(This chapter is excerpted from “Akron’s Daily Miracle,” copyright 2019, University of Akron Press

By Tim Smith

Sometime in late 1979, (memory dims after a couple weeks, let alone after 40 years), two Akron police detectives – Helmut Klemm and Sgt. Ed Duvall – were investigating the reappearance of handguns that were supposed to have been tossed into a blast furnace.  The story started developing after the Beacon Journal had run a series of stories about corruption in the sheriff’s office. The series was written by Dick McBane, the Beacon’s courthouse reporter, and Morse Diggs, the police reporter, joined by investigative reporter Keith McKnight, a curmudgeonly old bulldog I had hired from the Dayton Journal Herald (full disclosure: also my oldest friend).

McBane and Diggs had been hearing rumors about an investigation into guns missing from evidence lockers or maybe showing up in pawn shops. Klemm and Duvall started leaking stuff to Diggs about the guns and how deep into the courthouse their probe went. They also wanted us to run some blind-source stories about their suspicions, of course without offering any hard evidence and nothing they would stand behind.

Imagine our reluctance to participate. 

But Klemm and Duvall were serious cops, even if a little naïve about the news business and standards of proof prior to publication.  And, of course, they were cops.  They had the same trust level that lambs have with lions. (I doubt they would appreciate the imagery.)  Still, they were able to convince me that the probe could reach deeper into the courthouse than we had been led to believe, including to judges and major local political figures. 

After clearing their request with Editor Paul Poorman, I allowed the two cops to come to the newsroom on a Sunday afternoon when the place was vacant to examine our clip files on, among other topics, Probate Judge James V. Barbuto and Akron lawyer Robert Blakemore, the former county party chairman and a significant figure in state and national Democratic politics.  They were there for several hours and I made copies of numerous newspaper stories – called “clips” – that would later come back to haunt me (more on that below).

Though we were digging into the story, we weren’t moving fast enough for the cops, who decided to up the ante. In early 1980,  they invited the ABC-TV investigative show 20/20 – and its star Geraldo Rivera (a.k.a. Jerry Rivers before he became a TV icon) – to Akron to dig into the story.

We heard rumors that Geraldo had been spotted when I got a request to meet with his producer Charlie Thompson. (I remember talking to him in my BJ office, but I cannot remember how he got invited.) I was a newly minted night school lawyer (having passed the bar in `77) and one of my law-school favorite clichés came to mind: “You knew it was a snake when you picked it up.”

Charlie talked a good game about sharing and helping each other, but mostly he just kept trying to milk me for as much information as he could get about the main players we had been looking at for weeks.  What I didn’t know at the time was that the cops had already provided Thompson and his crew with copies of the clips I had given them.  I guess with the hindsight of 40 years, I can’t blame the cops. They didn’t trust anybody: the prosecutor, the judges, certainly not the Beacon Journal and probably not some of their fellow cops (some of whom got caught up in the gun probe).  And, hanging out with Geraldo was a lot cooler than some local newspaper reporters.

 It turned out that the gun probe was small potatoes compared to what the cops turned up on the local judge, Barbuto.  They had women who were willing to testify about being pressured for sex, but they wanted a special prosecutor to handle the case because they didn’t trust Prosecutor Stephan Gabalac, who had been Barbuto’s chief assistant before taking over when Barbuto was elected to the bench.  It didn’t help that Gabalac didn’t trust the cops, apparently fearing their agenda included bringing down as many Democratic officeholders as they could. 

In the midst of all this, 20/20 producer Thompson was going around town, bad-mouthing the Beacon Journal at every opportunity, including doing the occasional radio interview.  Taking shots at the local newspaper was always a popular game for other local media and some local politicians (except when they wanted an endorsement).  You could hardly blame them. By this time in the paper’s storied history, it was probably at the peak of its influence and near the top of its local reach, circulating in four counties, with bureaus in Stark, Medina and Portage counties besides the headquarters in Akron. 

The paper had long worked behind the scenes to influence issues in the city under the guidance of Executive Editor and Publisher Ben Maidenburg. Following his retirement, there was something of a revolving door in the editor’s office until Poorman was hired in 1976.   Shortly after the gun probe got underway, Poorman hired a tall, curly-haired, kick-ass type from the Philadelphia Inquirer named Dale Allen to be the new executive editor.  Allen was soon caught up in the local intrigue surrounding the gun probe and the Barbuto investigation.

Not long after Dale’s arrival, 20/20 aired its story about crime and corruption in Summit County.  The gun probe barely figured in the story because the cops had shared their findings about Barbuto’s sexual escapades while a sitting judge.  And former Democratic Party chairman Robert Blakemore provided the angle to justify doing a story about hanky-panky in the courthouse: the Beacon clips showed a connection between Blakemore and the Kennedy family from the 1960s.  Never mind that the connection was tenuous, and old, and unrelated to Barbuto, guns or anything else in the 20/20 story. The Kennedys were the hook. This was a story with national implications.

Well, not actually. 

It was classic Geraldo.  Barbuto was up to his neck in trouble, as subsequent events would prove. But the rest, as time would show, was made-for-TV-razzle dazzle.  The program’s most dramatic scene was Rivera chasing an alleged “hitman,” Bobie Brooks, supposedly hired by Barbuto to intimidate witnesses, through a downtown hotel and through city streets.  The show presented the event as a bold confrontation between the intrepid Rivera and the shadowy “hitman.”  The hitman turned out to be a small-time crook with a conviction for manslaughter in his past. Even better, a picture later surfaced of Rivera sitting with his arm around Brooks at the Tangier restaurant, taken some time before the “chase” took place. 

Another feature of the program was an interview with one of the witnesses against a young woman who had met with the judge.  Rivera and his cameraman, lugging a hidden camera and mike in a suitcase, talked their way into the woman’s house with a promise that she would not be identified nor quoted by name.  The whole segment was done with Rivera’s voiceover while showing the young woman sitting in her house facing Rivera. The woman sued Rivera and 20/20 sometime later and the need for the voiceover became apparent.  The cameraman had taped Rivera repeatedly reassuring the woman he wouldn’t take her picture, use her name or reveal anything she said.  Of course, he did all three. Hence, the need to pass on the tape recording and just stick with the video. (The woman won at trial, but lost on an appeal.)

Still, with all its faults, the show left the Beacon looking as if it had ducked a major story.  Fact was, we had missed a major story about Barbuto’s conduct.  We immediately started playing catch-up, including an extraordinary meeting at Allen’s house called by Poorman and attended by me, editorial page editor Dave Cooper and a local lawyer, Orville Hoover, who would soon be appointed special prosecutor.  Hoover was a compromise appointment agreed upon after Gabalac and the common pleas judges ended a stand-off on how to handle the Barbuto allegations. 

Dale recently admitted to some reservations about getting involved with community issues from the outside, instead of being the usual neutral observer.  I can’t say I was wild about it, either, but I had a much longer history with such conduct at the Beacon under Maidenburg, who had often acted as an arbiter when local rubber worker unions struck the local rubber companies, which they did like clockwork every three years.  There was also a local chamber of commerce committee of bankers and other heavyweights who met in secret any time a city, county or school tax levy was being considered.  Maidenburg attended and the rule was no endorsement of a levy that the committee dinged.  All done in secret. 

