Author: Mr. Write Coach

                                             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.

(This is a chapter from my non-fiction book, JOCK: The Quickest Thinking Coach in America, 2025

Fall of 1968

Irvine Stewart says he didn’t know what to expect that morning, Aug. 28, 1968 — the day the Democratic Presidential Convention was about the tear apart Chicago and the nation and four days after he turned 15 years old.  Anxious about the road ahead, he boarded the yellow school bus near his home on West Sixth Street in Lexington. Ky.  That bus and  others carried Stewart, his best friend, D.K. Garth, and dozens of  black students miles away from their downtown neighborhoods to a high school in the  suburbs, a school where only a couple of years earlier the students waved Confederate flags at athletic events.

Stewart didn’t fully grasp then why he couldn’t attend Paul Dunbar High School, which was only a block from his house.  Ever since he was young enough to pick up a basketball, he imagined himself wearing a green-and-white Bearcat uniform.  Dunbar basketball was the pride of Lexington’s black community. Home games had the fervor of a gospel service.  The band played.  The cheerleaders swayed.  And all the people said “Amen” to their high priest of basketball, the head coach, Dr. S.T. Roach.

The icons of the team’s 512 victories under Roach filled the school’s trophy case — two state black school championships, six 11^th Region championships in the 11 years Dunbar was allowed to compete against white teams and  two state tournament runner-up trophies, from 1961 and 1963. Stewart knew all the players from those teams from pickup games at Douglass Park and the Charles Young rec center.  This should have been his time to be a part of all that tradition, to add another trophy to that shelf.  And now the high school, and all that it meant to him and every other kid in the neighborhood, was gone.

In 1966, Lexington school officials, fearing forced integration, took a pre-emptive step, announcing they would close Dunbar High School.  That meant white students wouldn’t have to be bused to the black high school. Federal officials weren’t satisfied, however, so the city and county merged school systems.  The city also closed its other downtown high school, Henry Clay, building a new Henry Clay High School in the eastern suburbs. Dunbar closed in the spring of 1967, and over the next two years, its students were disbursed to the four high schools out in the county, far from their inner-city homes.

The local politics didn’t matter much to Irvine Stewart that August morning as the school bus headed south on Broadway Avenue for several miles – passing by the  Campbell House Hotel, an aging white building with the stately look of a southern plantation.  A half-mile farther, the bus veered left onto Clays Mill Road, then took a sharp left  onto Springhill Drive, past rows of brick and stone houses with well-kept lawns, then pulled in behind his new high school.

There were several white students waiting to greet Stewart and his friends as they stepped off the bus.

“Go home niggers!” he remembers several of the students shouting. “We don’t want you here!  Go back downtown!”

Welcome to Lafayette High School.

                           Xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Lexington had changed again when Jock Sutherland returned late in the summer of 1970 at age 42.

Southland Park was no longer as busy as it was three summers ago when he first moved back to his hometown, staying for only one season before he was offered a job as an assistant at the University of Alabama.  Maybe because other parks and pools had been built in the south side of town by then.  Maybe because there was restlessness among young people that led them to less frivolous activities.  On May 5, 1970, the day after National Guardsmen killed four students at Kent State University, the sleepy University of Kentucky campus suddenly woke up to war protests.  Someone set the Air Force ROTC building on fire.  The building was only a block from Jock’s grandmother’s house, the house where he grew up.  It was right across the street from Alumni Gymnasium, where he had spent so many gleeful days as a child sneaking into UK basketball practices.

Jock’s family dynamics were changing, too.  For the first time in Jock’s coaching career, the Sutherlands were no longer together as a unit.  Their oldest son, Charlie, graduated high school before the family left Tuscaloosa.  He decided to stay behind at Alabama to play for the freshman basketball team. The house they rented on Lafayette Parkway felt empty at times to Snooks, although Jock and Glenn were usually right across the street at the high school, where the youngest Sutherland enrolled as a sophomore.

But the biggest change of all, the change Jock never anticipated when he decided to return to his alma mater, was Lafayette High School itself.   Redistricting in the fall of 1968 moved the school’s wealthiest families to the rival Tates Creek High district and brought the city’s poorest students from the Charlotte Court section of downtown all the way out to Lafayette Drive. Lafayette had 14 National Merit semifinalists in 1968, only two in 1970.

Lafayette integrated in 1963, but those kids were rural blacks and there weren’t many of them.  They blended quietly into the student body. The downtown black kids came with different attitude.  They didn’t want to be there.  They were reminded every day of what they didn’t have: cars, new clothes, the three-bedroom, one-and-half bath brick homes with nuclear families.   They carried themselves defiantly.  They refused to cower to racial taunts by the school’s white toughs, the guys who spent most of their days smoking in the restrooms, intimidating anyone, black or white, who just wanted to use a urinal.  I was a junior that year.  Like most of the white students, I avoided the rowdies and the rednecks. In fact, I stayed out of the main bathroom all three years I was in high school. But the downtown black kids fought back.   With fists.  Sometimes with knives.  There were days when the suburban school yard looked like a scene from West Side Story.

The worst of the fighting had subsided by the time Sutherland returned in 1970, but many of the black students continued to rebel.  Black teachers like Louis Stout Jr., who had been the last basketball coach at Dunbar High School before it closed, says he thought that the white teachers were afraid to discipline black students, only encouraging bad behavior. Chaos often resulted.

On the first day of school in August, 1970, Sutherland remembers walking into the cafeteria and saw black girls dancing on the table tops as their friends played loud music and cheered them on.

“Knock it off,” the coach called out.

Everyone ignored him.  They had never seen this man before.

“Knock it off, I said,” he repeated, his voice rising.

Again, they ignored him.

Sutherland said nothing.  He walked over to the light switch and shut it off.  The cafeteria went dark.

“Everybody out,” he bellowed.

The students scattered. 

“That old man’s crazy!” one girl yelled as she departed.

                   Xxxxxxxx

Sutherland’s late decision to leave the University of Alabama didn’t give him much time to get acquainted with his new Lafayette basketball team.

Still, he liked what he saw at first.  

