Ray Pryke: Publish free or die
During World War II, when Hesperia Resorter publisher Ray Pryke was still just a young Englishman from East Anglia, he joined the British Army, Royal Air Force and finally the Royal Navy.
"I loved to fight," he said Wednesday.
Today, 84 years old and an American for 53 years, that hasn't changed.
On May 5, a California Appellate Court judge overturned a $3 million judgment against Pryke's company, ValleyWide Newspapers. Nancy Bohl, the wife of San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod, had sued ValleyWide in June 2000 for libel, based on a series of articles published between 1999 and 2000.
The articles alleged Bohl and her company, the Counseling Team, including "sleeping with the sheriff to obtain the service contracts, cheating the County of San Bernardino on the bills for such services and breaching the confidentiality of therapeutic dialogue by disclosing the content with the sheriff or other law enforcement brass," according to court documents.
Bohl's attorney alleged ValleyWide reporter Mark Gutglueck had fabricated the stories and his anonymous sources were non-existent.
Pryke says he took a page from Watergate-era Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and had Gutglueck write down the names of his sources in an envelope, which remains locked in a safe.
"Americans always think they have freedom of the press, but they don't know what that is and you can't tell them," Pryke said. "I knew I was going to get sued, but I kind of looked forward to that."
"I want to see where it goes"
He's received more than one settlement offer from Penrod and Bohl, he says.
"If I would sell the newspapers, have dinner with Gary and Nancy and I'd give them $25,000," Pryke says was the latest settlement offer, with no trace of an English accent. "Why would I want this dismissed? I like this suit. I want to see where it goes."
The potential financial downside doesn't seem to bother him.
"I have 135 pieces of land. What am I going to do with it? You can't eat it," Pryke said. "What's $3 million [in damages] when I have $20 million?"
Bohl has not yet decided if she will appeal the decision and potentially carry it to the California Supreme Court, according to her attorney John Rowell. A decision will be made before May 19.
San Bernardino County Sheriff Gary Penrod was unavailable for comment for this article, according to department representatives.
"What disturbs me," Pryke said, "Is what happened to the America that I knew? They took an old man and tried to break him because he has a newspaper."
Pryke and his wife Jane have no children, and although more vigorous than many men half his age, he repeatedly notes that a stroke could kill him tomorrow. Or perhaps not: His parents lived to be 96 and 95 years old.
He first came to the United States at age 19 to learn how to fly fighter planes in Texas.
"And I liked it here," Pryke said of the country he's lived in for 64 years.
Post-war England
Post-war England held no appeal for him -- "They were starving. Socialist government. Christ, it was bad." -- and so, after the war was over, he studied at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and the University of Toronto, then moved to Austin, Texas. But in those days, Austin was a sleepy town, and like other young men before him, Pryke went west.
"I thought I would go to Southern California, where there was more going on."
He picked up a real estate license, as he had older relatives who had worked in real estate in England.
"I thought, 'well, I'll try to do that.' I had no money, [but] credit's easy in the United States. Everyone wants to give it to you."
Pryke became an American citizen in 1954, and lived down in Dana Point and would fly his Cessna airplane up to the High Desert and the tiny desert resort community of Hesperia.
"I ran into Penn Phillips, who developed Hesperia. He liked me, nice man," Pryke said. "He taught me how to do it."
One of the things Phillips taught him was to provide a four-color flyer to buyers, advising them of additional real estate opportunities to "keep the revenue going."
In 1962, he upgraded from publishing a flyer to a newspaper, when he bought the Apple Valley Observer. Purchases of the Apple Valley News and Adelanto Bulletin followed.
"It's exciting, you see, being an immigrant. You learn all this stuff. You can't do this in England."
Meanwhile, Phillips had started his own newspaper, the Hesperia Resorter, using it to promote the High Desert resort town. Pryke acquired the paper in 1976, but it was being named grand jury foreman that turned him into the crusading publisher he is today.
"I found out about all the stealing going on. And it pissed me off."
Pryke looked over his newspaper group and thought of the English tradition of tabloid journalism.
"I thought, with my English background, about what they do on [London's] Fleet Street," he said. "And I started writing things I heard about on the grand jury in the newspaper."
Almost immediately, Pryke began ruffling feathers -- which led to his departure from the newspaper industry.
He and his wife Jane were walking on the beach back home in Dana Point when she turned to him.
"'I've never asked you for anything,'" he recalled her saying, "'But I want you to sell the newspaper. They're going to kill you.'"
Pryke sold his newspapers, but it didn't stick. The new owner sold the papers to another buyer who defaulted on a debt. Pryke reacquired them and went back to writing about people who "pissed him off."
Margaret Caulfield wrote for the Resorter from 1993 through 2000.
"He said 'you can do it, and if you always write the truth, you can walk around town with your head held high.' Which I always thought was kind of funny," she said Friday. "The reputation was out there that it was a terrible newspaper [but] he left me alone and let me write my stories."
His personal passion for the stories in his paper separates him from his competition, Pryke said.
"With the Daily Press, it's all bottom line." (The Hesperia Star is a Daily Press publication. Hesperia Star Editor Peter Day wrote for the Resorter from 1989 to 1991.)
"People would say 'why do you write for that paper?'" Caulfield said, "But they knew everything that was in the paper."
Today, Pryke lives in the Juniper Riviera overlooking Apple Valley and goes after after politicians and officials he believes to be dirty, dishonest or simply inept.
It was "40 weeks before I ran [former Hesperia City Manager Bob Rizzo] off," Pryke said, noting it took the Washington Post more than 400 stories to do with same with President Richard Nixon.
Vogler: "Sometimes I'm going to agree with him"
He has a cynical view of those running the city today.
Mayor Rita Vogler "wants to be the queen, but she doesn't want to read [the city council agenda] package."
"Sometimes I'm going to agree with him, sometimes I'm not," Vogler said Thursday. "People have a right to their opinion, and I've been called a lot worse things.
"I do think he gets a lot of it right. But you have to understand where he might be coming from. What can I say? I think I have a good relationship with him. But he comes after me like he comes after anyone."
According to Pryke, Hesperia City Manager Mike Podegracz is "a good-looking man, but he doesn't know what he's doing."
Podegracz declined to comment for this story.
Deputy Director of Development Services Tom Harp is "loony, loony," according to Pryke, who refers to Harp as a "rubber-stamper."
"It so saddens me. They want 10 lots to the acre," Pryke says of the city council and officials. "Where's the recreation? [Frontier Homes CEO Jimmy] Previti's going to be long gone, and we can't live there."
He's equally cynical about county politicians.
"We've never had a proper [county] supervisor. A bunch of jerks," Pryke said.
County supervisor-turned-assessor Bill Postmus -- a frequent subject of Resorter articles -- declined to comment for this story.
Politicians "change overnight" once elected, Pryke said.
But if Pryke did run the current crop of politicians and officials out of office tomorrow, there are others he's never really put in his crosshairs to keep him busy.
"There's always somebody who's going to come along," he said. Victorville Mayor "Terry [Caldwell] is waiting. Nothing's going to happen at George Air Force Base. [The city of Victorville] is spending hundreds of millions of dollars over there."
Pryke still considers real estate to be his business, and ruffling feathers with his newspapers is a hobby.
"The older I get, the more I enjoy it. What else am I going to do? I'm not going to travel; you know what that's like," he said. "It's better than going to the movies."
Beau Yarbrough can be reached at 956-7108 or at beau@hesperiastar.com.
