Changing of the Guard

As New Mexico's state legislature waded through routine business in the closing hours of its 1957 session last March, a tough-talking, cigar-worrying statehouse reporter for the Santa Fe New Mexican (circ.11,710) scented a far-from-routine story. What awoke the newsman's curiosity in Reporter Neil Addington, during a discussion of a $221,000 appropriation bill for the National Guard of New Mexico (4,000 officers and men), was the evasiveness with which officials who had drawn up the budget answered lawmakers' questions about such standout items as a $14,000-a-year telephone bill. Though the legislature had been setting new records for parsimony, it cut less than $5,000 from the total requested by the Guard.

Neil Addington, 32, a Marine Corps machine gunner in World War II, promptly trained his sights on the National Guard and, by a well-aimed series of disclosures in the New Mexican, blew up a statewide scandal involving the highhanded misuse of thousands of dollars in state funds, compounded by unbelievably lax state auditing procedures. Last week, after a week's airing before a legislative committee, the Guard's Adjutant General Charles Gurdon Sage, 62, a veteran of Bataan./- Japanese prison camps and 38 years as a guardsman, resigned under fire. The Guard's shenanigans were under investigation by the state attorney general, state finance director, Sante Fe district attorney and Santa Fe county grand jury.

Power-Mower Play. On his own investigation. Neil Addington, a stocky (5 ft. 7 in.), Kansas-born reporter whose close-to-the-skull haircuts have earned him the nickname "Bones," at first drew little sympathy and considerable skepticism from lawmakers or state officials. In eleven years as state adjutant general--under Republican and Democratic governors--respected General Sage, an old newspaperman himself (publisher of the weekly Deming Graphic), had fortified his post by appointing relatives of many potent political figures to his staff. When Addington started digging into the operations of Sage's elite, several of his key informants received anonymous telephone threats. Addington himself was warned to lay off or be knocked off. He was pleased. "When people start threatening," he said, "then you know they're scared."

The first hints of the Guard's financial maneuverings were printed in a blustery political column in the New Mexican that is traditionally bylined El Chivo (The Goat). The goat-writer: Bones Addington. Columnist Addington used his anonymous goat-butts to rout out productive leads for Reporter Addington. Example: in the midst of his disclosures, half a dozen calls told of nighttime removals of state-owned power mowers and home freezers from Guard officers' homes; Sage later admitted that he himself had returned a freezer. Addington also uncovered many state vouchers that had been falsified to permit unallowable purchases.

Checks & Errors. Newsman Addington's biggest break was the discovery last month that 21 National Guard officers (whose names were front-paged by the New Mexican) had each been listed as receiving $63 in per diem allowances for attending a flood-survival school that was never held. In another case, four officers were credited with separate expense checks for a period in which they were supposed to have simultaneously 1) taken part in rescue operations in the remote Upper Pecos, 2) enforced a statewide highway safety check, and 3) attended an encampment at Fort Bliss, Texas. Bones Addington, who has won three New Mexico Press Association awards for investigative reporting, also established that several of the phony checks had mysteriously been cashed without ever being turned over to the officers named.

Soon after acknowledging that some funds were "paid in error," General Sage had his attorney give back to the state $1,673 and offer to make full restitution for any other "irregular" dealings. Along with Adjutant General Sage, two other high officers also resigned last week. But Bones Addington was not in the city room to write the climax. When he heard of the impending resignations, he headed off on a long-delayed fishing trip, satisfied that his story was pretty much told.

/- Where he was taken prisoner along with nearly 2,000 other New Mexicans in the 200th Coast Artillery biggest contingent from a single state captured by the Japanese in World War II.

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