I know because when I was a county government reporter in the early 70s, Ben invited me to attend a committee meeting, off the record of course, to discuss county government finances, which were a shambles.  On the walk back to the paper, Ben commented archly on county operations. Feeling a bit stung at the implication that my coverage was lacking, I allowed as how the presentation made by a chamber economist missed the problems of county government by a country mile. 

Put up or shut up, Ben replied, leading to the publication of my series on county government that prompted the first formation of a county charter commission and a county charter (that got clobbered on the 1972 ballot – another decade would pass before one was adopted).  Ben’s famous line about all that: ”There’s probably a special place in hell for those who manage the news.”   

So the meeting with Hoover, no matter how uncomfortable, was nothing new for me.

Meanwhile, Barbuto went on trial, got convicted, and was sentenced to prison. He got out a few months later on “shock probation.”  I often wondered whether he knew too much to be left in prison too long.

The gun probe that started it all ended more with a whimper than a bang. A few law enforcement types got rounded up and procedures were changed to eliminate light-fingered treatment of guns confiscated in crimes.                 

Now, looking back 40 years at the story, I’m trying to focus on the lessons of my encounter with journalism from the receiving end.  The Geraldo story itself was a whole separate trip, but, at bottom, it was just another story. Complicated, to be sure, and more than a little frustrating when you’re caught between feuding public officials like the cops and the county prosecutor, with neither side trusting you and both sides trying to get you to spin the story their way.  

But the enduring part — still crystal clear despite the passage of four decades — was my interview with Wall Street Journal media reporter Dan Machalba.  He had heard about Geraldo stirring things up in Akron, resulting in some Beacon coverage about the tensions between the TV star and the local paper.  He had already interviewed Poorman and Allen, but he wanted the perspective of the line editor, the one in charge of the staff having to deal with Geraldo.  

“Why not,” I remember thinking. “Just another reporter. How tough can it be.”  

So much for my predictive ability.  What I remember most of the lengthy interview was what he didn’t write down. When I made what I thought were substantive points about our coverage and the 20/20 team’s less-than-professional approach to news gathering, Machalba listened politely, but he didn’t take any notes. However, when I lapsed into one of my occasional smartass remarks (really out of character for me), he wrote it down.

I should have known. When his story appeared a short time later, in the middle column of A-1 in the Wall Street Journal, my worst suspicions were confirmed.  The story accurately recounted my quotes, just not in the order that I made them, nor in reference to the topics they involved. But they were good quotes.

For example, Machalba asked me about the reporting work the 20/20 crew was doing. I called it “sleazy,” being charitable.  Machalba placed it next to reference to the show 20/20 aired, which didn’t appear until long after my interview.  It was, it turned out, a sleazy show, but that’s not what I was talking about.  Other quotes were also out of context. Made for a good story, but my sense was that it played more like how the little hick paper got rattled by the big time, if disreputable, reporter.  

It was a lesson about how journalists can spin stories to fit a preconceived notion that stayed with me and influenced how I taught journalism for 30 years.              

                                             Chapter 3

                 This is an excerpt from “A Place Called WriterL: Where the Conversation Was Always About Literary Journalism,” copyright 2022 Mr. Write Coach LLC.

Writers have long mulled the relationship between their craft and music, none more eloquently than E.B. White in the final chapter of “Elements of Style.” “Here is where we leave solid ground,” White writes.  “Who can confidently say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same notes slightly rearranged are impotent.  These are high mysteries ….”

The mystery of connection between writing and music intrigued WriterL members after a post by veteran journalist Peter Kendall in September 1999. The discussion lasted for several days as hosts Jon and Lynn Franklin, musician and Poynter Institute writing guru Roy Peter Clark, music journalist Brett Campbell,  journalist/trumpeter Steve Provizer, writer/flautist/artist Karla Harby, authors Don Obe and David Hayes and journalist/educator Terrie Claflin and others joined in.

Peter Kendall: There’s a play called “Cowgirls.” It’s about a trio of classical musicians who find themselves mistakenly booked into a country western venue in Kansas. The pivotal scene is the one where the owner of the venue, an experienced country singer, explains what’s wrong with the singing style of the classical musicians – they sing all the notes. I’m no country music fan, but as they learn to let go of the wrong notes and lay into the right ones, the emotion that emerges is a revelation. Picking the right details is the same thing as picking the right notes. Sometimes, when the story needs to be advanced, country singers will simply say the lyrics just as good writers will get through the momentum-building aspects of the story to the critical details that need to be emphasized.

Please tell me there are analogies that can be drawn from other musical forms.

Steve Provizer: The phenomenon you describe has been at work in the jazz world for a long time (I play trumpet).

When you’re a young musician starting out and you want to establish yourself in the self-selecting world of jazz, you show off your chops with pyrotechnical and muscular playing. At the very least, this proves you’re serious about mastering the craft.

Then, as time goes by, partly because of having proven your bonafides, partly because of flagging energy, partly, possibly, because of increasing wisdom, you play fewer notes. In about 80 years of jazz, I can think of no counter-example to this progression.

The common wisdom which is applied in this situation is that the musician has become a better story-teller; that his or her playing is more in service of the music (or the listener) and less in service of his or her own ego needs.

While there is an obvious analogy here with writing, it should also be noted that it is indeed difficult to improvise at a fast tempo; it’s not very much more difficult to write more words. One final wrinkle: The difficulty of playing fast means that the improviser is much more likely to resort to learned cliches rather than invent something new.

Jon Franklin: Peter Kendall asked for parallels between music and writing, and I think there are a very, very many.  Rhythm is the beat.  Pacing is how lines build into verses.  There are harmonies and melodies.  There are refrains, as with Tom Wolfe’s blue bolts to the feet.  There are major and minor keys, and they are quite different … as in a love story and a ghost story, respectively.  There are movements, and you will see them in well done serial narratives.  There are crescendos.  A good long piece may well have symphonic qualities.

I tumbled to this in mid-career, and have been ungodly busy since then capitalizing on such things.  Too busy, to my frequent chagrin, to undertake any formal study of music.  If I had it all over to do again, I’d definitely (a) learn to read music and (b) study music history.

As it is, I studied art and art history, which also comes in very useful. There are many parallels between what a painter/sculptor does and what a writer does, except that the parallels seem to me to be most useful in terms of the artist’s vision, the painter’s eye.  Music relates more to the performance, it seems to me.

I will go so far to say that, in the last 15 years or so, I hear my pieces musically.  I do, that is to say, when they are strong pieces and working well. I hope, I truly do, that there’s someone on the list who has a good classical music background and can pick up this thread and lead us somewhere.  Because I really think there is somewhere to go.