Irvine Stewart was a senior now.  He was only 5-foot-10½, but he was one of the fiercest rebounders Sutherland had ever coached.  Stewart’s buddy, 6-foot-1 guard D.K. Garth, and two other downtown kids, 6-foot-3 Chuck Scott 6-foot-3 Darrell Higgins, were all experienced players.  Steve Feck, a 6-foot-3 white senior, and two 6-foot-2 junior guards, David Moore and Van Berry, gave the team depth.

None of them was a dominant player like Gary Waddell or Toke Coleman, but all of these kids had good size and quickness. They were perfect, Jock was certain, for his style of basketball.

But there was so much he didn’t know about the downtown black kids.

He didn’t realize that when he scheduled a Saturday practice, they often had no one to drive them from the inner-city to the suburbs; nor that when they went home after school on the days of an away game that they had to catch a bus downtown in order to get back to the school in time to leave with the rest of the team.  He couldn’t see that the attitude they wore was a shield from the piercing intolerance they felt at the predominantly white high school.  He didn’t understand that “acting white” made them look weak to their peers.

The players knew even less about him. They didn’t understand that when he yelled at them, he wasn’t trying to humiliate them; he was trying to push them out of the comfort zones, to use all of their abilities.  They didn’t know how he had protected his first black players, how he had been a father-figure to fatherless kids like Toke Coleman and Wendell Hudson. They also didn’t know much about his reputation as a coach. When he returned to Lafayette the first time, he had immediate credibility with the players, black and white.  But those kids were gone, and Sutherland had been away from high school basketball for two years.

The four black seniors were a little wary of him from the beginning.  He was their third head coach in their three years at the school.  Each coach employed different offenses and defenses; each coach treated them differently.  They had reached the regional tournament as juniors.  They figured this was their year to strut. This new coach needed to prove himself to them.

Practices became a war of wills almost from the first day.  Sutherland knew one way to coach – he talked, the players listened. He wasn’t going to change.  When any of the seniors challenged his authority, he erupted.  These seniors didn’t accept sharp rebuke from a white man easily. The tension increased every day. Between the players and the coach.  Between the black players and the white players. 

Yet the team held together for the first month of the season.  The players’ athletic skills and their basketball acumen were well suited for Sutherland’s increasingly complicated defensive schemes.  He kept a collection of  colored towels with him on the bench.  He’d wave a red one if he wanted his team in the basic zone defense, white to increase the half-court pressure and blue for full-court pressure, yellow for a straight zone.  Sometimes, if none of those worked, he’d just throw all the towels up in the air and let them play whatever they wanted.  That usually confused both teams.

Mostly, all the defenses were working in December of 1970.  After eight games, Lafayette had a 7-1 record and was ranked among the state’s top 10 teams.

Then came game No. 9, on Dec. 30, 1970, for the championship of the Bluegrass Festival, a holiday tournament at Lexington Catholic High School.  Lafayette won its first two games of the tournament easily.  Its opponent in the championship game was a highly disciplined but undersized Frankfort High team, which didn’t have a player in its starting lineup over 6-feet tall.  This should have been an easy victory for Lafayette. 

About four minutes into the game, Lafayette trailed 11-0.  Frankfort’s precision offense … bounce pass, bounce pass, bounce pass, bounce pass until someone worked open for an open shot … confounded the Generals’ multiple defenses.  But the bigger problem was on offense.  Nothing was working for Lafayette. Sutherland saw that two starters refused to pass the ball to one another, knocking everything out of synch.

He called time out.

“What’s wrong with you guys?” he says he bellowed at them.

They wouldn’t look at him.

He yelled at them some more before they returned to the court.

Afterward, a manager cautiously approached the angry coach.

The two players got into a fight in the locker room before the game when Sutherland was outside, the manager said.

“What about?”  Sutherland asked.

The manager hadn’t packed all of the team’s socks for the trip.  When the last two players arrived, there was only one pair with the school’s emblem, a red L, left.  The other player would have to wear a pair of plain socks.  These were kids who had to scrap for everything they got in life. They wrestled for the more stylish pair of socks.

Sutherland was livid.

“A pair of damn socks!” he shouted.

He pulled both players out of the game.

The berating continued at halftime, with Lafayette trailing 40-25.

Lafayette made a run in the second half, but Frankfort remained patient in the face of the Generals’ harassing defense and held on for a 59-53 victory despite 25 points by Stewart, who was named the tournament’s most valuable player.

Lafayette’s players didn’t show any disappointment after the defeat.  Maybe their lives were so full of disappointment that they had learned to mask it.  Sutherland was furious.  His anger increased when he saw some of the kids laughing and joking in the locker room.  Then Chuck Scott really lit the coach’s fuse.

“Hey, at least we got a trophy to put in the trophy case back at school,” the coaching remembers Scott saying, hoisting the runner-up award up high.

Jock lost it.  He wasn’t sure why.  Maybe it was the memory of all the Lafayette championship teams, the finely disciplined squads coached by Ralph Carlisle.  Maybe it was the frustration of knowing he left a Division I coaching job at Alabama to return to a school that he didn’t recognize anymore.   Maybe … maybe … he never has been able to explain what happened next as anything other than temporary insanity.

He grabbed the trophy from Scott, hurled it past the player’s head, into the locker room wall.

Wham!

Pieces flew all over the floor.

“You ain’t putting nothing into that trophy case until you can win something with the right damn attitude!” he screamed.

Finally, there was silence. A trophy and a team had been shattered.

As the others quietly left, Steve Feck, the lone white senior, gathered up the pieces, put them in his gym bag and carried them home.

                 Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

January and February of 1971 were the two most miserable months of Jock’s coaching career.  Nothing else quite compared … not losing his first 10 games at Gallatin County, not the last-second tournament defeats to Bourbon County and Shelby County when he was at Harrison County, not the injury to Gary Waddell before his first Lafayette team began tournament play.

At home Jock rarely spoke.  The Sutherlands’ regular 6:30 p.m. dinners were no longer happy meals.  Snooks tried to console him, tell him that the players and he would adjust to each other, they always had.  Give it time, she said. Glenn stayed out of the line of fire.  He was playing on the school’s promising junior varsity team.  He saw his dad suffer every day. He didn’t want to talk about it at home.  Charlie called regularly from Tuscaloosa.  He recognized that his dad’s voice no longer carried his usual enthusiasm for basketball.

