The Pitch at 30: First Pitch editor Don Mayberger looks back
Life seems to have turned out pretty well for The Pitch‘s first editor, though readers who remember 1980 will recall the man’s name not as Don Mayberger but as Warren Stylus — Mayberger’s pen-name nod to the paper’s record-store beginnings.
A Shawnee Mission East High School grad who discovered Lawrence in the late 1960s, Mayberger lives there still, in a two-story, 100-year-old brick foursquare across Tennessee Street from Watson Park. Below the glass surface of his coffee table are the nine Regional Emmy Awards that he won for his work with Randy Mason and Mike Murphy on KCPT Channel 19’s Rare Visions & Roadside Revelations — long after his days with the Pitch, he rose to fame as “Don the Camera Guy.” A greater treasure than the Emmys, though, may be the folk art that Mayberger has collected over his 15 years on the road with the show. Paintings and sculptures by self-taught artists and mementos from offbeat attractions cover every wall and surface of his home. Upstairs, he estimates, are as many as 5,000 records — vinyl records.
“I still like to spin the vinyl in the cold, cold winter months,” Mayberger says. Right now, though, it’s summer, and he’s nursing a highball glass filled with something the color of bourbon. That would be iced tea, not the harder stuff that one imagines might have sustained the record-store employees who started an alternative newspaper 30 years ago.
The Pitch: How did you end up starting The Pitch?
Mayberger: I’d met Chuck [Haddix] waiting tables. We worked at Washington Street Station, which was sort of a Spaghetti Factory at Ninth and Washington with a vague “trolley” theme. You could eat like a pig for $2. The all-you-can-eat salad bar with the spaghetti dinner — including spumoni — started at $1.95. I first became aware of Chuck while scooping rock-hard spumoni. I lived in his backyard in my van.
In 1978, I was living in Chicago with my lovely wife, who got a real job so I could be a representative for a record distributor. I’d drive around Illinois, and basically I was paid in records. I called myself a promosexual.
My first task for PennyLane was selling bluegrass records at Winfield [Kansas, for the annual Walnut Valley Festival]. Chuck was managing PennyLane, and they were going down to Winfield, and he knew I had the van. He wanted to go down there and sell some bluegrass records.
Hal Brody, who owned PennyLane, was a distributor for a couple hundred small record labels, and the records were down in the dreary limestone caves off 31st Street. I moved back here in 1979 and worked in the record cave.
They had a new-release list, which was hundreds of records. Hal was worried that nobody was bothering to read this list because it was a list — it was boring. The way I remember the Pitch happening was, “Let’s make a fake newspaper! Maybe we’ll make it readable, and we can give it out free and sell records that way.” There really wasn’t much of a free paper or any I can recall, back in ’80 in Kansas City.
So, I don’t know, Penny Pitch came up just for the derivation of PennyLane and that old game we used to play in the boys’ room in junior high. That was it. It was kind of like the classic, “Hey, let’s put on a play! My uncle has a barn!”
And so, OK, we’ll get LeRoi [Johnson, see interview this issue] to write record reviews, or Chuck’ll write about jazz because he knows jazz. Dave Conn wrote about classical records and reggae. “Ragin'” Rick Henderson, headbanging music. Lane Turner, new wave and punk. Teddy Dibble wrote features, and Phil Minkin wrote the food column, “Chow Lines.” Dwight [Frizzell] can write about the solar system. And I’ll cut and paste.
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I took the pseudonym Warren Stylus and put out that first issue. It was quick, dirty and primitive, pretty low-budget. But I think we almost broke even, ’cause I was the ad department, the editor and the photographer (we developed pictures in the bathroom down there). It just kind of took off. It came out when it came out, you know? We tried to get it out every month, but it was just the volunteers and me. Before I knew it, we’d quadrupled the number we were putting out. It was catching on. But I was mostly in it for the records.
Why do you think it caught on?
It wasn’t the most sophisticated thing. Maybe it was just people could relate to it. There wasn’t all the media we have now. We didn’t have the Internet, 500 TV channels. MTV didn’t start for another year or two. And it was free — it was priced right.