Karla Harby: I started the flute at 36, a few years ago. There is no question that seriously studying music has changed how I write, although whether this is good or not remains to be judged by others. The most important gift the flute gives me, corny as it sounds, is another route of access to my inner emotional life, and the courage to let it inform my writing. When I was in J-school a professor said to me, “You could be a good writer if you’d only loosen up.” The flute speaks to that particular deficiency of mine.

In his mention of classical music, Jon is perhaps alluding to music theory, which is not really a theory at all but rather the detailed description of how music is put together, or structured. Studying music theory has not helped me structure articles or book chapters, not at all. The ways of communicating are just too different for me to find the connections, except in the most general, obvious ways that have already been mentioned.

Rather, for me it’s the micro-organization of music, the musical phrase that finds its analogy in the sentence, that has been the most instructive. The musician’s first problem is how to put the phrase across in a way that is meaningful, which means it must “say something” and be somehow “beautiful,” even if the actual sound is more like a growl. Playing the flute has made me more sensitive to the aesthetic possibilities of the sentence, and while I happen to emphasize classical music I certainly believe jazz, rock, country or any other musical style would do the same.

David Hayes: On the subject of writing and music, I use a music analogy borrowed from Studs Terkel when I’m talking about interviewing with my magazine feature writing students. Terkel described an interview as being similar to a jazz combo playing a standard like, say “My Funny Valentine.” First, as prearranged, the band together plays the familiar “head” or melody. Then, one musician begins to solo over the chord changes. At this point, nothing may sound like the familiar melody of “My Funny Valentine” because the musician is improvising. One by one, each instrument will take a turn soloing until finally the whole band returns to the “head” again and the song is over.

Here’s how the analogy relates to interviewing. Good journalists go into an interview having planned an approach to open the interview, and having planned on addressing some difficult subject areas at the end. In between, the journalist should try to let the conversation flow as naturally as possible, which means following the interviewee, being able to respond to directions the conversation takes rather than awkwardly returning to the next question on a list.

This, of course, means being well prepared for the interview. I don’t draw up a list of questions, but rather make short (three or four words) point form notes on a page, divided into topics such as “background” or “financial dealings” or “dissolution of company” or “challenges of success,” etc. Then I highlight each topic in the same color. Everything that falls under “financial dealings” might be highlighted in green, for example. Then, when my interviewee makes an unexpected segue from courting his spouse into financial dealings, I’m not left staring at a page full of interview questions. My eye flickers to the green highlighted material and I can adapt seamlessly to the conversation.

This doesn’t mean that as a journalist you may not steer your interviewee back to areas you want to pursue, but I find this technique gives me maximum flexibility during interviews.

Jon Franklin: Another parallel between writing dramatic nonfiction and performing music is rehearsal.  I used to rewrite many times – and still do, on stories that are one step down from top importance.  But if a story is really, really important to me I rehearse.  I write it, then start over with a blank screen and write it again, and again.  What happens is that, partly because I forget and partly because I get tired, I drop out stuff that isn’t on the main story line.  The last pass is the performance.  Then I may polish it, but it was the performance run that counted.

Roy Peter Clark: For five years now, I’ve offered workshops on the relationship between writing and music.  I have different titles, but my favorite is: “Voices of Respect: What I Learned about Writing from Listening to Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.”

I begin by underlining the four direct ways to improve your writing:  by writing, by reading writers, by reading about writing, and by talking with editors, readers, and other writers.

Then I argue there are many other indirect ways to improve your writing. One is by engagement with the visual arts:  photography, videography, or just going to the movies.  Even recent popular movies, such as “The Blair Witch Project” or “Sixth Sense,” offer ideas about story pacing, scenic construction, what is described, what is withheld, that have practical application for the writer.

Just as we use many visual metaphors to describe writing, so we dip into the world of sound and music for metaphors such as:  voice, pace, cadence, rhythm, crescendo.  We talk about how a story “sounds,” even when we read it silently.

I try to demystify some of these connections by offering a list of musical tools writers can use:

1. Listen to how musicians adapt others material, how Aretha Franklin takes complete ownership and womanizes Otis Redding’s manly version of “Respect.” This leads to the question of how a reporter can take ownership of an editor’s assignments.
2. Use musical details in stories.  What song was playing on the car radio just before the collision?  Was it “Dead Man’s Curve” or “The Long and Winding Road”?
3. Borrow a voice.  Just as aspiring folk/rock kids used to imitate Dylan until they found their own voice, writers find writing voices they like, read them often, and try to imitate them.
4. Vary sentence length to create rhythm and pace.
5. Read the story aloud to HEAR what’s going on.
6. Play with the sounds of words, even in serious stories.
7. Think about the beginning and endings of stories by listening to the way songs begin and end.  Can a written story “fade out”?
8. Name the parts of the story.  Musical ability is related to spatial reasoning, which is important in math, or in trying to fit six suitcases into the trunk of a car.  But a story has space as well, and it takes skill to be able to fit the best stuff in it.
9. Listen to music for inspiration.  I’ve heard that legendary editor Michael Gartner plays Sousa marches on the way to work before he writes an editorial tearing into the city council.
10. Have a theme song. (Sorry, this is borrowed from Aly McBeal’s psychiatrist.)  But what is the song you hear in your head that identifies you in some special way?
11. More from McBeal:  Hire some Pips.  You need some back-up singers in your stories, the people you quote, whose voices harmonize with yours or create some counterpoint.
12. If they made a movie out of your story, what would be the musical score.
13. Use music as a reward, a celebration for work completed. Ta da.

Brett Campbell: As a writer who covers classical and jazz and all varieties of contemporary music and (to my wife’s annoyance) listens to recordings of it more or less constantly throughout my waking hours, I can’t resist adding a grace note to this thread. I find most of the attempts here to analogize music and writing to be merely that: analogies, not true correspondences.  I don’t think there’s much direct, substantive influence between musical and literary forms, although I often see stories divided into sections called “interludes” or “movements” or some such. But that just strikes me as more superficial, though maybe useful, analogizing.

Writers and composers both have needs for certain analogous formal devices, such as the use of repeated figures (call them fugues or refrains or whatever), but my guess is that most of us arrive at them based on our own respective needs, not because we encountered them in the other art form. I’ve had readers ask me if I structured a literary nonfiction story (about a person in the music business) along some sort of musical lines and had to reply honestly that I hadn’t. The story and complication/resolution approach dictated the form I chose. I’m glad they found the prose to be musical, though.

That said, I do think music can have a less direct, even subconscious influence on writers.  I agree with Jon that listening to music can be invaluable to a writer’s voice; I’ve been accused of having a lyrical style in certain stories and I’m sure that to whatever extent that’s true, much of the blame lies in my exposure to music and perhaps poetry. I do hear rhythms in my head when I’m composing sentences and paragraphs, and when I revise sentences, it’s often as much for sound and rhythmic variety or appropriateness as for clarity.

Surely the gonzo journalism of the ’60s and ’70s owes a good deal of its attitude and feel to rock and roll, and I guess the Beats tried hard to jazz up their writing to reflect the bop they were listening to. I’m not a composer, but I’ve interviewed a number of them, and one useful lesson from them (or any other artist) for writers is this: the purpose of art is to affect us emotionally. Even composers who use so-called “process” music, or jazzers and other improvisers, are generally thinking about how the audience will be moved by placing this note here or voicing this chord just so. That’s a lesson that journalists who aspire to do more than efficiently convey information – honorable as that is – can profit from.