School was even worse.  The man who grew up in love with basketball, dreaded the final bell every day and the start of another practice.

The coaching office he built for himself in an old equipment cage seemed more like a jail cell now.  The office had always been a place where players and the press could stop by for a chat.  Whatever happened on the basketball court, he always seemed jovial when you found him in his office.  Three seasons earlier, I had been an invisible jayvee player during his first return to Lafayette.  Now I was an 18-year-old sports writer for The Lexington Herald, assigned to cover the local high school teams. I often found him in the office after practice, head buried in his hands.  He seemed so isolated there.

Some days when I stopped by for an interview, I felt more like a psychiatrist than a journalist. I couldn’t print much of what he said.  It wouldn’t have been fair to the players.  I knew them, too.  My basketball career ended after my sophomore year, but the next season, when Stewart, Scott, Garth, Higgins and Feck were sophomores, I worked out with them in the preseason before I was the last player cut from the team.  Then I traveled with them all year as the team’s statistician. The four players from downtown were good kids.  They actually had a lot in common with Jock’s childhood -– they barely had a father figures in their lives, if at all; basketball gave them their identity.

But it seemed that the coach and the players would never find that common ground.

The team lost seven of its next nine games and Sutherland’s  frustration intensified.  For the first time as a coach, he couldn’t communicate with his players, especially the black players.  He thought he understood them.  He had gotten along with black people since he was a kid, even though he grew up in a southern city where the newspaper printed “Colored News and Notes” on Sundays.  He had shepherded Toke Coleman and the other black players at Harrison County through the rigors of integration in a rural community. On his first team at Lafayette, Sutherland’s black and white players blended together like keys on a piano. He recruited the first black athlete at Alabama, Wendell Hudson.  But these kids, these kids from downtown Lexington … he couldn’t reach them. He became so frustrated that he didn’t even want the team to win.  If these guys weren’t going to play the way he wanted them to play, then they deserved to lose, he told me off the record. 

The players dealt with Sutherland’s tirades in their own way.  Stewart was the leader of the group. Basketball meant the most to him.  He saw the sport as his way out of poverty, as a chance to go to college.  Now all that seemed to be disappearing. When he was with the others, he was the most defiant.  But in private he tried to mediate with the coach, to bring everyone together.

Scott was the cocky one. He was an intimidating figure, with an Afro, mustache and neatly trimmed beard. He was a brash talker.  He wasn’t the type to back down, to respond quietly, calmly, to a coach or anybody.

Higgins retreated into his own world, simply ignoring his coach, another male figure who wasn’t there in his life.

Maybe Garth internalized his anguish more than the others.  Outwardly, he appeared almost oblivious to the strife between players and coach, like he didn’t care.  Inside, though, something was going on that not even his best friend, Stewart, understood.

Feck, the lone white senior, kept his head down, trying to keep playing hard through it all.  He was enduring enough trauma at home – his parents were divorcing.

By early February, the team’s 7-1 record had fallen to 9-9.  After another blistering lecture by the coach, Garth left the team and refused to return.

Stewart tried shuttle diplomacy between his buddy and his coach.  Nothing worked.  Garth was resolute.  He had had enough.  Basketball wasn’t worth it anymore.

A couple of days later, on Feb. 6, the team was preparing to leave on a trip to northern Kentucky for a night game against Ft. Thomas Highlands High School.  Sutherland got a call from Stewart.  He, Higgins, Scott and junior Van Berry had missed their bus from downtown.

“It’ll be a half hour before another one comes, Coach. Can you wait for us?”

“Then you’ve missed two buses,” Sutherland replied, “because we’re out of here in five minutes.”

The bus left the school without the players, but the team hadn’t gotten out of town when Sutherland heard a horn honking and honking from a car traveling beside the bus.   The driver motioned for the bus to pull over.  The coach saw that Stewart was in the car.  The bus stopped.  Stewart got on without saying a word. 

Sutherland had ordered the managers not to pack the uniforms of the players who didn’t show up.  So Stewart wore a jayvee jersey that night.  He didn’t start, but he came off the bench to score 15 points, even though Lafayette got clobbered 74-50.

Just a few nights later, the team traveled across town to play rival Bryan Station.  The players who had been left behind on the Ft. Thomas trip staged a mini-protest.  They kept tapping on the bus window with quarters.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“Cut it out,” Sutherland yelled.

Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

“If you don’t cut it out, I’ll put you off the bus.”

“You can’t put us off the bus,” one of them said.

Sutherland ordered the driver to stop.  The bus was in downtown Lexington, near where the players lived.

“Get off and go home,” he said.

They didn’t budge. 

Sutherland saw a police officer nearby and called him over.

“Sir, these kids are disrupting my team,” the coach said.  “Would you remove them from this bus.”

The players left.  Lafayette lost again as the season tumbled out of control.  February ended and the team’s   record was 11 wins, 14 losses.  Only tournament play remained.  No one gave this team much of a chance to go very far.

No one except Irvine Stewart.

                                                Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Stewart knew there wasn’t much demand among college coaches  for 5-foot-10½ forwards, even though he had averaged 17 points and more than 10 rebounds during the tumultuous season. Still, he believed in himself, believed that someone would take notice if he performed on a big enough stage.  There was still time, he remembers thinking.

He called yet another team meeting.  It was time, he told the other players, to put an end to the resistance.  It was time to do it the coach’s way. “He was a coach at Alabama. He’s taken a lot of teams to the state tournament,” Stewart said.  “He must know basketball.”

Sutherland was surprised when he saw several of the players gather outside his office. 

Stewart spoke up.

“We know you are an old-fashioned man and you ain’t gonna change,” the senior forward said. “You won’t see our way, but the only way we’re going to do anything in the tournament is if we do it your way.  So we’re going to do it your way from now on.  We want you to understand, sir, that we don’t like you, but we’re going to do it your way because you’re the man.  There won’t be no more arguin’ from us.”

Sutherland smiled for maybe the first time in weeks.

“If you mean that,” he said, “we’ll win some games.”

The battle with each other was over.  The other teams were the enemy for now.

And Stewart became a warrior.

