiliation, because I was certain that precisely nobody would want the book, especially if they had to deal with me to get one.

But I wound up signing a ton of books and people were pleasant and appreciative and I can only attribute it to extraterrestrial intervention.

Bagni was a prolific correspondent, and wrote in the manner of Archy from Don Marquis’s column in the New York Sun of the 1900s. Archy was a defunct vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach who borrowed the columnist’s typewriter from time to time. He had to dive head-first onto the keys to work them, but couldn’t operate the shift key, and thus Archy’s works were all sans capital letters.

In April 2021 Bagni wrote on Medium, in lowercase, about a few “great lessons” he’d learned and been able to put into play after having had a gun shoved in his face— twice — deciding he would not live past the age of 30, and “living [his] life accordingly.”

“frankly … been pretty lucky being able to ride this crazy blue ball this long.

If you read it you’ll get a good idea of how he turned out. And if you never met him, you’ll wish you had.

Peace to Gregg Bagni, his family, friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. Ack ack ack.

Price capades

March 15, 2026March 15, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

While making a smallish grocery run today I snatched up a can of Juanita’s Mexican Style Hominy, which I like to have in the pantry in case I find myself in a mood for a pot of posole, prepared in lazy gabacho fashion.

But it didn’t look quite right. … and it wasn’t.

These suckers used to be 30 ounces. Now they’re 25. Last March 15, a can cost $2.99. Today, it cost $3.79. For 5 ounces less hominy.

Hmmm. Whatever could’ve happened? Wait for it. …

From foodnewswire.com, dated May 2, 2025

Apex Capital, a private equity firm focused on investing in the consumer sector across the Americas, is pleased to announce the acquisition of a majority stake in Juanita’s Foods, a leading producer of authentic Mexican food products in the United States.

Maybe this is why Juanita’s has been tough to find lately. For the last pot of posole I made I used canned white hominy from Goya Foods, whose CEO is a big fan of the pinche pendejo Charlie Pierce calls “El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago.” The boss-fella’s breath may have a whiff of ass to it — ¿quien sabe? — but it was a 29-ounce can and it only cost $3.69.

In any event, while I can’t say for sure exactly when it happened, it sure seems like these capitalistas carroñeros from Apex Capital have done slipped the pork to my posole via shrinkflation.