Publisher Jeff Fobes’ path to the Mountain Xpress

Editor’s note: August marked Xpress’ 30-year anniversary. Throughout September we’ll be celebrating the milestone with articles, photo spreads and reflections from current and former staff members. Thank you for reading Xpress, and please consider becoming a member. 

Jeff Fobes didn’t have a lifelong passion for journalism. In fact, he didn’t strive for a career of any kind, hoping to never work more than 25 hours a week.

The latter goal fell away. At age 77, the Mountain Xpress founder and publisher is still working nearly 40 hours a week. And he did find a purpose: giving local communities a voice that those in power would hear.

Fobes recognized that need after a childhood of privilege as a U.S. diplomat’s kid and the horror he felt at being ordered to participate in the Vietnam War. Additionally, the counterculture depicted in the Whole Earth Catalog shaped his commitment to self-sufficiency and bone-deep skepticism toward power, authority and government.

Today, he and his wife, Susan Hutchinson, live on a 22-acre farm in northern Buncombe County where they grow their own vegetables, raise chickens and goats, and make their own cheese. They do many of their home repairs and renovations themselves.

Fobes recently reflected on how his life led him to a 30-year career as the founder and publisher of Xpress.

Early years

Fobes was born in 1947 in Washington, D.C., to John and Hazel Fobes, joining a sister Patricia, who is five years older. Many details from his childhood in suburban Tauxemont, Va., are “lost in the mists of time,” he comments wryly. But he remembers his first foray into the media was a single issue of “Fobes Family Gazette” that he tapped out “one finger at a time” on the typewriter.

John Fobes had been a civil servant for the U.S. Bureau of Budget and Planning and was sent to Europe to work on the Marshall Plan, a foreign aid program to rebuild the industries and economies of Europe after World War II. In 1952, the family moved to Paris, where John Fobes helped implement the plan and Fobes began kindergarten in Paris.

Fobes’ very early life was a combination of privilege and proximity to devastation. He remembers visiting a major city in Germany, still reduced to rubble years after the war, and an excursion to Normandy Beach, site of the Allied invasion on D-Day.

At home, Fobes had an English nanny — “she was too prissy … very proper” — and for a time, the family had a maid. The maid’s husband, a blue-collar worker and a communist, made an impression on young Fobes. “That was an early point where I realized that I sort of had an affinity for the working class, and I did not like snooty or upper class,” he says.

Another formative experience with authority happened in a French classroom.

Writing from an inkwell, the left-handed Forbes dragged his arm across the page and smeared the ink. Ordered by the teacher to write with his right hand, “I refused in some way — [perhaps saying] ‘I can’t,’ and so the teacher slapped me across the face pretty hard  … [it left] a hand mark on my face for hours.” Livid, his mother went to the school, slapped the teacher and then enrolled her son in another school.

The incident illustrated authoritative abuse, which stuck with him. “I remember as a kid thinking people [I encountered] weren’t very happy,” Fobes recalls. “They seemed all stern. Why are these people so stern? Well, they had only been liberated from the Nazis seven years prior.”

In 1955, the Fobes family returned to the United States for John Fobes’ job at the State Department. Suburban Virginia had strip malls, a new McDonald’s and playgrounds — rousing some culture shock for Fobes after living in postwar France.

In 1960, the family moved to New Delhi, India, where John Fobes served as assistant director and then deputy director of the U.S. Mission/USAID in India. Although Fobes attended an American school, homesickness reappeared — this time for American hamburgers, french fries, potato chips, ketchup and toothpaste.

Then it was back to Paris a second time, where Fobes graduated from high school and attended 12th-grade prom at the Eiffel Tower. “We snuck in there, my girlfriend and I,” he says with a smile. “We were too cheap. I wasn’t going to pay!” They rode up in his Honda 250 motorcycle and walked right into the prom without tickets. “Mostly, I was amazed that they were serving mixed drinks — because it’s France, you know, they don’t care.”

The draft

Upon graduating high school, Fobes already knew he didn’t want his life to follow a traditional path. He didn’t identify as a hippie, but rather with the Beats, a subculture that embraced anticonformity and anticonsumerism rather than the prescribed trappings of American adulthood. “I didn’t want to do anything,” he says. “I thought, ‘I’m a kid.’ … Going off to college or getting a job? None of that made any sense.”

In 1965, Fobes ended up at Knox College, a small liberal arts school in Galesburg, Ill., at the behest of his parents, who still lived in France. He studied political science and graduated in 1969 — the same year the Selective Service National Headquarters began the draft lottery for Vietnam.