He scored 28 points and owned the backboards with 21 rebounds as Lafayette opened play in the 43^rd District tournament with a 54-43 victory over Bryan Station, which was now coached by Sutherland’s old rival from the 10^th Region, Bob Barlow.

Stewart added 31 points and another dozen rebounds in the district semifinals, a 79-73 triumph over Sayre, a private school in Lexington.

That victory guaranteed Lafayette a berth in the 11^th Region tournament, so it didn’t matter that the Generals lost to rival Tates Creek in the district championship game.  Both teams advanced to the regional tournament the next week at UK’s Memorial Coliseum.

Tates Creek, coached by Louis Stout Jr., was the heavy favorite to win the tournament and advance to The Sweet Sixteen.  Stout, Toke’s Coleman’s half brother, was the last link to Dunbar High’s basketball greatness.  He had been an assistant to Roach, then took over as head coach for the final two years of the school’s existence after Roach retired in 1965. But on the opening night of the regional tournament, the little Frankfort team pulled another surprise, upsetting Tates Creek on a 40-foot bank shot at the final buzzer.

That eliminated a major obstacle for Lafayette, which advanced with a 66-61 victory over Madison Central in the first round of the tournament.

That advanced the Generals to the semifinals against Woodford County, a team that had beaten them by more than 20 points during the regular season.

Sutherland’s players liked to run up and down the court and shoot whenever the mood struck. He knew that kind of fast-paced game would mean certain defeat against a team like Woodford County, which had size, talent and discipline.

This would be a real test of how sincere his players were about following his instructions.

He decided to offer them a little incentive.

When the players showed up at their dressing room in the Coliseum that Friday night, they saw five stacks of 10 silver dollars aligned on the bench. They once had belonged to Sutherland’s grandmother.  She left them for him.  Now was the time to pass them on.

“What you got there, man?” one player asked.

“That’s your money,” the coach said.  “One of these stacks belongs to each of you five starters.”

The players started slapping hands.

“Aww-right, man. Let me at my money.”

“Wait a minute,” Sutherland said.   “There’s a catch.”

“A catch, man. What kind of catch?”

“You don’t get the money until after the game,” the coach said. “And each time one of you misses a shot, I’m going to take one of the silver dollars off the stack.”

The players started slapping hands again.

“I ain’t gonna take no muther-fuckin’ shot, man,” said one.

“Me neither.  You take the shots, man.”

The first time Lafayette got the ball, the players kept passing and passing and passing.  Nobody would shoot.  Finally, Stewart was fouled.

He called time out.

“What the hell did you waste a timeout like that for?” Sutherland asked.

“Do free throws count if you miss them?” he asked.

“Yes,” the coach said, “and there’s one more catch.  If we lose, nobody gets any silver dollars.”

Every time Lafayette got the ball after that, the players ran their patterns over and over until someone broke free. Usually it was Higgins, the team’s best shooter and fastest player.  He made 13 of 15 field goal attempts and scored 30 points.  Midway through the fourth quarter, Lafayette  had attempted only 37 shots, but had made 80 percent of them.  By then, the Generals led by 20 points and Sutherland called another timeout.  

“You don’t have to worry about missing anymore,” he said. “The silver dollars are all yours.’

Lafayette won 64-49, advancing to Saturday’s 11^th Region championship game.

Its opponent:  Frankfort.  The team that had beaten the Generals for the Bluegrass Festival title, the night back in December when Sutherland smashed the tournament’s runner-up trophy.

After the Friday night game, Sutherland went to the Lafayette gym alone.  He wanted to get his mind focused on basketball.  These kids believed in him now.  He couldn’t let them down.  He walked the floor for hours, mimicking Frankfort’s offense, and Lafayette’s defense. By early Saturday morning, he had his plan.

That afternoon, Sutherland gathered his team for a workout at the Lafayette gym.  Frankfort’s offensive trademark was the bounce pass, a throwback to another generation, when players weren’t quick and athletic.  It worked now, because defensive players are taught to play with their hands up, blocking their opponents’ passing lanes.  The Quickest Thinking Coach in America drilled his kids that afternoon on playing defense with their hands down, close to the floor.

That night, Frankfort’s bounce passes turned into steals and deflections.  At one point, Frankfort went eight minutes without scoring a basket.  Stewart scored 25 points and grabbed nine rebounds as Lafayette pulled ahead by 13 in the final quarter and won by a final score of 49-39.

And it was time, once again, for Sutherland and his team to cut down the nets.

Irvine Stewart and the Lafayette Generals were going to The Sweet Sixteen, the first time the school had been back to the state tournament since it won the championship in 1957.

Sutherland had been the first coach to take Gallatin County to the state tournament and the first to take Harrison County.  This victory provided a couple of more firsts for him.  He became the first coach in tournament history to take three different schools to The Sweet Sixteen, The Sunday Herald-Leader reported. And Lafayette became the first team ever to reach the tournament after finishing the regular season with a losing record.

None of that seemed to matter with Sutherland as he spoke to reporters after the game. He was more contrite than celebratory.

“I wanted to win this one so bad because I’ve mistreated these guys all year long,” he said. “I apologized to them in a team meeting and I want to apologize to them publicly now.”

                                                            Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The summer before he returned to Lafayette, while he was on a scouting trip for Alabama, Sutherland visited a basketball camp run by his old friend Harold Cole, the coach of the Ashland Tomcats.

Jock had always zealously guarded the secrets of his Mad Dog defense, but when Cole asked if he would share the technique with him and his players, Sutherland relented – he figured he was finished with high school coaching anyway.

So, of course, Lafayette was paired against Ashland in the first game of the 1971 state tournament at Freedom Hall in Louisville.

Sutherland had abandoned the basic Mad Dog because teams with quicker, more athletic players could break it down when they had time to practice against it.  Ashland played in the northeast, predominantly white corner of the state.  Sutherland didn’t know what to expect from the team.  He forgot about the Mad Dog and didn’t rehearse his team for it. The defense’s half-court trap surprised Lafayette’s guards early in the game and forced them into several walking violations. Ashland pulled ahead by as many as a dozen points.

But Irvine Stewart was playing on the biggest stage of his life and he wasn’t going to let the moment pass. Even though he was the shortest player on the court that day, his performance in the second half that was larger than life, one of the best in the tournament’s history.

