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Minnesota Monthly /  August 2007 /  The Power — and — piousness — and — frustration — and — sorrow of One

The Power — and — piousness — and — frustration — and — sorrow of One

How Cheryl Johnson became C.J., the most infamous Journalist in Minnesota

(page 2 of 4)

C.J. OCCUPIES a remote corner office at the Star Tribune cluttered with water bottles, dead flowers, paintings, a cutout cowboy, photos of family and celebrities (Mary Tyler Moore, Donny Osmond, Barack Obama), a dress pattern, three giant rolodexes, and several stacks of books (The Kennedy Tapes, Diana in Search of Herself, Your Guide to Total Health Care). She writes her column while perched on an ergonomic standing chair, and today she’s wearing what passes for her work uniform: black jeans, running shoes, a pedometer, and a green T-shirt on which she had printed “Evidence suggests that Strom Thurmond found black women irresistible.” A large ring of keys, anchored by a tyrannosaurus rex fob, hangs from her belt loop.

With three columns to fill each week, C.J. spends most of her waking hours trying to gather material—on the phone, in her car, or attending local events. Because the Twin Cities lacks the stable of A-list actors, rock stars, and heiresses that populate gossip columns in larger cities (even our professional athletes often live elsewhere), there are days when she has to, as she puts it, “make somebody who’s not so famous famous,” people like boxer/grillmaster George Foreman’s former wife, Adrienne Foreman-Jones, or Minneapolis salon owner Jon Richards.

 Often, she corners these not-so-famous people in not-so-glamorous places. One morning this past June, while traveling from Costco to her office, she stopped at a red light and noticed Rhea Isaacs, widow of American Iron and Steel Company founder Fred Isaacs, sitting in a black Range Rover one lane over. Rather than simply wave, C.J. honked her horn and motioned for Isaacs to lower her window. As the two cars idled on Hennepin Avenue, C.J. shouted: “Are you selling your house?”

Still, the primary focus of the column remains local broadcast-media personalities, and C.J. has made it her business to be in their business. Vascellaro, like many of his peers, considers such scrutiny “part of the job,” but that doesn’t mean he enjoys reading headlines like, Is Vascellaro’s hair real?

“It gets tiring after a while,” he says. “There have been a number of things in her column that I wish were not there. It goes with the job. Minnesota is the 14th-largest media market in the country, but we don’t have a lot of real celebrities.” (His hair, by the way, is real.)

Not everyone in the media is so accepting of C.J.’s interest in their lives, but most know that to ignore C.J. is to invite more attention, as any effort to avoid comment invariably becomes part of the story. “People call me in a panic when C.J. calls them,” says Vascellaro. “I advise them to simply call her back. I appreciate that she’s always given me the opportunity to tell my side of the story.”

“Scaredy-cat media people are endlessly entertaining,” C.J. says. “I get a kick out of those who don’t want to return calls—but themselves count on people to return calls. I like honesty. If you call me back and say, ‘I’m not going to tell you,’ that’s honest and I respect that—and you—in a small way.”

Yet picking up the phone doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll escape C.J.’s wrath, either. In one recent column, for example, she noted that KSTP-TV’s Anne Hutchinson was getting married. Hutchinson took C.J.’s call, but declined to talk about the nuptials. C.J. may have respected this display of candor, but she also devoted four paragraphs to retelling Hutchinson’s long history of previously avoiding comment.


WHEN PEOPLE WHO KNOW C.J. are asked about her, they invariably remark on her toughness, a quality that C.J. sometimes has to employ even while reading her mail. It seems that some Minnesotans aren’t all that nice when taken to account by a high-profile black woman, and C.J. tends to receive a steady stream of malicious phone and e-mail messages at the Star Tribune. (One particularly persistent guy called more than 600 times.) “We deny we’re racist here, but you can’t get as many ‘fucking nigger bitch’ e-mails and phone calls as I have without thinking that people here can be racist,” she says.

“The mail she gets is virulent, rabid garbage,” says FOX-TV evening news anchor Robyne Robinson, who is also black. “I don’t get the volume or the deep hatred she is victim to. It’s her cross to bear, and I admire how she handles it.”

Her ability to handle it, C.J. says, comes from growing up in the South during the early days of integration. “There were a lot of racist jerks who tortured us, but I didn’t have it as hard as a lot of people,” she says of her childhood in Montgomery, Alabama. “My mother is responsible for me not hating people who don’t look like me.”

The Johnson family valued achievement. Her mother had a career in public relations, and her father, one of the first blacks to earn a PhD (in entomology) at the University of Oklahoma, was a college professor. When C.J. was a teenager, he joined the faculty at Tuskegee University’s School of Veterinary Medicine. The children were expected to work hard at school and at home. “I didn’t grow up with a sense of entitlement,” C.J. says. “I credit my healthy detachment around celebrities to my upbringing and my mother not encouraging and indulging childhood whims.”

As an “innately curious” teenager, C.J. worked on what was then the nation’s only weekly public high-school newspaper, where she became the first black student to hold a management position. Even then she exhibited the traits for which she would later become infamous. “She liked to be in charge of whatever was going on,” says her mother, Barbara Harris. “She’s always been kind of bossy.”

When C.J. graduated from high school, her father insisted she attend a historically black college. But at Bennett College, a women’s school in Greensboro, North Carolina, she quickly alienated classmates by refusing to join a sorority—a staple of campus life—and writing about it in the student newspaper. “I said, ‘Bennett is a sorority, why specialize?’” she recalls. “As a result, I was ostracized. But I’ve always been a loner, happy by myself.”

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