“That guy died for $12.”

That’s what Darcy Wilt told me in a story I wrote for The Springfield News in February 1981. It’s taped into one of my clip books from that era, and surprisingly came to mind in an idle moment.

By Eric Mortenson  Nov 11  ||  ABOUT HALF SHOT

It was, after all, just one story among thousands in a couple dozen clip books I compiled over 37 years at five Oregon newspapers. The shooting, outside a Springfield tavern called The Pour House, of course, certainly wasn’t national news. Even statewide, I doubt it merited more than a couple of paragraphs if the Associated Press bothered to pass it along. “Police rule shooting self-defense,” that sort of thing.

But it was a pretty big story for us, the hometown paper.

The story surfaced when I was trying to remember how many people I’d interviewed who had killed someone. At least four convicted murderers, that I could think of, including Diane Downs, who shot her three children in 1982, killing one. Then there were a couple cops who had shot people in the line of duty, as they say.

The ones that stuck with me emotionally were two veterans who had killed people in combat. One was an anguished World War II veteran who cried as he described killing two German soldiers during the push across the Rhine following D-Day, 50 years before. “To take a human life…” he gasped.

The other veteran shot a Viet Cong soldier during the Tet Offensive in 1968, and quietly recalled how the man’s hair stood on end from the impact of the M-16 bullet. Then there was the guy, a former college wrestler on “business” in Central America, who disarmed a pair of would-be robbers and shot them both dead. He got a bullet hole through his right tennis shoe, as I recall. He was wearing them when I interviewed him. One editor insisted the guy must have been a CIA agent on some nefarious mission, but I didn’t have any way of finding out. He told me he was a lumber broker.

And I remembered Darcy Wilt, too.

In my early days of journalism I cut my stories out of the newspaper with scissors and taped them into spiral notebooks by category: Cops, Courts, Fires, County Government, Miscellaneous. Nothing was online then, so paper records were all we had. When updating ongoing stories I often needed to go back and double-check names, dates, charges and so on.

The paper had a receptionist who maintained our clipping files, but she was typically two weeks behind and I usually needed background information immediately, on deadline. So after six months on the job I bought a spiral notebook and started keeping my own clips.

Darcy Wilt lives in that first clip book.

I covered cops, like I said, and every weekday morning drove a circuit to read dispatch logs and overnight reports at the Springfield Police Department, Springfield Fire Department, Lane County Sheriff’s Office and the regional patrol office of the Oregon State Police. At the Springfield News we pretended like Eugene, the much larger city next door, didn’t exist. I didn’t visit the Eugene cops unless some Springfielder caused newsworthy trouble there.

At the Springfield Police Department I learned there’d been an early morning attempted robbery and fatal shooting in the parking lot of The Pour House, then primarily frequented by rough and tumble mill workers and loggers, back when the timber industry was boom shaka-laka. Darcy Wilt, then 29, was from Marcola, a town about 14 miles northeast of Springfield and even higher up the rowdy redneck scale.

Being an industrious and easily excitable rookie on the cops beat, I jumped when I saw the shooting on the patrol log. The cops and the district attorney — long live DA J. Pat Horton — quickly said Wilt was in the clear. “It looks like a robbery. He was trying to ward them off and the gun went off,” J. Pat said. “No charges of any kind have been filed against the guy.”

Then I called The Pour House, which I think had just opened for the day, and the bartender answered. I told him who I was and I wondered if anybody there had seen anything or knew what happened last night with this Darcy Wilt fellow. Some people tried to rob him in the parking lot?

“Well he’s sittin’ right here, you can ask him yourself,” the bartender said, and he handed the phone to Darcy Wilt.

I told Darcy Wilt who I was and said I sure would like to talk to him about what happened. He said that would be OK and I said I’d be right down there to the tavern. Because I thought, jeezus christ, we need a picture of him, too.

Me and Darcy stood out in the parking lot and talked. He told me what happened and I took his mug shot. He’s looking straight into the lens.

