To the brink and back

ON THE LATHE: John Woods working at one of his passions, wood turning. Picture by Jason Burgess

Two bankruptcies and three businesses going into receivership were bumps in the road for publisher John Woods but didn’t slow the workaholic and his hedonistic lifestyle . . . a massive stroke 11 years ago gave him pause, but it wasn’t until 2018 that the message to look after himself for his family finally got through. He talks to John Gillies.

Journalist and publisher John Woods pulls no punches when he talks about the lifestyle that nearly killed him.

Twice he’s gone bankrupt; three times he’s had businesses that went into receivership.

He fuelled a workaholic temperament with an alcoholic habit, and drank himself to the brink of death.

That he is alive today is testament to the quick, decisive action his family took in a crisis, and to the skill of the nurses, doctors and surgeons who treated him. His recovery is down to the expertise of those who oversaw his rehabilitation.

July 21, 2018, was the day John Woods turned his life around.

It was during a week he spent in the intensive care unit of Gisborne Hospital.

“A young American doctor told me how lucky I was to still be alive and said, ‘If you don’t change your lifestyle you will go home in a box’,” Woods said.

“She was the one who drilled into me, ‘Wake up. You have a huge, beautiful family. You need to pull yourself together for their sake’.”

Woods, 70, has six children, two step-children he considers his own, and 17 grandchildren. He married Liz, his second wife, in 2000. He says his drinking contributed to the break-up of his first marriage, to Annette.

His family sustained him through hard times.

“The first time I went broke almost pushed me over the edge,” he said.

“I hung on because I had a large brood of kids. I have always had to remember that.

“The first disease I got was being a workaholic. I’ve been broke three times in my business career. Every time the only way out was to roll my sleeves up and work harder and smarter, learning from the mistakes.”

Woods has had his successes, too.

His community papers were among the first in New Zealand to change from letterpress to offset printing, and his magazine groups were among the first in the country to embrace computer-to-plate technology.

A side effect of changes in the industry was the need to retrain and redeploy print media journalists and production people, and Woods played a role there, too, finding alternative work for them.

John Woods went to primary school in Waiouru, New Plymouth Boys’ High as a boarder and, for his last year at secondary school, Ōpōtiki College.

“My father, Gordon Woods, served his time in the navy, and after World War 2 he joined the civilian navy – a communications arm of the Ministry of Defence,” John Woods said.

A “huge operation” sprawling around the Desert Road wasteland at Waiouru handled radio communications for the ministry. Gordon Woods worked as a radio technician and would take young John along with him on jobs at radio stations that operated with old valve technologies.

“My father retired from the civilian navy and started up in business as a self-employed wood and coal merchant in Waiouru. From there he became a publican in Ōpōtiki and Tauranga.

“My mother, Lena Woods, ran a business while also managing the TAB branch at Waiouru. In Tauranga, she and Dad owned and operated a hotel.

“In ‘retirement’, Mum was a manager of nurses’ homes for the Tauranga Hospital. She was very capable and very productive.

“We had a strong streak of entrepreneurism in our family.”

In 1970, John Woods started as a cadet reporter on the Thames Star, a community daily then owned by INL. After half a year there, he was a full-time student in the journalism school at Wellington Polytechnic in 1971, then had a brief spell back at the Thames Star.

In 1972 and ’73 he was a general reporter with the Waikato Times; in ’73 and ’74 he was with the Bay of Plenty Times; and from ’75 to ’77 he was with the New Zealand Herald, in its Tauranga branch office. From there he went back to the Thames Star as editor, in ’78 and ’79.

In 1979, he started an opposition regional newspaper to the Thames Star – the Hauraki Herald.

“It did very well until I sold out to INL in 1982,” Woods said.

“From there I bought the Huntly Press and the Bay Sun in Tauranga. That purchase included the Te Puke Times. I continued publishing them until 1985, when I sold the whole group to New Zealand News Ltd owned by Brierleys.

“Then in 1986 and ’87 I went into advertising and had an agency in Auckland and Tauranga called Arrow Advertising. In 1987 – because of the stock market crash – I went broke, owing millions.”

In 1988 he borrowed from his mother “to get going again”. He bought the Ruapehu Bulletin in Ohakune, and got into publishing magazines such as Adventure and New Zealand Skier. But the ground-breaking move was his founding of New Zealand Geographic, a quarterly journal.

“I learned to be a good salesman,” Woods said.

“With the Geographic we sold very expensive pages of advertising to fund it and then we had the boom of “lifetime” subscription sales.

“To get the material editorially, we commissioned a huge string of freelance photo-journalists to write and photograph our stories.

“I had a good network among journalists through my newspaper career and through my early foray into magazines. I knew a lot of people and had a very talented editor, Kennedy Warne, who was my production manager at the Thames Star. He was a super-intelligent academic and zoologist who took up photo-journalism and joined me straight from university.

“I had learned right from my years in Thames about desktop publishing techniques. We were able to design and publish NZ Geographic using those desktop publishing skills.

“We grew so big so fast with NZ Geographic that we incurred huge printing costs we couldn’t sustain. I ended up going broke a second time. The magazine was sold to new owners, who promptly re-employed me to help them.

“I went into contract publishing special-interest magazines for Diners Club and Ansett airlines. I wrote books, one of them being Highway 35, which became a finalist in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards.

“I diverted — through over-indulgence in the good life — into a new career as an alcoholic, which resulted in some health issues.

“When things went bad for me, I took a job with the government for the first time in my life — it beats working.

“Around 2003 I went to Wellington, working for Te Puni Kokiri as a communications adviser.

