Growing Up Gonzo: Excerpts From the Oral History of Hunter S. Thompson

Gene McGarr: "He headed north; he'd read in Editor & Publisher about a small-town newspaper that wanted a sports editor. He wrote them a letter, and they said to come up. This was a place called Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. Now, it turns out that Jersey Shore was just a bleak, hideous place with coal dist in the air. Dreadful, and no women in town that were worth looking at. Hunter got a room over a bar and started working for the paper, describing horse pulls and wrestling matches with 'Popo the Killer Jap' and all kinds of things with this peculiar Dadaist approach. Everybody knows how it's phony as baloney, but he played it straight. Well, not exactly straight; he was writing things like 'People were carried out of the ring with broken backs,' 'His neck was broken in three places' — stuff like that. Apparently nobody really cared whether it was true or not."