As I’m writing this,  Mozart’s sublime “Clarinet Concerto” is playing on the radio. I don’t know whether listening to something of such surpassing beauty makes me smarter, or a better writer, or a better person, and I wouldn’t blame Mozart for any infelicities in this post. But perhaps in stretching my emotional range, such music can help me be a better literary artist by giving me more emotional resources to draw on, and a sense of what emotional effect I want my stories to have on readers.

Music can be salutary for writers in other ways, too. Some of it provides good background sound for writing, but of course if you want to get anything more out of great music – from Bach to the Beatles – you must pay attention, and you can’t do that while writing. I’ve recently started playing in a music group, and I find the chief effect of performing music on writing is to leave me less time for it. However, I think there’s a benefit there: The sheer emotional pleasure of playing music you like (especially in a group setting) can be a welcome relief from the left-brain, intellectualized, concentrated thinking that writing entails. It works a different part of your mind and soul, and if nothing else provides a nice break from staring at the screen all day. I’m sure yoga or athletics can do the same. Since I took up music and tennis, I’m writing less, but enjoying it more, and maybe feeling more refreshed when I do write. I hope that shows up in the stories.

Mostly, though, I hope writers don’t view music as “instrumental” in the sense that its main purpose is to make you a better writer or teach you formal devices. For me, its value – to anyone – is that great music endows our lives with the greatest beauty and is one of the prime sources of emotional fulfillment. And now I’m going to pay attention to Mozart for a while.

Jon Franklin: There seems to be two sorts of artists, one who must believe some things are unexplainable and others who believe they must be explained.  I’m the second, of course; this may of course be for lack of natural talent, which forces me to learn to read the music – if I were a musician.

Beyond that, I agree with Brett that the art we immerse ourselves in ultimately has a profound impact on our own art.  Who we read, what we listen to, the paintings we choose to pay attention to … these are among the more important things that make us what we are. Our own voices, to use a common example, often are reflections of the voices we hear.

All of which is to say: Be careful to only steal from the best, even unconsciously.

Don Obe:  Perhaps the loveliest example of lyrical cadence in modern English prose is Hemingway’s first paragraph in “A Farewell to Arms.” Though it begins a novel, it could just as well be a nonfiction passage. For those of you who don’t know it by heart, it goes:

“In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.”

Of that famous passage, Hemingway once said: “In the first paragraph of ‘Farewell’ I used the word ‘and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes – or, anyway, so he would like it.”

Terrie Claflin Martin: So what does all this discussion over music and writing mean to someone who plays piano by ear?  I’m not good enough for anyone else to listen to, but for most of my life I have loved sitting down late at night to pick out a tune, search out the harmonizing notes and discover the chord – one key at a time. I have never taken lessons, never studied theory, but I “know” when what I play is “right.”

I write the same way.  I plunk down words, one at a time, listening to how they sound – individually and in strings.  I say them out loud, whisper them softly, looking for rhythm.  I make sure that certain passages run smooth, while others snap!  I play the sentence or paragraph over and over again, just as I would on the piano, until I know it by heart and can say it with my eyes closed.  And again, I know when it’s “right.” I can hear it.

I’ve certainly taken writing classes – and now teach them – but I still have little interest in knowing the parts of speech or examining how they work together. (I say this with great apologies and respect for those on the list who do.)  I never knew what a transition was until I began teaching.  All I knew was that if I wrote in a certain way, where my words and sentences linked together like a chain, it read better – and it was almost impossible for a bad editor to insert, delete or change a word.

I must admit, I pray daily that my students won’t ask me technical questions that will trip me up.  We certainly go over all the literary devices.  I hand them all the tools they will need.  But by the end of the term I probably sound more like a journalistic obi-wan: close your eyes, listen, feel the words, trust that when it is right you will know it.

Some feel it, some don’t – in writing and in music.  My niece has been taking piano lessons for most of her life; she can play the heck out of a piece of sheet music, but without the paper in front of her, she’s lost.  I think most of my students are in the same category.  They will make fine reporters, and write fine stories, but their words will seldom “sing.” and they may never understand why because they are writing off-key and can’t even hear it.

So, I’m curious: anybody else out there play by ear?  Or know anything about it?

Lynn Franklin: To answer Terrie’s question:  I play the piano by ear as well as read music.  If I don’t have access to sheet music, I can pick out a tune and create chords to go with it.  As I child, I even experimented with composing.

I don’t know a lot of music theory; my piano teacher believed a young student would stay interested longer if allowed to choose the music.  (So my first “song” on the piano was “Wipe Out.”)  Yet what little theory I DO know helps a lot when playing by ear.  Knowing which chords classically accompany the key of “C”, for example, makes it quicker to create harmony.  Quicker and more likely to work.

I’ve found this also to be true in writing.  Again, I don’t have formal training in grammar; I came through the education system just at the time when students were NOT taught to diagram sentences.  What I’ve learned I’ve had to pick out through my own research.  Yet the theory I do know is incredibly helpful.  There is little more frightening than writing an article that people love – and you don’t know HOW you did it!  So the terrors take over:  Will I ever be able to do it again? 

In contrast, when you know that the article in question followed a classic complication/resolution form, that you slaved for hours over the transitions to make them smooth (something I still struggle with), that you specifically listened for rhythm in the sentences and pacing throughout, then you can be pretty sure that if you apply those same techniques to the next story, you’ve got a shot at another piece the readers will love.  In other words, one of the benefits of knowing any kind of theory is that you gain the ability to repeat a good performance.

Terrie is absolutely correct in that theory isn’t everything.  Any artist, whether writer or musician, must be able to hear and feel the work of art.  However, there are two kinds of hearing and feeling – educated and uneducated.  Uneducated feelings are the ones that reassure writers even when they are bullshitting themselves.  We’ve all done this.  It often occurs when we’ve slaved over a paragraph and then decide it’s the most poetic thing we’ve ever written.  Then an editor or a friend singles out that particular paragraph and points out that it does nothing to move the story and is nothing more than writing.  Even the most experienced writers succumb to this temptation.  This is why many famous writers recommend that you throw out your babies during the editing process.

Educated feelings are those that are reinforced by readers’ reaction to a passage or a piece.  To give an example that most members are familiar with, when Jon finished writing “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster,” his heart was pounding.  It was the first time this ever happened to him, and it was different from the feeling, “I’ve just written something wonderful.”  It was frightening. 

He said the feeling was similar to those I’ve described as “uneducated,” but different somehow.  The difference, of course, was that he wasn’t bullshitting himself. 

John Steinbeck described this feeling as holding fire in one’s hands.  Once you’ve experienced this, you can more easily tell if a feeling about a particular passage is real power or wishful thinking.  Even then, it’s not easy.  In recent years, I’ve only heard Jon compare a feeling about a piece to “Mrs. Kelly’s Monster” twice – once was “A Death in the Family.”  The second is a piece he’s working on now.