Stewart had perfected a baseline move that he learned as a sophomore.  He would drive his man toward the baseline, then turn his body parallel to the line and slide toward the basket until he was actually behind the backboard, facing out of bounds with the defensive player on his back.  Then he would use his jumping ability to spring himself in reverse until his was in front of the rim.  His back became a shield that prevented even players six or seven inches taller than him from blocking his shot.

In the second half against Ashland, he made that move from the right side and from the left side, hurling his body into the mass of taller players again and again and again, scoring basket after basket.  He scored 22 points in the final two quarters.

Yet with 48 seconds left to play, Ashland still led 71-65.

Higgins scored on a jumper to cut Lafayette’s deficit to four points with 35 seconds remaining.  Then Steve Feck intercepted a pass and made a lay-up.   Ashland led by two.  Seventeen seconds still to play.

Sixteen.  Fifteen.  Fourteen.  Ashland cautiously worked the ball up the court against the Lafayette press. 

Ten.  Nine. Eight. The Generals didn’t foul.  Six. Five. Four.  Higgins stole the ball.  He passed it ahead  to Stewart. 

There was no time to drive to the basket now.

Stewart pulled up for a jump shot.  Beyond his normal shooting range.

The ball danced on the rim for a moment.  Then it fell off.

Ashland 71.  Lafayette 69.

The Tomcat fans, whose teams had been embarrassed by Sutherland teams in the past, whooped and hollered.  But hundreds of fans from all over the 17,000-seat arena also stood and applauded as Irvine Stewart walked off the floor.

He finished the game with 29 points and 11 rebounds, an effort that earned him a spot on the All-Tournament team.  In seven tournament games, three in the district, three in the region and one in The Sweet Sixteen, he averaged 22 points and more than a dozen rebounds.  At least a few college scouts noticed the undersized forward.

He couldn’t thoroughly enjoy his moment, though, not so much because his team had lost; because his lifelong friend, D.K. Garth, hadn’t been there to share the season-ending triumphs with him. 

Sutherland accepted some of the blame for that.  Stewart didn’t pass judgment.  When the senior finally reached the locker room, the coach already was surrounded by a battery of reporters, eager for a few colorful quotes to fill their game stories.  Stewart walked by the pack, turned toward Sutherland, stretched out his arm and clasped the coach’s shoulder.  They looked at each other without saying a word. They didn’t have to.  The mutual respect was obvious.

                                                            xxxxxxxxxxxxx

Three weeks later, the Lafayette team gathered for its annual team banquet.

At the end of the program, Jock Sutherland held up the 11^th Region championship trophy.

“I’ve never been prouder to put anything in the school’s trophy case,” he said.

But the celebration wasn’t over. 

Steve Feck’s senior year at Lafayette had been a thunderstorm of emotion.  There was constant strife at practice and the divorce at home.  When he turned 18 after the first semester, he moved out and rented an apartment, paying for it with his earnings from a part-time job. Ever since he was a child, he had enjoyed rebuilding things that had been broken. His unselfish play helped the team repair itself in the final weeks of the season.  And alone at his apartment, he worked on a special project.

Feck carried a brown bag with him as he and the other seniors approached Sutherland. Feck opened the bag and pulled out that runner-up trophy from the Bluegrass Festival, mended with glue and tape.

He handed it to the coach.  The players and the rest of the crowd applauded loudly.  Jock was speechless for one of the few times in his life.

The trophy of a team that was torn apart then put back together remained on display at Lafayette High School for more than 30 years.

.

By Deb Van Tassel Warner

On the southeast side of the corridor leading to the editorial board offices at 44 E.  Exchange St. sat a windowless room decorated top to bottom, walls, floor and upholstery, in deep shades of red.

Akron Beacon Journal employees referred to the room, neither surprisingly nor creatively, as the Red Room. Reporters took advantage of its privacy to conduct interviews, hold confidential conversations and have spirited discussions over brown bag lunches about the craft of writing. Editors used it for planning and training sessions, to deliver performance reviews, and occasionally to melt down privately from stress.  No one remembers who deemed red suitable for the room’s purpose. But as our cafeteria had been decorated in blue tones (yes, we called it the Blue Room!) in the same renovation, some decision-maker must have thought red was just the ticket. 

On an auspicious day in mid-1992, seven staffers occupied the Red Room for an entire shift, not to be interrupted, to brainstorm ideas for a project on race relations, an initiative that two years later would win the newspaper the prestigious Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal.

The idea hatched after the April 29, 1992, trial verdict clearing four white Los Angeles police officers in the brutal, videotaped beating of Rodney King. Gathering community reaction, the Beacon had run a story of a white woman in Canton holding up a sign that simply said: “I’m sorry.”

For Black Americans, the verdict “underscored . . . the years of unfair treatment by police and the criminal justice system,” reporter Yalinda Rhoden recalled. It triggered a series of arguments between Rhoden and Assistant City Editor David Hertz, including a debate over which was more horrific, American slavery or the Holocaust.

“To me, anti-Semitism and racism have a great deal in common,” Hertz said. “I became convinced that the ABJ should examine race relations in our community and help the residents come to grips with racism.”

Hertz took the idea to senior editors, who called a meeting for input and buy-in from the entire newsroom. The staff packed into the hallowed John S. Knight conference room, and Hertz led the discussion.

“I was petrified,” he said. A relative newcomer to the Beacon, 30-year-old Hertz was then one of the youngest editors on staff.

Everyone supported the concept, but agreeing on the project’s scope proved contentious. A few staffers argued that any examination of race relations must include Akron’s suburbs and other minority groups. Most favored limiting the project to blacks and whites in Akron only. The rationale was twofold: The predominantly white suburbs would not illustrate the issues underpinning racial tension; and blacks formed Akron’s largest minority group. After all, the impetus was a black man’s beating at the hands of white cops. 

At the time, the decision seemed to make sense. We knew it would be an enormous undertaking requiring deft management and skillful diplomacy to keep newsroom egos on task. Today, some of us would certainly support a broader approach. Ignoring Akron’s other minority groups ran counter to the project’s goal, which was to foster inclusivity. 

