Harrville, a small town of 7,000 people in the heart of East Texas, will never be the same when two widows – the new city manager and a local newspaper editor – cross swords with the powers-that-be.

The new city manager, Stephanie Donnegan, often called Stevie, is a vibrant, beautiful woman in her early fifties, bright, magnetic. Stevie thinks that city government should represent the taxpayers, but she has quickly learned that the elected council, who hired her, represents only a few special interest groups. Undaunted, she has already made major changes in city government, from stricter accounting of public funds to legal updating of administered policies. In the few months since her hiring, a number of privileged groups and individuals have found themselves on the same footing as the average citizen. On the other hand, many “ordinary” people and most city employees – after surviving eleven different city managers in just seventeen years – are delighted with her fairness and respect. Coming from an affluent area of Houston, cushioned by financial independence, and braced by a large dose of integrity, Stevie is not intimidated by anyone challenging her idea of representative government. She is charming and diplomatic with the various council members, but none of them can keep up with the number of actions her amazing energy creates on any given day.

Samantha Walker, nearing the age of sixty, and showing it, is the beloved editor of a local newspaper and a media legend in the area for several decades. But Sam, who has seen it all, has stopped fighting the men who own Harrville. She once ran her own newspaper, famous for serious, straightforward coverage, and then pioneered and operated the first local cable news channel for a decade, but currently, and for the last couple of years, Sam just manages a local paper which prints only “good news”. The powers-that-be have finally narrowed her influence. Politically, she has been neutralized. Publicly, the average citizen still thinks of her as a crusader and believes she will be there when it matters. Privately, she has no fight left in her.

Until she meets Stevie.

On a bright and beautiful June day, the two are introduced at an open house held at Harrville’s modest airport. As they lean over a porch railing of the small terminal building, talking, listening to each other, elected officials at the gathering cannot help but feel alarm.

The two women are immediately struck by each other. An instant friendship is formed, something unusual for both. But Sam does not plan to pursue the relationship, thinking it would hurt Stevie’s efficacy as city manager if the “boys in the back room” think Sam has any influence on Stevie. And Stevie is busy, working and enjoying the challenge of improving Harrville’s city government, department by department.

But over the next few weeks, Sam hears some disturbing reports about the city manager’s actions, reports she finds difficult to believe. She cannot, however, bring herself to jeopardize Stevie by going to see her.

At City Hall, Councilman Ralph Womack bursts into Stevie’s office in anger over her actions that affect a dance studio (and a former girlfriend) at the city library. Ralph tells Stevie to leave the fee schedule alone at the library or he’ll fire her. Stevie calmly tells him that the library’s grants are not legal with the current fees, but if council directs her to leave the matter alone, she will abide by that direction. He says council will not be directing her on this because the issue will not be on any council agenda.

Womack may not be the mayor, but he has been the mayor, a number of times, and will be again. Only the city’s home rule charter with term limitations prevents him from serving as mayor at all times. In office or not, however, he is the most powerful man in Harrville, as his daddy was before him, and no city manager bucks Ralph Womack. On anything. Ever.

And Harrville has seldom had a city manager who actually manages the City. Stevie has already held up a drainage project until the landowner, a former bank president, pays his fair share of the improvement. She has also facilitated the start-up of several small businesses who were unduly harassed by the code inspector. And Stevie has denied the Chamber of Commerce (managed by the wife of a former councilman) its usual city funding due to a lack of proper documentation. The library issue is just the final straw for Womack.

The councilman promises to add an executive session to the next council agenda and have Stevie fired.

When he does so, Stevie counters with something never done before in Harrville; she has the personnel issue put on the open agenda. Council will have to discuss the firing and terminate her employment in open session, before the media and the public.

The council meeting draws a lot of people, something that rarely occurs these days in Harrville. Several people have put their names on the agenda to speak. An important businessman. A retired schoolteacher who runs a small business. A City employee. All speak in Stevie’s favor. And Sam speaks.

No one’s seen Sam at a council meeting for several years. No one’s heard her speak her mind in a long time. And employees at the newspaper she manages are worried about what the owner-publisher will think of her political action.

Sam’s comments to council include the fact that only one of them is really bent on firing Stephanie Donnegan. But, she says, given the pressures of public office, it is possible they will vote to fire the city manager - and that means that a minority rules them. That the town is held hostage by a minority.

When the time comes for the vote, the other council members, as much as they are beholden to Womack, cannot, in public, after what has been said, vote to fire the city manager. Womack makes the motion -- but there is no second.