There are levels of educated feelings, and most writers experience these.  Sometimes you suddenly know that a particular transition works; the feeling is not exactly holding fire in ones’ hand.  It’s more a jolt of control.  When those feelings occur, it really helps to stop and compare them to the uneducated feelings that said something worked when it didn’t.  After a while, most people will be able to develop Terrie’s ability to differentiate.

What I’m saying is that theory is the intellectual aspect of feeling.  Great writers and, I suspect, musicians and artists use both feeling and theory.  In those times when you’re not sure a feeling is apt, theory can often save the story from becoming simple self-indulgence.

I should add that theory eventually becomes incorporated into the subconscious so that it helps you differentiate between feelings of power and feelings that are self-delusions.  When I pick out a song on the piano, I don’t consciously tell myself that the most common chord for the key of “C” consists of C, E and G; my fingers just naturally reach for those keys.  The same happens while writing; you naturally recognize a particular action as your story’s complication without actually putting that into words.

Name withheld:  Terrie Claflin’s post struck a chord with me – and that’s about as musical as I will get. But when it comes to writing, I definitely play by ear, letting instinct, intuition and feeling lead the way. However, they share the lead with the rules and techniques I’ve learned along the way. I was fortunate to have a good education when I was young, and the rules of grammar and syntax, enhanced by several years of Latin, are part of my autonomic writing system. I don’t think much about avoiding passive voice because that, too has been drilled into the subconscious. Bridges, sentence length and all those other techniques rarely require active thought.

I suspect Terrie functions the same way. She doesn’t think much about technique because she’s incorporated it into … the process, allowing her to focus more on creativity. (And Terrie is unquestionably the most creative writer I have ever worked with. As with all my favorite writers, I wish she would give us more.)

When people ask me questions about grammar or syntax, I usually have to reach for a reference book. I can tell them what is right and what is wrong, but unless it’s fairly simple, the why is not always accessible.

Still, I think it’s important to continue to improve technique, to add more tools to the box. That’s one of the reasons I’ve subscribed to this list for four or five years. As we move into new areas, such as writing for the web, we need to refine our style. Even if we stay with the same kind of writing, refinement and growth are important. Otherwise, to return to musicology, we’ll be the writing equivalent of John Denver singing “Rocky Mountain High” the same way, over and over and over. And even this musically challenged person would prefer Chinese water torture.

Jon Franklin: With regard to playing by ear, it certainly can be done, and done well.  In music, though, there are limits imposed by complexity.  One could play a ballad by ear, for example, but not a symphony.  A symphony involves some serious logistical problems, if I may call them that.  Different instruments coming in and out at different times, recurring themes that have to be remembered exactly in order to vary them properly.  All that.

I think writing is the same way.  We told stories long before Homer, but as we told them, and the generations passed, the stories got more complicated. Then, in western civilization at least, certain people like Emerson and Chekhov started studying how stories worked.  They didn’t do this to impose form.  Both of them were looking for an advantage they believed some theoretical knowledge might convey.

It gets to the point, in modern times, when certain kinds of stories can only be told with a team effort of some sort.  I have written books with partners that I could never have written alone.  I just couldn’t have done everything and kept track of everything.  But if you’re going to work with someone else you have to have a language, and to have a language you have to nail down specific concepts to talk about.

This is also true in relationships between writers and editors.  They have to be able to communicate.  If the piece in question is not complex or multi-leveled, of course, communication can be pretty guttural.  But if it IS multi-leveled, say, the editing process will require an explicit discussion of the individual levels.  That requires language.  Language requires taxonomy.  Taxonomy is difficult to construct without theories pushing their snouts into the effort.

I think there will always be writers who write totally by feel, and we can argue the advantages and disadvantages of that.  But it definitely imposes a limit of complexity.  Murray Kempton (I hope I’m spelling his name right) once told me he wrote totally by feel, and a little later in the same conversation he remarked that he could never hold together a piece longer than about 800 words.  But, of course, it was often an incredible 800 words.

On the other end of the spectrum, those of us who find structured thinking useful believe that, with that thinking, we might be able to write symphonically.  That’s the motive, at any rate.  Structure, for example, is a tool … much in the same way Lotus is a tool.  And there are levels of tools.  Structure has been called “story grammar” but what we usually refer to as grammar is something quite different.  I’m very theory-oriented, as many of you know, but I don’t know jack about grammar.  And yeah, there are a lot of people who possess a mind-numbing knowledge of grammar but who don’t write all that well.

So it depends on the tool.  But then, tools are transcendent, and they can be beautiful for their own sake.

(This chapter is excerpted from “Akron’s Daily Miracle,” edited by Stuart Warner and Deb Van Tassel Warner, copyright 2020, University of Akron Press)

By Dale Allen

In less than a month after those of us in the news room were patting ourselves on the back for winning the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the attempted takeover of Goodyear Tire and Rubber, our publisher, John McMillion, sprung a surprise on us. He had decided, as he had suggested back the previous summer, that we would switch the newspaper from afternoon to morning publication. This time, he gave us a firm date. We would become a morning newspaper on July 13, just three months after his bombshell announcement.

“If the Beacon Journal is to be successful in attracting new readers and advertisers,” he said, “it must meet the changing needs of society. Publishing in the morning is just a part of that change.”

I agreed with the decision. I had watched through the past three decades as morning newspapers became dominant in the nation. Several afternoon newspapers were on the brink of extinction;  others had made the switch to morning publication to stave off the death rattles. Still others were contemplating the move. Moreover, in cities where morning and afternoon papers were still being published by a single publisher, consolidation was taking place, with afternoon publications being folded into their morning partners. Knight-Ridder’s newspapers followed in line with that trend. 

The corporation had closed or was preparing to close its afternoon newspapers in Charlotte, N.C.; Lexington, Ky.; Columbus, Ga.; Columbia, S.C.; Saint Paul, Minn.; Wichita, Kan.; San Jose, Calif., and Long Beach, Calif., among others. The closings certainly created issues for the folks running those papers, trying to figure out how to merge staffs and make the transition for their readers and advertisers as smooth as possible. But, the papers in those cities had a running start on the mergers. They already had mechanisms in place to print and distribute papers in the morning market.

That was not the case in Akron, where the Beacon Journal had been the only newspaper in town since 1938, when John S. Knight purchased the Times-Press, a paper owned by the Scripps-Howard corporation. Sure, we had always published a paper on Sunday mornings, and we had only four years previously switched the Saturday paper to morning distribution. But we knew converting to morning publication seven days a week would require major changes in the way we did business.

If it sounds like an easy task, let me assure you it was not. It was the most difficult job I had taken on since becoming a newspaperman way back in 1957. 

Making matters more challenging for me personally, McMillion asked me to supervise preparations for the switch – not just in the news room but in all of the departments at the paper. I accepted the job, knowing it would be difficult but also knowing I would benefit by gaining the knowledge offered by the process. Moreover, I felt confident the Beacon Journal could pull it off, so long as we had the cooperation of managers and employees throughout the building.