After a second staff discussion, Editor Dale Allen advised Hertz to pick a smaller but diverse cross-section of newsroom talent to sharpen the focus. Offering the black perspective were reporter Rhoden, local columnist Carl Chancellor and editorial writer Laura Ofobike. For the white perspective were projects editor Bob Paynter, copy editor Sarah Vradenburg and myself, then the Sunday news editor.

That’s how we landed in the Red Room for eight intense, emotional hours, launching the discussion with the experiences that had shaped our own attitudes about race. We challenged and teased each other. We were variously loud, angry, contemplative, sorrowful, joyful, tearful, confrontational. We stayed in the room for lunch, leaving only for bathroom breaks. At the end of the day, no one was dry-eyed.

I told of growing up in a lily-white, working-class suburb in New Jersey, where my interactions with blacks were mostly positive. The worst racially motivated incident in my lifetime happened after I moved to Akron in 1982. I was driving through a benighted area of North Hill when a young black man threw a lit cigarette through my car window and called me a white bitch. I learned to drive through the ’hoods with doors locked and windows closed.

Akron also delivered my most illuminating epiphany about race, at a baby shower for Yuvonne Bruce, a black reporter who would become the copy editor on the project, at the Highland Square home of Cristal Williams, a black assistant editor. There were as many whites as blacks at the party when it began in the afternoon. By nightfall, the group had shrunk to about six or eight dedicated card players. I was the only white person.

I never felt unsafe. These were my friends, my colleagues. But I did wonder how I would feel if I were the only white in a group of blacks I did not know. Then I realized this uncertainty about safety, about how one will be treated, is what my black friends must experience most days of their lives as minorities in this country.

Rhoden, a versatile and gutsy newswoman as well as a good friend, chuckled, and said something to this effect: You’re right about that. When I started here I was covering northern Summit County. No one looks like me there.

A graduate of Akron’s Central-Hower High School and Ohio Wesleyan University, Rhoden was the youngest in the room. Family members had strong ties to the rubber companies and ran a funeral business. She provided invaluable context, having witnessed firsthand the demographic shifts along Copley Road and Hawkins Avenue, the near west side, North Hill and other neighborhoods as tire jobs, Akron’s economic spine, vanished.

She broke into tears recalling how one of her best friends in childhood, a white girl, told her they couldn’t play together any longer.

Hertz, a native of Shaker Heights, recalled how older black students would try to shake down the younger white kids every day at lunch time at Woodbury Junior High School.  “I had to figure out a way to fool these kids, as they were much bigger than I. So I bluffed and told them I had no money, even though I did. I saw this as a racial thing, as everyone I sat with was white. … For years after I told this story, Carl Chancellor and I would joke about it. Every so often, he would come up to me and ask me for my lunch money.”

So many years later, it is impossible to capture all we discussed that day. I am not the best person to be writing this chapter. I had been the business editor for about five years when Stuart Warner, my husband, got promoted to deputy managing editor, overseeing business and local news. As I could not report to him, I was named Sunday news editor, a new position without portfolio. Heck, for months I didn’t even have a dedicated seat.

I no longer created content or directed reporters, which is what I do best. I worked Tuesday through Saturday to plan and design the big Sunday paper, as well as elections and special sections. Mine were the last eyes on major projects, checking mainbars, sidebars, headlines, captions, page toppers, pull quotes, photos and graphics, before they went into the paper. That was my contribution for the first three installments of A Question of Color, a five-part series. But I was never comfortable in the role and left for The Seattle Times in September, before the series concluded at the end of 1993. Stuart stayed in Akron to see the project through. Key people involved in the day-to-day wrangling were not available to author this chapter.

Here is what I have reconstructed from my memories, Beacon Journal archives and interviews: We agreed to do something ambitious and important and with impact. It would be expensive. We would examine black/white relations in Akron, a city where African Americans made up 25 percent of the population. We would inform our reporting using Census data and professionally managed focus groups of blacks and whites. We would ask for polling money for the University of Akron to survey city residents about race, pivoting off the 30^th anniversary of  Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We would use the polling, focus groups and Census data to drill down into what we suspected would emerge as “hot-button issues”: education, economic opportunity, crime and punishment, and housing. Hertz suggested  a community component.

I proposed that the focus groups be racially mixed but got roundly shouted down; my colleagues said that blacks and whites would hold back if we put them in the same room at the same time. To accomplish anything at all, they said, we needed to create a safe environment for people to discuss their feelings candidly. Ultimately, we decided on three focus groups for each installment – one white, one black, and one mixed to be drawn from members of the first two groups.

Paynter, the venerable and highly decorated projects editor who introduced computer-assisted reporting to the Beacon newsroom, drew up a comprehensive proposal for Allen’s review.  Always supportive of big-picture projects with a strong sense of place, Allen signed off quickly.

Allen anointed Paynter to lead the project. He began working on the survey and drafting reporters, one black, one white, for each topic. Officially, Paynter had carte blanche to ask for anyone he wanted and reached into the features, sports, business and local news departments. In reality, Stuart conducted delicate negotiations with more than one territorial editor. Fine writers who should have been chosen were not. Some could not be spared; others were casualties of hoary grudges.

The final team, however, a diverse collection of 29 writers, editors, photographers and artists, did superb work. Assistant Managing Editor Susan “Mango” Curtis oversaw the design and graphics. Chancellor and feature writer/columnist Bob Dyer sat in on the focus groups with Assistant Managing Editor Doug Oplinger and wrote for all but one installment, kicking off with “30 Years After the Dream.” Paynter often shared a byline. Other writers were Leona Allen, Carole Cannon, Sheryl Harris, Michael Holley, Colette Jenkins, Kevin Johnson, Ron Kirksey, David Knox, Steve Love, Maura McEnaney, Bill O’Connor and Will Outlaw. Also rotating onto the team were news editor Gloria Irwin; photographers Mike Cardew, Lew Stamp, Paul Tople and Jocelyn Williams; and artists Chuck Ayers, John Backderf, Deborah Kauffman, Art Krummel and Terence Oliver.

