Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

Or
If Bill Ormsby's life sounds more like fiction than fact, it's strictly coincidental.
"I don't even think like fiction,” he said.
A retired writer who once spent 12 years living and writing in a rusty van outfitted with a
file cabinet, desk and stove while he crisscrossed the country in pursuit of material for hard-hitting
detective magazines and tabloids, he's owned a weekly newspaper, been arrested for pursuing
what he felt was the public's right to know, cooked on off-shore oil rigs, gone to sea on merchant
ships and "bummed around Mexico and Guatemala.”
These days, as he nears his 74th birthday, Ormsby finds himself content to stay in his
Yellow Creek Lake cottage where he keeps busy remodeling, fishing, gardening, painting and
learning the intricacies of using a computer while he writes a book.
As a reporter, Ormsby covered the news. But he became news after he attempted to enter
a school board's executive session and police were called when he refused to leave.
"Three new members had been elected but they hadn't taken office yet," Ormsby said.
"The board called an executive session and asked those three to sit in. I figured if they were
allowed to attend, I'd go too. They said I couldn't.
"It took them an hour to decide to have me arrested. I was a friend of the sheriff and
when he came, he leaned over and said, ‘Come on, Bill, lets go.' That's all there was to it.” But the
angle of an area newspaper's picture made it appear Ormsby had been evicted bodily and the story
was 00picked up by The Associated Press and United Press International.
His charge, 'trespassing public property,' marked the first time a reporter had been
arrested for refusing to leave a school board meeting.
Response was immediate. A news organization in Washington offered to put up the
money for his defense. Reporters from newspapers all over the country called for information.
He was represented by counsel from the Hoosier Press Association, but by the time he
eventually sold his weekly paper, the case still hadn't been tried and charges were dropped. “I
don't know yet if it was legal," Ormsby said. "I had a lot of controversial stuff while I had my
paper but I was never sued. The best defense for libel is truth."
Ormsby was a high school drop-out completing a military tour of duty when the sale of
an article to a trade journal for $10 convinced him his future lay in journalism. After his
discharge, he used a copy of the article to help wangle a job on a newspaper in his native Kansas.
His first assignment, covering a local football game in a drenching rain, left him soaked
to the skin until.he decided to write the story at home while listening to the play-by-play coverage
on the radio. His infuriated editor fired him. "He said I'd never make it as a writer," Ormsby said.
That was all the incentive the 23-year-old needed. "I decided I'd show him,” he said.
He completed high school, then entered Butler University on the GI Bill. “I took all the
journalism classes I could,” he said.
Eventually, he decided to start a newspaper of his own - the Gas City Reporter - in spite
of the town's already well-established weekly. A few years after the Reporter was sold, it was
merged with the other paper to become the Journal-Reporter.
In 1975, Ormsby took to the road in his trusty van/office after his marriage ended and the
paper was sold. "I drove from Maine to California and Florida and all places in between,” he said.
"I wintered in Mexico, California and Arizona.”
When, after years spent at a typewriter, he decided he'd rather go to sea than write, he
turned to cooking and working on oil rigs, tug boats and supply boats out of New Orleans and
Morgan City, taking breaks in Mexico and Guatemala.
"It got to where I didn't appreciate it any more," he said. "I came to Yellow Creek in
1987 to spend the winter. I just stayed.” Of his book, Ormsby simply says, "It's the story of my
life. I’m writing it mostly for my kids.” But, he said, the book will be strictly factual. “I can't
think 'what if.' I only think 'what is.’”
[Rochester Sentinel, Wednesday, October 8, 1997]
ORPHANS, CHILDREN OF FRANCE [Rochester, Indiana]