To some of the old timers at the newspaper, the announcement came as a shock, despite McMillion’s advance warning. While we had given them a taste of working on a morning newspaper, when we switched the publication of the Saturday paper from afternoons to mornings, many of our editors had never worked the morning cycle every day of the week, so they could only imagine what effect the change might have on their lives. Those of us who had migrated to the Beacon Journal from morning publications understood their workaday assignments – and ours – would be irrevocably changed. 

While I had grown accustomed to the afternoon cycle in the seven years I had been in Akron, I knew morning publication offered a lot more pluses than minuses, particularly as it related to the news room. Foremost, the switch would permit us to truncate the staffing cycle, giving us more concentrated firepower within fewer hours. If that is a difficult concept to understand, I’ll try to explain it by comparing the usual routines for afternoon versus morning newspapers.

As an afternoon newspaper the Beacon Journal had staff members working in the news room 24 hours a day, six days a week. Only on Sunday mornings – from about one a.m. until noon – was the news room not staffed. By contrast, on morning newspapers, the news room was usually staffed only from 9 a.m. until 1 or 2 o’clock the following morning. So, there was a seven-hour period each day of the week, when the news room was bereft of staff. Yes, morning publication concentrated our work into a shorter time period, but it also concentrated the number of people we had available to do it. Plus, it gave editors more opportunity to work the same shifts as their reporters and their assistant editors and, thus, a lot more time to work one-on-one on stories. I knew from previous experience that the news room would become an easier place to manage, precisely because we were able to eliminate, for all time, the overnight shifts. 

I also understood we would need more firepower on our copy desks, where the crunch of deadline work would be more demanding. Thankfully McMillion understood that ,too. He agreed to let us add three copy editors in the news room, including two on the news copy desk and one in sports.

The crunch of copy on deadline was particularly acute for the sports department of a morning newspaper. On an afternoon newspaper, the copy editing could be done overnight, long after the games typically were completed. On a morning newspaper, the editing had to be done in quick, 30-minute bursts from the time the games ended – usually between 10 and 11 each evening – to the first edition deadline, which we figured would be around 11:30 p.m. to ensure a press start of midnight for our first edition. 

Games originating on the West Coast presented big problems because they usually did not end until between 1 and 2 a.m. in the Eastern time zone. We figured, even with later home-delivery editions for Akron and Summit County, we still would be unable to get all West Coast results in the paper. To compensate, we created a new, final edition, which we labeled the Sports Final, to be distributed in racks on street corners and other single-copy sales outlets. 

In some departments of the paper, the move from afternoon to morning publication required very little change. Advertising executives and sales personnel would still work day shifts, keeping their schedules consistent with the hours most conducive to selling advertisements. The folks in accounting would continue to count their beans on the same schedules they had in the past. And in some of the lesser departments, including research and promotion and human resources, the switch to a morning cycle required only minor scheduling changes.

The same could not be said in the production and circulation departments, where schedules of many employees would literally be turned upside down. The bulk of pages handled by the composing room would be put together in late afternoon and into the evening, instead of during the early morning shifts required by afternoon publication. The same was true in the engraving department, which handled photos and artwork for news stories and advertisements, and which had become the platemaking department, creating plastic plates for use on the presses to print the pages.

Schedules for folks working in the final two production departments – the press room and the mail room – also required big changes to produce a morning newspaper. Employees in the press room, obviously, would be working different schedules to print the paper from midnight to five in the morning instead of nine in the morning until one in the afternoon. The same was true in the mail room, where advertising inserts were stuffed into the papers and where the newspapers were bundled for distribution. 

Of all the requisite changes required, however, none loomed greater than in circulation, which had to distribute the papers to our home-delivery customers and to single-copy sales outlets, such as the multitude of street-corner newspaper racks and other outlets, including news stands, drug stores, supermarkets, business offices, and restaurants. The potential for problems was enormous because, in large part, the Beacon Journal’s home delivery apparatus depended on the people we called our “little merchants,” the kids who delivered the afternoon paper after school or after their baseball or softball practices in the summertime.

The kids and the few adults who delivered the paper for us were not employees. They were independent contractors. We could not order them to make the change. We had to coddle them and coax them to continue carrying their routes after the switch from afternoon to morning publication. Here was the nexus of the issue: Could we persuade roughly 2,000 kids to get up at 5 o’clock each morning to deliver their papers instead of delivering them at 4 or 5 in the afternoon? Some of us were skeptical. We had worked in other morning markets and realized the vast majority of our carriers there were adults, not kids. 

The switch would also radically alter the schedules of our district managers, the men and women who worked in the field, making sure the kids delivered their papers and seeing to it that complaints about delivery were handled expeditiously. 

Soon after McMillion announced the intention to switch, managers from throughout the building began meeting once a week – and sometimes more frequently – to get things started and then to monitor our progress. Initially, we discussed the changes each of us knew would be required within our departments. As the overseer of the project, I took copious notes, as managers in each department explained the actions necessary to get the job done. I also encouraged the department heads to pick the brains of their counterparts in Knight Ridder papers where the switch had already been undertaken. It made sense to compare their steps with those we planned and to hear about the unanticipated pitfalls they discovered as they made the conversion. 

Within a couple of weeks I began assembling a master checklist of all the changes required. The list described each change in some detail and named the person charged with seeing the task to completion. The list also included start dates and end dates for each task, and one last column, indicating whether the project had been completed or was still outstanding. The list was dozens of pages long. By way of example, here are some of the items those of us in the news room included in the list: 

• Establishing new deadlines for pages in each section, including all news, features, and sports pages, and getting the production department to agree to them.
• Creating new schedules for reporters, editors, photographers, and artists to conform with the demands of new deadlines.
• Checking all wire service contracts, particularly Associated Press, to see whether the switch would cost us more in monthly assessments. 
• Checking syndicated features contracts (comics and columnists) to ensure their continued use.
• Interviewing and hiring the new copy editors. 

The master list contained even the remotest items to ensure that the jobs were assigned to someone and to ensure that they were completed. Example: We decided to order all-new sales racks, to be placed on street corners throughout the region. The individual tasks related to the new racks included designing their appearance (assigned to the research and promotion department), then ordering the racks, making a list of all locations, then delivering the racks when they arrived from the manufacturer (all tasks assigned to circulation).

The weekly meetings we held to check on our progress were grueling sessions, often lasting hours. We went through each incomplete item on the list, wanting to hear some explanation of progress or lack of progress made on it. I knew I was never going to win the award as the most beloved manager in the building but, in the weeks leading up to the conversion to morning publication, I became a pox on some of the folks who fell behind in completing their assignments. Tough questions had to be asked, and I was a somewhat unmerciful taskmaster, even though I believe it’s fair to say that I was an equal-opportunity scourge. I picked on supervisors from every department in the building. 

The reason was simple: There was no give in our scheduling. We had already announced to the outside world – to our readers and advertisers – our intention to convert the Beacon Journal to morning publication. The date certain – July 13 – was absolute, so all of the tasks on that master list had to be completed in time for a conversion by then. 