Upon graduating college, Fobes joined VISTA, which he describes as similar to a domestic Peace Corps. (The program was later incorporated into AmeriCorps VISTA.) He did poverty-oriented work with a South Side improvement project, as well as a project helping low-income people purchase housing, in Milwaukee.

Fobes had been classified by the Selective Service as 1A, meaning he was qualified for military service. He proactively worked to get reclassified as a conscientious objector in case he was called up. “They were pretty much going to draft me,” Fobes recalls. “The more I thought about it, I was like, ‘That’s preposterous. I’m not going to go shoot and kill people because somebody told me to.’”

His impression of the government, he says, was, “These people think they own me. They think they can tell me what to do and tell me to go out and kill people.’ I said, ‘Well, I’m not going to do it.’”

He wrote a lengthy appeal for reclassification as a conscientious objector.

“They denied it,” he says. “That was typical.”

Fobes was registered in Virginia, so he returned home for an in-person appeal before a five-member draft board. He’d sent statements written by individuals supporting his conscientious objector beliefs, including by some ministers and his father. The members of the draft board hadn’t read his statements, Fobes says, and his sense was “they just don’t really care.”

When the board asked if he had anything he wanted to say, Fobes read excerpts of those statements of support aloud. He later learned in the mail the board ruled 3-2 in his favor, which Fobes says  “is supposedly very unusual.”

In 1970 or 1971, Fobes got called for service; as a civilian conscientious objector, he could spend two years providing other beneficial services for the country.

Media beginnings

Fobes worked at a Baptist home for troubled children, where he lived in a cottage with eight-12 boys. Then “we agreed, in a friendly way, to part,” Fobes explains. “The Baptists didn’t like me. I was too much of a free thinker,” whereas their attitude toward the children was “rigid and sort of doctrinaire.”

He needed another assignment to fulfill his conscientious objector service.

Around this time, Fobes read Sex and Broadcasting: A Handbook on Starting a Radio Station in the Community — a book critical of the commercial radio industry that encouraged community-based radio. “The idea was that radio could be for social change,” he says.

There weren’t many community-based radio stations at the time, he continues, and he wrote to half a dozen asking if he could work there. A St. Louis radio station pointed him to North St. Louis, where Fobes helped set up a 10-watt radio station, KPLH.

In someone else’s biography, establishing a community radio station might have been the direct launchpad to a media career. But for Fobes, after he fulfilled his two years of service work, he sought to work as little as possible. “I never wanted to have a career,” he says. “This stuck with me even as a teenager. I never really wanted to grow up or have a profession. It just didn’t make any sense to me.”

He earned money bartending, driving a taxi and fixing electronic equipment. But he didn’t work more than 25 hours a week. “Because life’s too short,” he explains. “Work is prison unless you find something you really want to be doing.” And fixing electronic equipment, he says, was not it. (He notes that he paid $25 a month for a three-room apartment in St. Louis, which he eventually split with a roommate.)

His attention turned toward counterculture ideas burgeoning in the 1970s. During this time, Fobes says he was less interested in discrete political issues than an overall way of living. “The Whole Earth Catalog would probably spell out my views,” he explains. “The world would be a better place if people could go back to the land, explore different cultures … what does it mean to be human?”

Founded and edited by Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog was like a proto-Google — a catalog of suppliers, an encyclopedia and magazines with community commentary and input. The catalog covered everything from raising rabbits to avoiding a “bum trip” from LSD, solar energy to reviews of futuristic inventor Buckminster Fuller’s books. The back-to-the-land ethos of the Whole Earth Catalog and its emphasis on self-sufficiency — such as growing your own food, rather than working longer hours in order to buy that food in a grocery store — resonates with him to this day.

In late 1984, Fobes moved to Western North Carolina, following his parents, who had recently retired here. In 1987, he attended a meeting of the newly formed local chapter of the Green Party. The party’s 10 key values — among them “think globally, act locally, postpatriarchal, nonviolence, grassroots economy” — resonated and spurred his interest in “getting the word out.” The Green Party was  nascent at that time in the U.S.

“I thought, well, you guys need a newspaper — you’ve got to get the word out,’” Fobes continues. “And they said, ‘You mean a newsletter?’ I said, ‘No, you need a newspaper.’ Newsletters are for talking to yourselves. Newspapers talk to the community.”

His Green Party friends thought a newspaper — Green Line, which was founded in 1987 —  sounded like too much work, Fobes says. He assured them it would not be.

How wrong he was. Green Line was the precursor to Mountain Xpress, which was founded in 1994.

“That was the beginning of my career, even though I said I didn’t want a career,” Fobes says. “Even in the late ’90s, I was still saying, ‘I don’t want a career.’ But at that point, I realized maybe, maybe I have one.”