Saga of Milo Sorghum: Part II: Back to the Valley

A few months after the farm editor incident, Milo Sorghum returned to the Valley.

It was shortly after the pseudo farm editor was provided with an offer to return to the Valley as the newspaper's first staff bureau chief.

Although our hero was honored, he was a bit hesitant when making the decision, preferring to hang onto his cushy feature writing-farm page editing post. But that was before the newsroom godfather made it clear to him the transfer was an offer he could not refuse.

During their conversations, something about no more feature writing and night police beat surfaced for a moment. That coupled with an offer of substantial remuneration tipped the scales.

At that time the Valley bureau involved providing news and photographic coverage of the cities and various governmental agencies of the Imperial Valley and the government of the Mexican state of Baja California del Norte which has its capital in Mexicali.

The staff of the bureau provided enough news stories, features and photographs to fill the Valley section, usually a page and a half to two pages of space.

When the decision was made to use a staff member as bureau chief, it was agreed there should be a second full-time news staffer assigned to the bureau. In addition, the bureau news personnel included a Valley oldtimer who was an El Centro City Councilman, the El Centro mayor's wife who along with her women's section work did some news writing, an intern and a couple of stringer photographers.

Despite all the news stories, features and photographs the bureau staff produced for each day's paper, there was a problem. It was unique among the paper's four county editions. In all other sections -- those covering the East County, North County and South County -- should there be a shortage of material to fill the day's news space, a story or photograph from the San Diego area or one of the other county editions could be used.

In the Valley, however, the space had to be filled with material from the Imperial Valley only.
And it was this peculiar problem that led to Milo Sorghum's return to the area of his birth.

Milo showed up one day after the bureau chief received a panicky call from the county editor, who said he had a three-inch hole and needed some kind of a filler story to plug it. Just as he had in San Diego when the pseudo farm editor was under the gun, Milo came to the newsman's rescue.

This time Milo came back to life as a farm equipment salesman, whose dealership (for a defunct tractor manufacturer at a non-existent address on Brawley's Eastside) had named him salesman of the year. Along with the financial reward, Milo was to be flown (on an airline which had ceased to exist) to a resort on a beach in Hawaii for a week. The item fit the space perfectly.

That started what would be several years of Milo's life in the pages of the Imperial County edition. Over those years, Milo would rise through the ranks of his farm equipment business until he was manager of the dealership. He would be active in community activities as a member and in various officer slots for a variety of fraternal and social organizations, each one that either did not exist in the Valley or anywhere else.

His kids would go off to little-known and non-existent colleges where they would be honored for their scholastic, athletic and other achievements. His wife would garner her share of plaudits from a variety of organizations, none of which existed in Brawley and usually nowhere else.

When it came time for the pseudo farm editor-bureau chief to leave the Valley for another job, he was faced with yet another dilemma: What would become of Milo?

Fortunately the bureau chief's successor offered to keep Milo alive, or as alive as Milo had ever been. After all, no one filled those hard-to-fill spaces like the aging equipment dealership manager, his family and his activities.

All went well for a year or so. Then Milo's keeper was provided with a job offer he could not refuse. Again the quandary: What about Milo?

Milo's second keeper came up with an amazing end to Milo's life story. It involved the family, while on vacation in the Midwest, having a ghastly accident. A tire on their car blew out, sending the the vehicle into a skid on the rural gravel road. There was no way to correct for the skid and the car and its occupants rocketed off the road, across a ditch and landed in a sewer treatment plant pond. It was several months before the sewer workers discovered the car and the Sorghum family.

The news of the family's demise, along with the information that there were no known survivors in the Valley, came in a story, which began: "Word has been received by friends of the Milo Sorghum family of Brawley of an accident that claimed the lives of Milo and Cornelia Sorghum and their son and daughter..."

The oddest part of the life and death of Milo Sorghum and his family was that not once during
his existence in the pages of the newspaper did one reader of the Imperial County edition or one editor of the pages ever question any of his antics or the non-existing organizations so vital to his life.

Next: Saga of Milo Sorghum: His spirit lives on