To ensure that our carrier force would stay with us during the conversion, the Circulation department distributed contracts to every Beacon Journal carrier, asking them to sign a pledge to continue carrying the paper. Those who did not sign were replaced immediately. But, to our great relief, the vast majority of the “little merchants” indicated a willingness to continue delivering the papers after July 13. 

In the news room, we began work on our conversion plans, distributing assignments to editors in every department. While we got approval to hire the three new copy editors, we also decided to create a universal copy desk, combining the features copy desk with the news copy desk. Every story except sports stories would be filtered through the single desk. 

We also got approval to add significant space to the business section to accommodate vastly expanded stocks, bonds, and mutual fund quotations, working on the theory that stock quotations are fresher in a morning paper and more meaningful to our readers. Larry Williams, our managing editor who had been business editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, was the perfect manager to oversee the new stocks and bonds pages, working together with the business editor, Doug Oplinger.

As an afternoon newspaper, the Beacon Journal offered less than a full page of quotations each day because our deadlines precluded the publication of closing numbers. We did offer a more nearly complete report on Sundays but felt a daily page of complete quotations was useless, given the fact that they would not be final quotations for each day. 

On the master checklist the expansion of stocks pages occupied several lines on the listing, beginning with an identification of the quotations we wanted to add, a notification to the Associated Press that we wanted those quotes added to the daily stuff sent to us, a design of the pages containing the information, and a test of each new listing in advance of the conversion to see that it worked. 

We also decided to join in a recent trend across the country by implementing an innovative approach of running the Metro desk, assigning reporters to teams based on the topics they covered. The move was led by John Greenman, the assistant managing editor in charge of local news, with advice from Larry Williams. Several editors became team leaders, each supervising the work of eight to ten reporters. 

Steve Hoffman, who had been a Metro reporter then editor of the new Stark County bureau, became the leader of the team of reporters covering the state and region. 

Maureen Brown, who had joined us two years earlier as a reporter, became leader of a team of reporters concentrating on major topics, including science, medicine, religion, education, higher education, etc. 

Debbie Van Tassel led the team focusing on governmental coverage. Jim Quinn, hired as a reporter from the Knight-Ridder newspaper in Fort Wayne, Ind., moved to North Canton to lead the Stark County bureau, and Kathy Fraze became chief administrative officer of the Metropolitan Desk. 

But we faced an even greater tasks beyond the news room: We had to convince customers of our reasons for making the move to morning publication in the first place. In one of the columns I wrote in advance of the conversion, I tried to explain our reasons for doing so: 

“There are lessons to be learned from history, of course. We think one of the important lessons is that nothing can stand still, for change is a part of the fabric of our society.”

Not all of our readers bought the argument. In fact most of them did not. We heard loud and clear from our customers something we already knew in our hearts: Newspaper readers do not like change. As most any editor can attest, even the slightest shift of a comic strip from one place on a page to another can set off protests from untold numbers of readers. Locate the crossword puzzle any place but an outside corner of a page and the howls of protest will echo through the building. Kill off a favorite comic, even one that readership surveys show is popular among only ten percent of the readers, and thunder bolts of agony will descend upon you for days. 

In Akron, the protests usually ended with a common note of dissent: “This wouldn’t have happened if John S. Knight were still alive.” Or a variation on a theme: “John S. Knight must be rolling over in his grave.”

John S. Knight’s feelings about shifting his newspaper to morning publication will remain a point of conjecture. He had been dead for six years. But my suspicion is he would have seen merit in the move, as long as he did not have to listen to the protestations. Certainly, the folks running Knight Ridder Newspapers in Miami felt the conversion made sense, if only because it moved the Beacon Journal into more familiar territory for most of them. Almost every corporate executive had arrived at that point in their careers after having served on some morning newspaper within the corporation. 

Throughout the three months leading up to the conversion, the corporate bigwigs wanted frequent updates on our progress. But, typical of Knight-Ridder’s corporate Zeitgeist at the time, decisions about the conversion were left to those of us in Akron. The corporation had not yet become the big brother it would become within a few years, when peering over our shoulders and engineering change at the local level became de rigueur in Knight-Ridder. Even at the time of the conversion, though, I sensed that the big eye of the corporation kept closer track of things on the business side of the newspaper than on the news side of things. Larry Jinks, the senior vice president for news and my boss in Miami, wanted reassurance that our plans were going smoothly, but he did not insist on a day-to-day report on our progress. On the business side, the concerns were obvious. The corporate bigwigs did not want us to lose subscribers or advertising dollars. In fact, they wanted to see gains in both those numbers. 

As July 13 approached, the meetings to assess our progress became more arduous and more contentious. Among other assignments that were slow in developing, we had not made much progress in negotiating new language in labor contracts, chiefly with the Teamsters, who represented the district managers and drivers in circulation and the employees who worked in the mail room. The Teamsters wanted more money for their members, arguing that their assignments would require them to work early morning shifts to produce and deliver the papers. 

Finally, with the union issues resolved, the big day arrived. An aura of excitement could be sensed throughout the building on Sunday evening, as we prepared to produce our first Monday morning newspaper. John McMillion was there to push the button, firing up the first presses at midnight. 

While there were a few hiccups involving carriers missing their assignments, the consensus was all of our planning had paid off. In a follow-up meeting that first afternoon, we assessed our efforts and decided we had done a good job. That lasted about one month. Then, disaster struck. 

As the fall term began in area school districts, carriers began to drop off the rolls like flakes in a winter snow storm; not just one flake here and there. They came down in clusters. 

We began noting the trend in mid-August. By the first of September it was an avalanche. 

At one point, as September rolled around, we had almost one-hundred routes “uncovered,” as the circulation folks labeled routes where no carrier was assigned. Those pesky little merchants, the ones who had signed a pledge saying they would remain on their routes, did not say how long they would continue carrying their routes. And, as the school year began, they decided getting up at four or five in the morning to deliver their routes was more commitment than they wished to make to the Beacon Journal.

The folks in circulation – in fact folks in every department in the building – were pulling their hair out, trying to figure out how to get all of the newspapers delivered. It soon became clear that doing it was an impossibility. The district managers, who were supposed to cover when a route went uncovered, simply could not keep up with the unprecedented demands put upon them. 

Meanwhile, in accounting and in Miami, folks charged with counting the beans and the newspapers we sold were seeing a concomitant drop in our circulation numbers. Instead of the rise we had predicted in circulation numbers, we were watching as the numbers plummeted; not just a few subscribers lost but thousands of them over the course of the next two months. 

In none of those hours of planning sessions leading up to the conversion had we contemplated the reality we were now facing. It was a time for action. 

Within days, the circulation department was running big advertisements in the classified section of the paper, seeking adults who wanted to make some extra bucks delivering morning newspapers. We needed to deliver ourselves of the little merchants and replace them with reliable adults, who would see that subscribers got their papers on time. 