He said he was in the tavern when a woman walked in about 1 a.m. She and Darcy Wilt quickly struck up a conversation and then headed outside to his pickup. For the life of me I don’t remember if I even asked him about her ploy. Did she ask him for a ride, invite him out to smoke a joint or maybe offer him sex for money?

Whatever the case, Darcy told me they were walking to his pickup at the rear of the tavern when he noticed two men sitting in a car with the windows down, on a February night. “I felt something was wrong,” he said.

The two men approached from behind, one carrying .22 caliber pistol and the other a nightstick.

“What’s going down?” Darcy asked, and the guy with the pistol said, “I think you know,” and stuck it up beside Darcy’s head. “It was cocked and everything,” Darcy told me.

He told me he only had $12 in his wallet. He grabbed the gun and twisted it backwards, and it went off. He pulled the pistol away from the man and hit him with it as the guy fell.

“I never knew he was shot,” Darcy told me. “I thought it went off in the air somewhere.”

The partner whacked Darcy on the head with the nightstick, then hit him across the back, knocking him to the pavement. Darcy scrambled to his feet and pointed the gun at the man. “I’ll shoot you, you son-of-a-bitch!” he yelled. The man dropped the stick and ran off. The woman took off, too, but the cops arrested both of them later that night.

The best part came when those two split the parking lot, but Darcy Wilt stayed.

He’d been convicted 10 months earlier of criminal mischief and fourth-degree assault, and was on probation that February night. The cops were on the way. Decision time.

“I figured I was in the right this time,” he told me, “and I’d stick it out.”

The robber who got shot when Darcy twisted the gun on him was taken to a hospital and died about five hours later. Cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.

And Darcy Wilt went back to The Pour House tavern when it opened the next day.

“I guess I should feel sorry about it but I don’t,” he told me as we stood in the parking lot. “That guy died for $12.”

A couple weeks later, at a staff meeting, the managing editor held up a copy of my Darcy Wilt story and said, by God, it was great work and the type of story he would be proud to show people if they wondered what The Springfield News was capable of. We always held our major staff meetings at a bar, so the editor might have been lit up a little bit. I know I was when he said it.

The editor was Bob Caldwell, like me a native Oregonian and something of a good old boy, from La Grande. He rose up the management ranks at various newspapers and years later became head of the editorial board at The Oregonian, the state’s largest paper. I ended up working there, too. Bob was a notable figure in Oregon journalism, in part for reasons you can look up yourself, if you don’t know already.

But anyway, the other day I was thinking about people I’d interviewed who had killed someone, remembered Darcy Wilt and started looking for him. I thought it would be interesting to contact him and learn how his life went after that February night in the tavern parking lot. He’d be 73, I figured.

But I quickly found out he’d died in 2009, apparently of heart failure. An obituary posted on findagrave.com called him by the nickname of “The Mayor,” so I’m guessing he turned out to be a colorful character in the Marcola area. Darcy “The Mayor” Wilt, it said.

He’d served in the Marines after high school and worked as a logger in Alaska and in the Mohawk Valley, as the greater Marcola area was called. He was married and had two daughters. The obituary didn’t say he’d killed a guy who tried to rob him.

The 1993 photo of “Darcy Wilt’s Open Air Tavern” in Marcola was a joke, because it consisted of a sign and a cooler most likely full of beer. Darcy is on the right, with suspenders.

The color photo must have been taken much later. He looks somewhat gaunt, and I wonder if that was the heart disease beginning to take a toll. He’s looking straight into the lens, but the wary challenge is gone from his eyes. I know it’s conjecture on my part, but he looks at peace. About to make a wisecrack.

So that’s what happened to Darcy Wilt, who has stared out from my 1981 clip book for the past 43 years. He hung around the small town he’d grown up in, and was such a constant and familiar character that people called him “The Mayor.” I hope he had no more serious trouble with others and didn’t cause any himself, because he was in the right that time and stuck it out.

Pacific Northwest writer who worked 37 wondrous years as a reporter at Oregon newspapers. I write about Oregon, family, journalism, politics, pets, bad golf, gardening, cooking and running.