Records were such a big part of the culture. It really went crazy in the ’70s with, like, Saturday Night Fever. We could sell 10 million albums! Man, I was getting 20 new releases a week and playin’ records. It was exciting. While we were doing the Pitch, I think John Lennon made another album, and I was 14 in 1964 when the Beatles hit, so my timing was good on that. And, hey, the record store was named after a Beatles song, so I was golden with that.
When did you get a sense that, beyond just catching on, The Pitch was meaningful in some way?
It was mostly the work of Chuck, who went on to do some serious writing with his Kansas City jazz book [Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop — a History, Oxford University Press, 2005]. He did an interview with Milton Morris — the very colorful Milton Morris — down at [his bar] Milton’s. We put a little tape recorder on the table, and I transcribed it. Up until then, it had been “Hey, buy this record!” But we put out that issue, and people started saying this was some serious stuff. It was actually close to journalism. There was a little bit of history.
I’d gone to KU in print journalism, but that was before spell check, and I was terrible, so I started taking pictures, which sent me in a different direction. So I did have a little experience with the KU paper and the high school paper, so I could pretend to be a journalist. I had a sense that the Milton Morris issue was worthy of some inclusion in the category of journalism.
On the day it came out, I was all excited. It looked good. So I took a stack over to Milton’s around four in the afternoon. And Milton’s — you should never be in there when the lights are up; that was something I learned — I go in with this stack and there, sitting at a table, are Milton Morris, Count Basie and Miss Ebony 1939. With, like, six shot glasses lined up. One of my prized possessions is that issue signed by Count Basie and Milton.
What did Milton think of the issue?
I think Milton was happy with it. We had his quick-and-dirty mug on the front, which was just basically — we used the Xerox machine a lot for my layout. I’d type the stuff out on a typewriter and cut it into paragraphs. The cover was a Xerox of Milton’s T-shirt. But I felt good about that issue.
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Which issue was that?
That was the third issue. That was the fall. The paper had taken off by then. We had expanded to 20 pages from our measly four. It was all volunteer because everyone was doing their job at the store, whether it was working the register or ordering records for stock or what have you.
How long did you do it?
I did it for about a year. We were almost ready to put out our monthly issue, but then Hal decided we weren’t going to have an issue. Discipline is not my forte, so it was hard to say, ‘OK, well, we’re not going to have one’ when I was really trying to get into a regular groove. So I decided, well, I got it going so I’ll turn it over. I was driving back and forth from Lawrence every day, and my cars were never reliable. I couldn’t do it much longer. So I got into television.
Were there other high points?
The fact that it kept going. Dwight took over right after I left, and it kind of got a little stranger. But it was still going, and before I knew it, it was 10 years. They did a 10-year anniversary issue. They were amazed, I think, too. The paper became, basically, a big part of Hal Brody’s empire. (In 1999, Brody sold The Pitch to New Times Inc., which became Village Voice Media in 2006.)
Do you look at the paper now and think, I started that!
I do. I’ll drop it kind of like a joke on people: [fakes English accent] “I invented the Ruggles.” But I don’t think my real name was ever in the paper until the 10th-anniversary recap. I chose the pen name Warren Stylus to escape blame. The Pitch was a grand experiment. I’m glad it’s still out there.
How do you feel about all of the changes in media over the last 30 years?
Media is so fragmented. Everybody’s vying for smaller pieces of attention. People are walking around with cell phones. It’s harder to get anybody’s attention. You can go anywhere, and there’s 20 racks of free papers on every corner. We had a pretty easy way to get the Pitch out there. We’d walk into some place and people would say, “Sure, leave a stack. Put it over in the corner.” There weren’t that many alternatives. Same thing with the rest of the media. There were three networks, and then cable came along. CNN is just celebrating its 30th anniversary right now. So it really started branching out 30 years ago and has not stopped. I don’t know if we did anything exceptional, but we got our foot in the door. Thirty years later, you guys are still doing it. My hat’s off to you.
