Roundup music columnist strikes discordant note

Back in the days of the print Gazette we “lost” a couple columnists to the Roundup – Jinx Pyle and D.J. Craig. Jinx told us he was leaving because the Roundup promised to let him “get political” – a decision they would soon come to regret.

Craig is another story. Always a lightweight, his column was something that appealed to people with way too much time on their hands. We happily replaced him with Kelly Watts whose musical knowledge easily eclipsed that of Craig.

But Craig was harmless enough – until last Friday’s column. What we usually get from Craig is drivel. What we got on Friday was a false and scurrilous attack on the good ladies who inhabit the Payson Unified School District office. Using his handy-dandy alphabetical list of song titles, Craig launched on the higher property taxes we’re all paying this year for our schools.

He claimed he went to the district office where he talked to a “young” secretary who “winked” and told him “Wait Till Next Year” and “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.”

Easy to dismiss as just more drivel? Not this time. Because D. J. Craig made up (or imagined) his encounter with a young secretary at the district office. Pardon me (and no offense to the secretaries at the district office, including The Consort), but not one qualifies as young and not one saw the likes of D.J. Craig.

Best case scenario – Craig was making it all up to have a little (very little) fun with his alphabetical list of songs. Worse case scenario – implying that district employees have a cavalier, in-your-face attitude about taxes paid by residents is unfair and unethical.

We would call for Craig’s removal as a Roundup columnist, but, alas, the Roundup tends not to listen to us. Besides, we’d like to think that the increasing putrefying pile of D.J. Craig-type journalism will eventually do the Roundup in.

If we were Craig, we’d reply “That’ll Be the Day.” But we’d also apologize to the district office employees in a future column.