I started styling prototypes with my dear friend Mango, who has one of the best eyes for design in the business.  After hours of mocking up, which involves placing dummy type, photos and graphics on a full-page grid, I would unveil my work for her. In the blink of an eye, she would have suggestions for improvement: Change that font. Make that bold. Use two-line subheads. Lose this. Add that.

Another huge talent in the art department was its director, Krummel, who created the project’s signature composite of a black-and-white face forming a ragged, ill-fitting puzzle, plus templates for all the infographics. 

The project gestated during an interregnum of managing editors. Jim Crutchfield had left to be editor in Long Beach, Calif. Allen was searching for his replacement. The steadying presence of a managing editor might have prevented the blow-up that occurred during a status meeting before the first part was published in February of 1993,  but probably not.

Mango and I simultaneously mentioned that we had to go beyond traditional reporting and somehow make a lasting, meaningful statement. We didn’t want to do another big-ass spectacular package that landed with acclaim, won awards for reporting and design, then went nowhere. The novel concept of public journalism was invading newsrooms nationwide, for better and worse.  Journalists either hated it or loved it.

Paynter hated it. He is a brilliant, ballsy, compassionate, dedicated journalist with a large personality and a mind for detail.  He began to bristle as I was speaking.

“No fucking way are we doing anything that makes us part of the story. That’s not our job,” he said, or something like.

Mango and I pushed back hard, begging Paynter to let us talk our ideas through, maybe with a larger group. We screamed at each other. Finally, Mango and I shrugged and left. There was no point in staying if we wouldn’t be heard.

Stuart watched it all quietly from a seat in the corner. He thought the idea had merit. He also understood Paynter’s resistance. He described the shouting match to Allen, who enjoyed an occasional donnybrook and probably regretted missing this one.  Most important, he appreciated what Mango and I wanted and figured out how to do it. 

The solution, he told Stuart the next day, came to him in the middle of the night. The Beacon  would bring in a number of prominent people from the community and put the question to them:  “How could we take A Question of Color beyond the reporting?”  He invited 10 or so business and political leaders and Stuart, a former religion writer, reached out to the same number of religious folks and social activists.  

“I can’t remember who all was there,” Stuart said.  “Deputy Mayor Dorothy Jackson and the Rev. Knute Larson (pastor of The Chapel) for sure … but a robust discussion took place.  I remember the saintly Dorothy saying, ‘The Beacon should be the facilitator, should bring people to the table, but then get out of the way and let them decide a course of action.’ That’s what happened and that’s how the Coming Together part of the project was born.” 

Allen also built a firewall: None of the reporters or editors working on A Question of Color, except Stuart, the project’s supervisor, would be involved in Coming Together.

“Solomon had indeed split the baby in two,” Stuart said.

A Question of Color was published in five, multi-day installments from February 1993 to December 1993. Day One opened with this introduction: “Many whites are tired of hearing about it. Most blacks wish it would go away. All seem powerless to move it…. Thirty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. described his dream of a colorblind America, race seems as huge and divisive a force as ever.”  

The project concluded in January of 1994 with a 12-page supplement bearing the names of more than 20,000 readers who accepted the newspaper’s pledge to fight racism.

That was also the beginning of Coming Together Akron, the non-profit formed through private and corporate memberships.  While it operated, CTA sponsored overseas missions to Africa and an annual race walk, as well as workshops, forums, and theatrical and musical events to raise awareness of Akron’s diversity. It lasted almost 15 years, dissolving in January 2008 when it ran out of money.

In 1997, though, CTA was still going strong. Citing its success, President Bill Clinton launched his national conversation on race with a Town Hall meeting at the University of Akron on Dec. 3, 1997. The choice was controversial – critics said the Midwest was too white and Akron was too small – but Clinton’s visit did boost Coming Together’s profile beyond Northeast Ohio. In a short time, numerous cities expressed an interest in developing local efforts, recalled longtime director Dr. Fannie Brown, and CTA became a model for a national project, Coming Together USA.

“I would estimate in excess of 3 million people were touched by the organizations,” Brown said.

Sadly, hard feelings linger over the newsroom’s management of A Question of Color. Some resentment is justified, some not. A black reporter said her editor blocked her from rotating into the project, yet forced her to turn over her contacts among business leaders to a white reporter. Badly done! Another reporter, a white man, sniped recently on social media, “While you guys were working on race, the rest of us were putting out the paper.” Nonsense!

For the record, Paynter was the only one who worked exclusively on race – the project wouldn’t have succeeded without someone’s full-time attention. The rest of us, while hitting our marks on race, also were putting out the rest of the paper. I know. We still had a composing room with printers and engravers for cold-type production. And that’s where I was every Saturday night as printer Mike Jewell placed type and photos on Page One and the A section. Deputy News Editor Tom Moore and I stayed well after midnight when the presses started rolling, to give the paper – every section – a final check, usually wrapping around 1 in the morning.

The Pulitzer Board awarded the 1994 Gold Medal for Meritorious Public Service not to named individuals but to the Akron Beacon Journal, for the newspaper’s “broad examination of local racial attitudes and its subsequent effort to promote improved communication in the community.”  Everyone in the newsroom made it happen and shares the kudos, now as then.  Stuart and I were both in Seattle by then, in another time zone. Paynter and I traded congratulatory voicemails. Stuart called Allen, who told us to have a celebratory dinner and send him the bill.

Examining race relations has proven to be a prize-winning formula for newspapers. In an ironic twist, the New York Times wrote of the black/white divide in the Beacon’s own newsroom as part of a series on contemporary racial attitudes across America. That series won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting.

Has any of it made a difference? Carl Chancellor wonders, “So here we are 56 years since Dr. King’s iconic March on Washington;  25 years since the Beacon’s last Pulitzer Prize; in the wake of Tamir Rice, Ferguson, Missouri, Mother Emanuel Charleston Church Shooting, Black Lives Matter, Orlando Castillo, Eric Garner, Charlottesville, [Colin] Kaepernick, Trump, and the question still remains to be answered: What becomes of a dream too long deferred?”

Fannie Brown thinks it would be worthwhile to revive Coming Together Akron.

“Many acknowledge the need for it and offer accolades for the work we were able to accomplish,” she said. “I can easily say it was the most important work of my life.  The students we worked with continually share with me that  diversity-related concepts learned as a part of the project have and will continue to govern the way they live their lives.