“Because I was ambitious and had too much to say for myself, I was seconded to Parliament to be press secretary for John Tamihere, a cabinet minister in the Helen Clark government. I did that until he was sacked for talking out of turn and all of his staff were made redundant. That was about 2005.

“I decided to get back into media and newspapering. I saw a job in the Dominion for editor of the Cook Islands News in Rarotonga. I applied and got it. I took my wife and one child, the youngest of six, to live in Rarotonga. Two years later, when my contract ended, the owner said to me, ‘You get on well with everyone here; why don’t you stay and take over my business.’

“I said, ‘I would if I had some money but I have been broke so many times I can’t contemplate it.’

“He said, ‘I will help’, which he did.

“My wife and I borrowed money to buy a little business with a dozen staff. It publishes six days a week. We built it up, paid it off within the first three years and continue to own it and publish it with a staff now of 20, who include six journalists; most of whom are New Zealanders and Fijians.

“Publishing news in a country like the Cook Islands is fraught with all sorts of challenges and difficulties, which include dealing with systemic corruption, the worst form of which is manifested in nepotism in the public sector.

“We run a lot of dangerous material, and spend a fortune on the services of a libel and defamation barrister in Auckland.

“We print 2000 copies a day. They go to five islands, mainly around Rarotonga. We sell it in all the shops on the island and shops on five of the islands that have air services. Some of the northern group get bundles of papers by ship. We have places on the other islands where there is a reading room.

“We now have a very successful online presence and we’re trying to sell subscriptions to that. CookIslandsNews.com is garnering hundreds of thousands of readers for us every day.

“Cook Islands is one of those Polynesian countries which has more expatriate members of its population than are at home — 50,000 in Australia, 50,000 in New Zealand, another 40,000 elsewhere in the world — and they are a big portion of our market. We have 10,000 readers in Rarotonga and 5000 in the outer islands, and at any one time 3000 to 4000 visitors. We think we have between 10 and a dozen readers per copy. They get passed over the fence.

“All the fun and games came to a horrible end for me in 2012, when one Friday I had a mini stroke . . . a TIA (transient ischemic attack).

“I couldn’t speak. My wife took me to the hospital. The young doctor said, ‘I think you have had a stroke, but could you come back on Monday’. He gave me some blood thinners. Liz said, ‘Stuff this’, and went back to the office and bought a ticket to Auckland, where we saw a series of specialists.

“She had wanted to have a CAT scan done. On the Monday we saw a GP in Auckland. He sent me to several specialists and they did not just a CAT scan but an MRI to confirm that I had blocked arteries . . . so blocked I needed a triple bypass. They put me straight into hospital. I had the bypass but during recovery I went into atrial fibrillation and my heart wouldn’t get its rhythm back. The second night in hospital after surgery I was going to the loo and tripped over my island jandals, fell to the ground and had a massive stroke.

“The right-brain injury was so bad that one hand and leg would not co-operate and I couldn’t really talk.

“We spent another three months in Auckland. I went through serious rehab where I learned to walk and talk again.

“We returned to Rarotonga but I found it difficult. I had lost my ability to touch-type and my shorthand capability died overnight. I have gone since gone back to two-finger typing.

“I am very lucky. I survived. Fatigue is a side-effect of the stroke. Not only do I dribble, but I can’t swallow easily.

“I foolishly carried on with heavy drinking and, facing the fact I couldn’t really operate and we had kids here saying we want you home, we came back to New Zealand in 2013.

“We ended up running the business remotely, my wife on financial control and me controlling the editorial side and production. A printing factory is attached to the business.

“My drinking was never really under control. I tried everything but I couldn’t do it. In 2018 I went home from the Wainui Store and couldn’t get out of the car because I was having another stroke.

“Somehow I forced the door open, crawled to the door of the house and grunted like a wounded seal until my 18-year-old son heard me. He and my wife came to my aid and called an ambulance in time for me to get to Gisborne Hospital, where — thanks to a couple of very talented doctors — I was given a treatment called thrombolysis to stop the stroke. (Thrombolysis uses medication or a minimally invasive procedure to break up blood clots and prevent new clots from forming.)

“Within one hour of that treatment I was able to speak and the stroke stopped and I have lived to tell the story.”

John Woods spent a week in the intensive care unit, where the young American doctor gave him the talking-to that triggered a change in direction.

“On July 21, 2018, I quit substances then and there,” Woods said.

“Thanks to my good wife, I put myself through a rehab and addiction facility in South Auckland, where I gained some new skills, mostly the art of mindfulness, the art of daily meditation and the preparation of a wellness tool kit. I identified all the things to which I could divert my energies to keep me sober and straight. I am glad to say that has worked.

“I decided to go to EIT to study commercial cooking and that is where I gained my London City and Guilds certificate in commercial cookery.

“I have also graduated from the wananga here in Level 4 whakairo carving. I love woodwork. I am a wood turner and I haven’t touched substances for nearly five years, and in the past 1860 days I have managed to restore all my relationships with my family.

“I wake up sober every day and I love life.

“I have been involved in men’s mental health activities, and programmes for suicide survivors and families of suicide victims. I am an active member of Tairāwhiti Stroke Survivors . . . Stroke Foundation were the people who rehabilitated me after my first stroke.

“What would I change? The level of risk. I would make it smaller and I would be more careful and be more prudent and circumspect with financial control. I am lucky that I have a wife who is very good with money management.

“We have shared parent roles with a huge whānau of kids and grandchildren. It keeps us focused and unified.

“Recovery has been good.”