Johnny, We Hardly Knew You

When John Maginnis died last May, people in Louisiana and beyond were shocked. Only those closest to him realized that he had been battling serious health problems.

“Johnny was a very private person,” said his brother Mike, a Baton Rouge dentist. “Whenever you asked him how he felt, he’d say, ‘Fine! Never better!’”

To say that Maginnis leaves a hole in the coverage of Louisiana politics is not hyperbole but fact. “John was born with much of his genius for politics, but it wasn’t all intuition and instinct,” wrote LSU journalism professor Robert Mann. “He also worked hard. He did the interviews and showed up at the hearings [and] press conferences.”

“He leaves a void that is impossible to fill,” said Jim Engster, owner of the Louisiana Radio Network and host of a daily radio show on WRKF-FM that Maginnis visited regularly. “He was the premier reporter on Louisiana politics over the last four decades.”

Maginnis, who had just turned sixty-six when he died, was the founder and publisher of LaPolitics.com and author of a weekly political column that ran in twenty-one newspapers across the state. For thirty years he was also a regular on Informed Sources, a weekly reporters’ round table on WYES-TV in New Orleans.

When national news outlets needed a quip or a quote, Maginnis was the source they called. “He was the rarest of journalists,” said Engster. “He had local and national cachet, and yet he never worked for a traditional newspaper. He was his own man in his personal and professional life.”

The closest Maginnis came to working for a “regular” newspaper was when he delivered Baton Rouge’s now defunct evening paper the State-Times on his bicycle after school. Years later, the Morning Advocate offered him a staff job, but he preferred to be his own boss.

As a twelve-year-old attending Sacred Heart elementary, Maginnis was urged by school librarian Celine Geary to start a newspaper. According to her son and Maginnis’ classmate Patrick Geary, for about two years Maginnis wrote a mimeographed weekly paper called Tiger Tips, illustrated with a drawing of a tiger whose tail hung down the side of the page.  

At Catholic High School, Maginnis started the weekly newsletter Bear Facts in his senior year, 1965–66. “It was mimeographed on one legal-sized page, front and back,” recalled classmate Steve Constantin, who helped with production. “The paper was distributed to all students at CHS, St. Joseph’s Academy, and St. Anthony High School.”

“I remember the sound of the Bear Facts getting dropped off outside the classroom door on Fridays at 10 a.m.,” said another classmate, Coleman Brown. “I raced to get my copy before they were all gone. The teachers grabbed it as fast as the students. It was a scream. To me it was the most creative writing I’d ever seen. John could be funny without tearing down people’s reputations.”

While still at Catholic High, Maginnis began working for the Catholic Commentator, the newspaper of the diocese of Baton Rouge. “I was his first boss,” said former business manager Leroy Colter. “We started out using him as a gofer, but he had too much talent for that. We paid him, but it was minimal. Today you’d call it an internship.” Maginnis eventually wrote bylined articles for the Commentator, a practice he continued through his first two years of college.

He graduated from Catholic High in 1966 and entered LSU that summer. Although he took many journalism classes and was editor of the Daily Reveille in the spring of 1969, he got his degree in pre-law, graduating in 1970.

“In those days you could start law school after three years and get a bachelor’s degree at the end of your first year of law school,” Maginnis said in a 2012 interview. “When I was in law school I started publishing an alternative paper ... called Kiwi.” The paper was the offshoot of a satirical column he wrote for the Reveille.

Like all male students then at LSU, Maginnis was required to join the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). Mike Maginnis recalled his brother writing a series of articles in the Reveille protesting compulsory ROTC. Among the indignities it entailed were marching with rifles twice weekly. Freshmen had their heads shaved and had to attend the first football game of the year in pajamas. “His articles ended that,” said Mike Maginnis.

John, the youngest of four children, could play his cards close to the vest, so some aspects of his life are hazy. “Johnny never told anybody anything,” recalled his sister Kathleen Bierman. “The family never knew what he was up to. We wish we had a clue to half of the things he did.”

No one is sure if he enlisted or was drafted, but by the spring of 1970, Maginnis was in Orlando, Florida, in basic training for the Navy. He headed back to Baton Rouge to visit family, and by late June he was bound for the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where he planned to get a master’s degree.

Mike Maginnis recalled that their mother Inez drove John to Hammond, bought him a train ticket to Chicago, and saw him onto the train. “After she left, he got off the train, cashed in the ticket, and thumbed his way to Chicago. He returned a semester or so later, not having finished the master’s program, and when Mama asked why, he told her he had learned what he wanted and didn’t need to stay any longer.”

At Medill for three quarters in 1970 –71, Maginnis took classes with famed author Newton Minow and worked as a reporter for Medill’s news outlets, covering the police beat.

In a letter to his sister Renee Dole, Maginnis wrote that Chicago was full of action, mentioning women’s lib, the Black Panthers, and longtime mayor Richard Daley. He lived in a fraternity house with other journalism students and accompanied a more seasoned reporter into Chicago’s “combat zones.”