In all of our advance notices to subscribers, we promised them we would get their paper to their home by no later than 6:30 in the morning on weekdays or no later than 7 in the morning on weekends. Clearly, it was a promise broken. And we paid the price for that oversight for the next full year, which is the time it took us to get our act together and to begin recouping our losses. 

So, who was responsible for the faux pas?

I’m positive no one at the Beacon Journal foresaw the bittersweet development. Certainly not moi. In looking back at our planning, none of us realized the little merchants would break the promise they made to continue carrying their routes within a one-month period. Moreover, we had not heard of that problem from folks at the other newspapers we consulted before making the conversion. But, boy, there it was in black and white in all those incipient reports the bean counters were sending off to Miami.

We had, to use the coarse idiom of the day, “screwed the pooch.” There was not much consolation in realizing that we were, in fact, producing a better and more timely newspaper than we had been providing as an afternoon newspaper. It didn’t much matter to the folks whose papers never arrived.

In retrospect, there was one other factor at play, as we watched our circulation figures tumble into the abyss. Many of the Teamsters – the drivers and district managers – did not like the fact that we had made the conversion. Some of them felt, if the switch to morning publication failed, the newspaper would ultimately be forced to return to afternoon delivery. So, they set up little roadblocks here and there to see if they could influence that decision. 

I learned that years later, when a retired driver and I were discussing our days at the Beacon Journal. It should not have come as a surprise. Generally, the Teamsters looked askance at most anything we did at the Beacon Journal, if it involved change.

What they did not understand at the time was that the conversion to morning publication was one of the smartest moves the Beacon Journal ever made. We could only look down the path toward the future and hope brighter days were ahead for us after the convulsions we felt when we switched to morning publication. 

We had to wait for a few more years to pass, before the genius of that move became apparent. It surfaced in many ways, but became absolute when The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, launched an aggressive campaign to attract new readers in the suburbs around the city, including areas within our prime circulation market. If we had remained an afternoon newspaper at that time, there’s no telling how much circulation the Cleveland paper could have siphoned off from us. 

(Dale Allen, former editor of the Beacon Journal, died in 2019. This chapter was reprinted from his unpublished memoir with permission of his family.)

By Dale Allen

By Stuart Warner

Forgive me if I have cold feet, or any other extremities, about plunging into the ice fishing debate in Hudson, Ohio, the city where I lived for 15 years, and which I ridiculed as a columnist for almost a decade before that..

Hudson’s mayor created a media storm this week after declaring at a city council meeting that putting shanties up on a lake there could lead to prostitution.  (Or maybe catching crabs?)

The last time I wrote about prostitutes, more than 30 years ago, my Warner’s Corner column literally was ripped off the page by the managing editor about an hour before deadline. I was writing for the Akron Beacon Journal then. (Yes, the paper is fondly referred to as the BJ. Don’t judge.)

Anyway, I thought the column was innocent enough.  A Columbus politician proposed hiring prostitutes to spread the word about using protection from AIDS. I simply wondered how a lady of the evening might fill out an actual state application for the job.  I guess the column did sort of go off the rails when we got to the question:  Position desired?

I should also mention that my old boss also did not like my jokes about Muffy and Buffy and the rest of their well-heeled friends in Hudson, where he lived at the time.  How many Hudson housewives does it take to screw in a light bulb?  Just one.  She stands in the middle of the room and the whole world revolves around her.

Now, thanks to Hudson Mayor Craig Shubert, I maybe I should rewrite that old joke, substituting “ice shanty” for light bulb.

At a city council meeting Monday, a proposal came up to allow ice fishing at the lake at Big Springs Park. You should know that the Hudson council says it is non-partisan.  But there are only two parties in the city: Republican and Crazy Rich Republicans.  Then there is Shubert, who is obviously worth every penny the city is paying him for his ceremonial position.

The mayor went all Music Man in his response to the proposal, saying,   “… if you then allow ice fishing with shanties, then that leads to another problem. Prostitution,” he said.  (“We got trouble.  Right here in Hudson City.  Trouble with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for … well, you know.”)

Shubert knows all this, he later wrote in a statement, because of his experience as a former award-winning journalist.

I also claim to be a former award-winning journalist, but I thought those fishermen were all alone in those shanties, perfecting their baiting.  In fact, I’m told, some are masters of their craft.

That’s just one of the many jokes about poles, shrinkage and hook(er)-line-and sinker that soon clogged the internet over the next couple of days.  “Don’t come knockin’ if my shanty is a rockin.”   (It’s not true that Hudson received 2,000 fishing license applications the next day.)

Go ahead and snicker.  I did. The town founded by explorer David Hudson as a proud part of the Western Reserve at the end of the 18^th century became a national laughingstock.  Again.

And not in a good way.  Back in the 1980s, when I was writing jokes about Hudson, people were laughing with Muffy and Buffy. (The Hudson 2s … you can never be 2 Rich, 2 Tan or 2 Thin.) Now, they’re laughing at them.

The Hudson of 2022 seems to have become a microcosm of our great national divide. Educators have been threatened, culture has been canceled and Critical Race Theory has been bandied about as the evil stepchild of education, though it seems few people know what it means, especially politicians. Sad for a community that once embraced its heritage as an important stop on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves fleeing to the north and the boyhood home of abolitionist John Brown.

Shubert made headlines last fall when he demanded that school board members resign or face charges of child pornography because of a supplemental creative writing course that contained references to sex and drinking. A video of Schubert’s proclamation went viral and made him a hero in some conservative circles, according to news reports.

After that, several members received threats significant enough for the school district to report to police.  According to the Beacon Journal, one woman wrote:  “YOU ARE OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER THAN TO DO THIS , RESIGNING WILL BE A LOT LESS PAINFUL FOR YOU AND YOUR FAMILY, either choose to resign from this board of education or you will be charged.”

A subsequent investigation determined that the materials were not pornographic. Schubert pleaded his poor hearing as the reason he might have misunderstood what another politician told him about the course.  

Summit County Prosecutor Sherry Bevan Walsh, a longtime Hudson resident,  then investigated Schubert’s role in prompting the threats. She brought no charges but said in a statement that “the reckless conduct by Hudson’s mayor resulted in threats, fear, and hate-filled words from around the country.”

A couple of months before the child porn allegations, Hudson made national news after American Legion and Hudson American Legion Auxiliary leaders turned down the microphone of a veteran as he spoke at a Memorial Day ceremony about Black Americans’ role in the holiday, according to the Beacon Journal and other reports.  Then school district officials investigated charges that high school students were making racist and homophobic comments on a video game app.

During a follow-up school board meeting to discuss diversity, one parent brought up the specter of teaching CRT in the classrooms, though there is no evidence that it has been. In fairness, most of the parents at the meeting spoke in favor of diversity.

But we’re getting far too serious now.

Let’s return to fishing lures and hookers.  There actually is an Ohio website about ice fishing called Rock the Lake, which explains terms like creepers and jigging.  It also notes that some fishermen decorate their shanties like a Holiday Inn.  (Not making that up.)

Maybe that’s what confused the Hudson mayor.  I don’t know.  I’m no expert.

But I think I do know an ice hole when I see one.