“What can top that?

By Stuart Warner 

(Originally published on Harvard’s Nieman Narrative website)

Narrative writers and teachers often have a language all their own. With the help of the Nieman Foundation and Jon Franklin, I put together this lexicon of literary journalism. Feel free to add to it.

1. In media res: A narrative has a beginning, a middle and an end. In traditional journalism, we begin at the end. We tell you the result. In narrative journalism, we begin somewhere else. Usually at either the beginning or in the center of the action, in media res. This is the point of the story where the plot can go in different directions.

2. Dramatic narrative or scene: Dramatic narrative happens at a point in time. The characters are acting or speaking, doing something. Almost always written in active voice.

3. Summary narrative: The link between scenes, often reduces the passage of time to a few graphs. Passive voice can work well here.

4. TDP: Time, date, place. Jon Franklin says there are two major turnoffs for readers boredom and confusion because they have enough of each in the own lives. You can help avoid confusion by always making sure the reader know where and when the action is taking place when you transition from one scene to another. Now, if your story is boring, youre really in trouble.

5. Flashback: When you begin in media res, you have to shift back to the beginning of the story. Franklin and many of his disciples insist that you should limit yourself to one flashback per story. Not everyone agrees, but flashbacks can be confusing in print, especially in serial narratives where you are asking readers to follow a story over several days. But there is another technique for communicating historical information about your characters, which is called …

6. Back story: As the story keeps moving forward, you can insert information about a characters history without changing time and place. Barrys Siegel’s “A Father’s Pain” (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-dec-30-mn-18995-story.html)  is one of the best examples I’ve seen in newspapers. Gay Talese’s classic magazine story, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” keeps moving ahead to cover the month before Sinatra turns 50, yet as the story progresses, he gives you Sinatra’s life story through other characters.

7. Cliff hanger: If you’re going to go multiple days with a narrative, each chapter must conclude with a moment that make the reader want to come back the next day. You never want readers to think you’re publishing more tomorrow simply because you didn’t have enough room to get it all in today.

8. Internal cliff hanger: The skilled writer hones each section of a story so that it reaches some finality. Franklin calls this writing with courage. (I call writing with courage reporting on drug lords when you work in Colombia.) But the point is well taken: You need to craft each piece of a narrative as if its precious metal. ALWAYS mark where you want subheds or story breaks to go. Be prepared to enter into a death match to the page designer who wants to remove or move one of you breaks.

Character terms

9. Protagonist. The character who moves the action. Not necessarily the hero. Heroes always have flaws, but sometimes the protagonist has so many flaws that you could never call him the hero. To me, the hero must evolve by the end of the story. Frank Sinatra is the protagonist of the Gay Talese story, but he’s certainly no hero. But choosing the protagonist or protagonists determines a key element of narrative journalism: Whose story is it?

10. Major characters. In literature, major characters are generally introduced in the first chapter. Im sure there are exceptions to the rule, but these characters need to be fully formed as the story advances and have a major impact on the outcome.

11. Walk-on characters. May play significant roles, but aren’t as critical to the outcome. Because they may not show up as often, they need to be re-identified when they return to the stage.

12. Character details. These are the details that tell us something about our characters physical details, body language and other observed details. Don’t get carried away with physical descriptions. Narrative non-fiction is generally accompanied by a gallery of photographs. The reader sees what the character looks like. You need to determine what details are important to the plot. If the character smokes menthol cigarettes, that needs to be relevant.

13. Status indicators. Closely aligned with character details, these are Tom Wolfes details that tell us something about the characters place in this world. Can be important in the characters motivations.

Writing Techniques

14. Getting into a characters head vs. internal monologues. Many narrative writers argue that through interviewing they can tell the reader what a character is thinking at any given moment. I still disagree with that. Even if a character tells you what they’re thinking, that’s one thing you can never prove to be true. But you can get into the characters head by describing to the reader what the character has been through at the point of time, what she knows or how he has reacted in similar situations in the past.

15. Quotes vs. dialogue. Dialogue is two characters speaking to each other. Quotes are spoken to the reporter. Most narrativists prefer dialogue, but quotes can be effective, especially if the writer acknowledges that she has become part of the story. Talese is a master of that technique, especially in his narrative profiles Joe DiMaggio, Floyd Patterson.

16. Reconstruction vs. fly-on-the-wall: In most longer narratives, you can’t be there 24-7. But writers will get enamored with what they see, potentially missing the defining moment of the story because they arent there. Most of what we do in journalism is reconstruction. We interview people to find out what happened. In narrative reconstruction, the standards are higher.

17. Showing vs. telling. Closely related to dramatic narrative and summary narrative. Telling is the writers version of what happened. Showing allows the readers to make up their own minds. He is a natty dresser. (Telling, that’s your opinion.) He wears Armani suits. (Showing, you let the readers own experiences define the character.)

Literary Devices

18. Complication/resolution. This is the fulcrum of every narrative. The protagonist confronts an obstacle, struggles with it and reaches a resolution. Not necessarily a victory. In literature, the universal complications have been man vs. man, man vs. himself, man vs. nature and now I would add man vs. technology.

19. Point of insight. Point in the story where the reader can see that the protagonist is going to reach a resolution with her complication.

20. Foreshadowing. The resolution can’t come out of nowhere. You need to give clues along the path that shows where your protagonist is going. This is why mystery writers often write their stories from back to front.

21. Shotgun rule: Closely related to foreshadowing. Chekov’s adage that if there’s a shotgun on the wall in the first act, you need to fire it before the finish. Don’t include useless details.

22. Ending: Find it first. Franklin recommends having some idea of where a story could end before you embark on the narrative journey. And maybe you’ll find a better finish. Write your ending before you write your lead.

23. Meaning: Does your story have a vision. Is it focused? What does it say about the world, the community, etc., that we live in. Does it illuminate the human spirit? A narrative doesn’t have to have meaning, but without it, is it really a story?

24. Attribution: Some of us argue that the well-crafted narrative doesn’t need any. The skilled writer makes his sourcing obvious. But not everyone is comfortable with that. And I have found that bibliographies, footnotes, source boxes, etc., are helpful to readers.