Around 1971, the Navy sent Maginnis to the Philippines for two years; he was assigned desk work and never saw combat. Back in Baton Rouge in 1973, with partners Jodie Cado, Jim Gabour, and Charlie East, he started the alternative newspaper Gris Gris, which covered politics, the local music scene, bars, restaurants, and whatever else seemed interesting. “It became really popular really fast,” said East.

“I wanted to talk about Louisiana politics,” Maginnis said later. “I was fascinated by it. I wanted to talk about it without a liberal or conservative slant, but more with a humorous touch.”

Gris Gris ceased publishing in 1979 but was revived from 1985 to 1991. Maginnis then partnered with Rolfe McCollister Sr. and his son Rolfe Jr. to put out a weekly suburban newspaper, the Baton Rouge Enterprise.

In 1984, Maginnis published his first book, The Last Hayride, about Edwin Edwards’ 1983 campaign against Dave Treen. In 1992, he brought out Cross to Bear, about Edwards’ 1991 campaign against former Klansman David Duke. In 2000, he published The Politics of Reform, an overview of Louisiana’s efforts at reform from the days of Earl Long through the late 1990s.

Maginnis had a quiet but watchful demeanor when covering his favorite beat, the state Capitol when the legislature was in session.

“John thought that journalists should be in the background,” said Engster. “He quietly absorbed information, then produced great prose about the wacky world of Louisiana politics.”

In 1990, Maginnis began publishing a bimonthly magazine, the Louisiana Political Review, which he kept going until 1995. In 1993, he started the Political Fax Weekly, which went to subscribers by fax. That became LaPolitics Weekly and its online counterpart, LaPolitics.com.

Maginnis met reporter Jeremy Alford in 2000 when they both covered four-time governor Edwin Edwards’ trial for racketeering, which ultimately sent Edwards to prison for eight years. “I grew up reading John’s books,” said Alford. “At the end of the trial, I brought my copy of The Last Hayride and asked him to sign it. He wrote ‘Jeremy, it was fun watching history with you.’

“We developed a relationship over the years,” said Alford, the married father of two young children, who was thirty years younger than Maginnis. “When I started my freelance career I turned to John as a role model. We were the only two independent journalists in the state covering politics. That was a bonding experience.”

In 2011, as Maginnis’ health began to decline, he asked Alford to join LaPolitics as a partner. Alford jumped at the chance to work with his idol. “John clapped his hands, chuckled, went into the kitchen, and pulled out a bottle of champagne,” said Alford. “Jackie (Maginnis’ wife) walked in and said, ‘What are we celebrating?’ John said, ‘It’s Wednesday.’”

Maginnis and Alford planned to write a book together. “It was gonna be twenty-one years of ‘They Said It’,” said Alford, referring to the wacky quotes from politicians they ran each week. “We were gonna profile the more prolific politicians.”

Maginnis, who suffered from heart problems and a blood disorder, left clues that led some to suspect that he was aware he might have little time left.

“John made a huge push toward the end to get his part of the book done,” said Alford. “He turned in a thirty-thousand-word rough draft the Thursday before he passed away.

“His strong Irish roots would not allow him to complain. He battled it privately. As much of a social butterfly as he was, John was a very private person.

“John had a last book in mind, Our Heroes Have Always Been Governors,” said Alford. “It would be his personal perspective on the governors he had covered. I loved the idea, but he kind of abandoned it to do the They Said It book.” 

Just as many were surprised to learn that Maginnis was ill, they were equally unaware of the fact that he had married for the first time at the age of sixty. While watching the Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade at the City Club downtown, mutual friends introduced him to Jackie Drinkwater. A year later, again watching the parade at the City Club, Maginnis proposed.

True to form, he did not want a lot of what his sister Renee called “whoop-de-do.” “They went to visit some friends in Florida and came back and announced that they were married,” she recalled.

His widow Jackie remembered Maginnis as a “true romantic. Every year on the anniversary of the day we met, he called the couples who introduced us to thank them,” she said.

Maginnis was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the LSU Manship School of Mass Communications in 2000. After his death, the journalism school contacted his widow and offered to start a scholarship in Maginnis’ name.

“They are letting me help design the criteria,” said Jackie. “John would definitely want it to be based on need. Applicants will write a 725-word essay on politics, because that was the length of John’s columns. We will also stipulate that the recipient do a two-week internship at the state Capitol.” 

In early 2015, Maginnis will be inducted into the Louisiana Political Hall of Fame in Winnfield.

Alford is carrying on LaPolitics without his partner and friend. “I learned so much in those three years with John, more than in my entire freelance career,” he said. “I knew he was sick, but I thought we had more time. We had so many plans.”

Ruth Laney wrote for both Gris Gris and the Baton Rouge Enterprise and recalls the loose, fun atmosphere of Maginnis’s workplaces. She can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net.