The work that earned the Point Reyes Light the Pulitzer gold medal for public service in 1979, for its “pioneering exposé of this quasi-religious corporate cult,” demonstrated the potency of local …
Dave Mitchell, the longtime editor of the Point Reyes Light, a weekly newspaper in Point Reyes, Calif., on April 26, 2006. David Mitchell, a muckraker whose tiny California newspaper challenged the violent drug rehabilitation cult Synanon and, as a result, became one of only a handful of weeklies to win a Pulitzer Prize, died Oct. 25 at his home in Point Reyes Station, California, in Marin County. He was 79.
It was said to have been only the fourth time since the prizes were first presented in 1917 that a weekly or one of its reporters won a Pulitzer. David Mitchell kept the medal in his office safe. The Light, a 16-page tabloid, had a circulation of about 3,000 and, in its best year, made a profit of about $17,000. It shared space with a shoe repair shop on block-long Main Street in Point Reyes Station, a peninsular town of some 400 people situated about 40 miles north of San Francisco and perched precariously on the San Andreas Fault.
The Mitchells wrote articles and editorials reporting on violence, terrorism and financial improprieties at Synanon. There were accounts that its founder, Charles Dederich, had demanded that men enrolled in the program undergo vasectomies and that pregnant women have abortions, and that hundreds of married couples switch partners.
“Probably the most important thing we’ve done, that I would take the most pride in, is helping the Mexican immigrants here become part of the mainstream,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2005. He taught at Marvel Academy in Rye, New York, and later taught speech and literature at Leesburg High School in Leesburg, Florida, where he joined a drive to register Black voters. He went on to teach English literature and journalism at Upper Iowa University in Fayette and later to work as a reporter for newspapers in Iowa and California.
In addition to his wife, Lynn, whom he married in 2018, he is survived by three stepdaughters from a previous marriage, Anika Zappa-Pinelo, Kristeli Zappa Monterroso and Shaili Zappa Monterroso; and two step-grandchildren.
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