It is a triumph for many, but a short-lived victory. Over the next six weeks, Womack applies a number of different pressures to the rest of council. The official newspaper in town, that supposedly reports hard news, that actually is in utter awe of the established powers, slants more and more of Stevie’s actions in a bad light. Also, the editor of that paper assists, behind the scenes, in promoting the rumor that the two women are lovers, an idea that would definitely hurt them in a Southern four-square-mile town of thirty churches. No such thing has ever been thought of Sam, but the editor of the other newspaper is relatively new to town and unaware of how improbable his theory. He is also somewhat blinded by his own resentment of Stevie spurning his advances.

During the weeks following the council meeting, the city manager is still working wonders with city services, but more and more of her time is bogged down fighting the consequences of Womack’s mechanisms.

And during this time, Stevie and Sam’s friendship strengthens. There is much conflict between them, and much laughter. They help each other on some personal issues and spend one weary evening singing “Side by Side” in the kitchen of Sam’s home. Stevie, who was staying in an RV, sometimes commuting back to Houston, has now moved into Sam’s large, old, rambling house.

The City Manager’s final undoing comes in the guise of Councilman Nix; he wants her to see where the county commissioner has illegally cleaned the private ditches of the local country club. That commissioner, Mervin Peck, is Ralph Womack’s main sidekick, personally and politically. Stevie goes with Nix to see the ditches in question, but before she can determine anything, the commissioner notifies the city council that he is withdrawing his assistance on city street pavings. The hullabaloo that transpires is the final nail in the coffin, the final pressure on the mayor and the council to “get rid of that woman”.

A special council meeting is called but, conveniently for council, on a Monday night. The local newspapers are weeklies, news deadlines on Friday and publications on Tuesdays. No one will know of the meeting though it will be properly posted at City Hall. Hopefully, Womack thinks, no one will be there.

And very few people are.

Stevie is fired. A handful of people come by Sam’s house after the firing. On the kitchen table is a stack of information Stevie’s been gathering about a local television channel. Again. Like Sam used to have...

Sam does want to work with Stevie and she does care about Harrville but she does not want to go back into the fight. And running a station again requires more from her than she feels she will ever want to give again. Those at the gathering, however, remember. They remember all the differences it made. Before. Sam had aired a weekly live call-in show, The Other Side of the Coin, that addressed any issue a caller wanted as long as the dialogue was courteous and about issues, not personalities. It’s obvious that Stevie is hooked on the idea of local television and that she believes the media can improve local politics. Sam argues against the idea, explaining how local elections are pretty much “fixed”, and citing other obstacles to overcome. She believes the citizens of Harrville are like victims of abuse, no longer expecting much from their government, that they are through fighting City Hall. Someone at the table says that since Sam went off the air, the local media has left them all “behind an iron curtain”. Sam contends that the local corruption will ultimately destroy itself. Stevie counters every argument, but Sam is adamant in her objections.

Within a few weeks, however, Sam, “courtesy” of Womack and the commissioner, is also fired from her newspaper job. And unlike Stevie, Sam is financially dependent on her job. She has to work. In her context, unemployment is devastating.

Stevie is now determined more than ever to offer a local channel again. But in her dealings with the local cable company, she runs into the same obstacles that drove Sam off the air four years earlier. The company is franchised through the City and as such the City has some say in their decisions. But Stevie is not Sam and she takes the cable company to task, legally. They finally buckle.

Putting a pretty penny on the lease, the highest possible according to the Federal Communications Commission, a channel is made available. Other people are dragged into the fray, supposedly to lease the channel, but Stevie digs up the “first come first serve” rule and other issues.

She obtains the lease for a channel.

The station will have to pay its way with local advertising, a skill Sam has honed through the years. Her reputation serves her well, although it is now, occasionally, marred by the well-planted lesbian rumor.

Stevie and Sam go on the air. They will be shooting the city council and school board meetings. Their first program is a revitalization of The Other Side of the Coin, the live call-in show, now hosted by the two of them.

The often-extreme differences in their personalities and points of view coupled with the reality and the diversity of local viewers makes for great local television.

Stevie and Sam. On the air. Live. Look out, Womack. Look out, Harrville.


The weekly segments focus on the two widows' friendship and on the dynamic interplay at the grass roots level between media, government, and citizens. The frustrations, point-of-views and responsibilities of that interplay are highlighted each week with a portion of a council meeting and a portion of the live call-in program.

© 2003, Darlene Bridge Lofgren