worked for the Spirit, whether there at that first house on Russell Street or in the offices on Broad or now here in the yellow building on Washington Road. Has it all been smooth sailing? Of course not. The Spirit has never been immune to the ebb and flow of talent and the fickle ticks of the market. There have been embarrassments and mistakes and the occasional clueless blunder, but always there has been that commitment to factual reporting and a clear-eyed understanding of our role, and because of that continuity, the paper has evolved into something larger than the people who have managed it. David Vantrease sold to Portico. Portico eventually sold to White. And the paper keeps soldiering on. Eventually, a paper takes on a life of its own, because after a certain amount of time it’s about the paper, not the people associated with it. The personalities become caretakers, simply parts of a whole. Offices move, people come and go, but the culture remains. As you look at the faces of just a few of our past employees, keep in mind this little bit of institutional humor: you’re not really a part of the Spirit unless you’ve left and come back. Over the years, the masthead of the Spirit has been littered with retreads. In fact, three of the four members of the paper’s current creative team are former employees. The fourth? He was two years old when the first Spirit rolled off the presses, so you can’t really hold it against him. Besides, there’s time. The paper’s not going anywhere. The reasons for such recidivism are pretty clear. It takes a particular type of person to work in such a fast-paced environment, one not easily fatigued or offended. The atmosphere is at once incredibly silly and incredibly serious.
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The stakes are high and there’s no net to catch you, but the freedom and solidarity are intoxicating. Really, only those who have faced the challenge of putting out a paper each week, every week, know the glorious and appalling addiction of it all. Each Thursday the slate is wiped clean. A fresh start every week. You don’t find that anywhere else, and once you’ve had it, it’s tough not to want it again. Plus, the Spirit has never had those adults frowning from the sidelines. You know the ones. They stand there with their arms folded in sour disapproval, waiting for someone to demonstrate too much exuberance. Everyone at the Spirit has had a certain playfulness and sense of fun which has allowed them to mesh together and form a family. Dysfunctional, sometimes and certainly nontraditional, but a family nonetheless. Successs at the Spirit is all about loving the job and fitting in, and the only way you can fit in is to love the job.
So here we are, a 22-year-old publication that’s a little over three months out of the cradle, a purely print publication in an ever-growing digital world. And we like it that way. Our philosophy on the Information Age is that it’s about the information, not the delivery system. The people who focus on content are the ones who will be successful. Methods of delivery will rapidly evolve, but no matter how miniaturized or digitalized or pixilated, we Augustans are still going to be eating in restaurants and going to the movies and hitting the cafes and moving around town. And we’re still going to be picking up Metro Spirits. Therefore, we we’re not going to join the race. We’ll just concentrate on what we’re already doing and let everyone else figure it out. We can do that because, contrary to what everyone assumes, there’s no shame in not being on the internet. Honestly. The only complaints we’re
favor for the paper that was then called the Metropolitan Spirit. “One day I walked in and she said, ‘I would like you, Randy, to design the logo for the Metropolitan Spirit,’” he said. “’I want you to design the Spirit.’” The two, he said, had already discussed the fact that while the formal name would be the Metropolitan Spirit, Vantrease really wanted to focus on the “Spirit” part of the name. Still unsure, Lambeth said Vantrease eventually didn’t give him much of a choice in the matter. “She said, ‘Randy get in there!’ She had these rooms with tables, I guess you’d call them interrogation rooms. She put me in one of these rooms and said, ‘Don’t come out of there until you’ve got a logo for the Spirit,’” he said. “I went in there and she slammed the door shut.” While she was in a meeting, however, inspiration struck. “I snuck out and went to the secretary at the front desk. I just came up with this wild idea,” Lambeth said. “I said, ‘Do you have one of those old-timey ink jars with the stopper with the ink thing down at the bottom with the hook?’ Durn if she didn’t produce exactly that.” Using the stopper and hook, Lambeth began writing. “I wrote ‘Spirit’ over and over and over again,” he said. “Just all kinds of ways, not in rows or anything, but actually here and there on various typewriter paper. Only on one side, you know, because it [the ink] soaked through.” After a while, Lambeth picked his seven favorites, cut them out and delivered them to Vantrease. “I walked in and put them down and said, ‘Well there you go. There’s my design,’” he said. “I don’t think she was expecting that be she said alright and I was out the door.” Next thing Lambeth knew, his work was gracing a billboard on one of the busiest roads in town. “So that was that,” he said. Well, almost. Lambeth recalled a time, after Alice Vantrease sold the paper to her ex-husband, David Vantrease, when he noticed something a bit odd. “They tried copying it one time and I called up David and I said, ‘I know you did wrong. You got someone to copy my Spirit,’ because I could tell,” he said. “It looked just like it, but I knew it wasn’t mine.” The original, however, is all Lambeth.
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