For three decades, West Virginia journalist Thomas F.TomStafford lived the letter the old investigative reporter’s adage of breaking and covering stories thatcomfort the afflicted while afflicting the comfortable.

And now the West Virginia University Press is releasing a memoir by the venerable Beckley and Charleston reporter who died in 1993.

Afflicting the Comfortable: Journalism and Politics in West Virginia,is Stafford’s steely look at the administrations of governors Matthew Neely, ClarenceFatsMeadows, Okey Patteson, William Casey Marland, Cecil Underwood, William WallaceWallyBarron, Hulett Smith, Arch Moore, Jay Rockefeller and Gaston Caperton.

Stafford stirs the good, bad and ugly of Mountain State politics from the 1940s through the 1990s, and also takes readers on a klieg light-country road side trip into 1960the year John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey duked it out here for the Democratic Party primary and a shot at the White House.

From the crushing poverty and strike wars of the southern coalfields to the backlash of Brown v. the Board of Education, Stafford was there with his notebook to chronicle the human condition in the Mountain State .

And his integrity and stubborn tenacity led to the uncovering of what would be the story of his career: theInvest Rightscandal of Barron’s administration, where it would come to light that the governor and several top aides had rigged state contracts and bids for other services in a web that tangled 17 different companies from Ohio to Florida .

The book is history, but it’s also very much alive with the spirit of Stafford, said Paul J. Nyden, an investigative reporter with The Charleston Gazette, where Stafford worked as a reporter and editor from 1954-66.

His integrity and courage sets an example for all reporters and for all citizens who treasure democratic government,Nyden said.

After graduating from WVU ’s Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism, Stafford joined the newsroom of Beckley’s Raleigh Register in 1936.

Following his service in the U.S. Navy in World War II, he returned to the Register, where he would be named editor. He later moved to the Charleston Gazette, where hisAffairs of Statecolumn was required reading in county courthouses across southern West Virginianot the mention the governor’s mansion.

Bleeding ulcers brought on by the chronic stress of a reporter’s life forced him to leave journalism in 1966. He reinvented himselfand worked 19 years as chief clerk for U.S. District Judge Robert E. Maxwell in Elkins.

He may have been out of the newsroom, said Sherry McGraw, the WVU Press’marketing director, but he still had his thumb on the pulse of West Virginia politics. And his breaking of the Barron story alone, McGraw said, makes him king of mountain among investigative reporters here.

Tom Stafford provides an amazing first-hand account of the robbing of the state for millions of dollars,she said.His closeness to the storyhis unflinching reportinggives an intimate look at this time in West Virginia’s history that readers just wouldn’t have, otherwise.

Stafford’s book is part of the WVU Press’ever-growingWest Virginia and Appalachiaseries that is looking at where the state’s been, and where it’s going. Recent titles includeClash of Loyalties,John Shaffer’s examination of the dilemma faced by border counties during the Civil War; andTransnational West Virginia,a study and celebration of the immigrant experience here by WVU professors Ronald L. Lewis and Kenneth Fones-Wolf.

For more information on the above books and other WVU Press titles, visitwww.wvupress.comor call 1-866-WVUPRESS.