Ron Kuhne: Life after the BJ

Here’s e-mail from Ron Kuhne, now retired in Fort Wayne, IN, on what he has been doing since the BJ:

After leaving the BJ, I went to Connecticut as editor of a large Sunday weekly in Fairfield County, a bedroom for the NYC commuting crowd. That means we were literally competing with the Sunday NY Times. The Herald was printed at a job shop in Mount Kisco, NY, a situation that meant most of our copy and art had to be ferried about 30 miles away via courier (before the days of instant faxing). Our makeup crew came back home late at night; fog on those hilly roads made the return trip hazardous.

The Sunday Herald was owned by Bill Loeb, of the then-infamous Manchester Union Leader. Except for my occasional trips to the Boston suburb where Loeb and his wife (the late Nackey Scripps) resided in a castle on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, none of my crew ever met the man. In his defense, he wasn't the monster he was perceived to be. He was generous to a fault (once paid our ad manager's bills and complete salary for six months during an illness). In fact, Loeb saw to it that the ad guy was treated at the Boston Clinic, a cost Loeb also bore. Loeb was an absentee owner whose only contributions to the Connecticut paper were editorials -- some of which ran on the cover. The mandated heads included such gems as "Shoot Jane Fonda" and "Dopey Dwight." Beyond that, he left us alone.

Loeb had bought the Herald long before I came onto the scene in 1970. The paper had been a classic scandal sheet that seemed to have been run into the ground by its previous owner. Loeb bought it, changed the name, moved it to Norwalk from Bridgeport and fought the good fight to improve its circulation and reputation, but the Sunday Times was a formidable adversary, to put it mildly. What I did not know when I signed on is that Loeb was using the Herald as a tax write-off and lost money on it every week.

There were 12 editorial types on the staff -- unionized yet, plus an assortment of about 15 ad, biz, and circulation types. It was a hopeless situation, but we managed to take paid circulation to above 40,000 from about 30,000 after converting it to tabloid format. We even showed a little profit now and then. But it was too late and Loeb decided to fold The Herald during the 1973 recession. By then, I was general manager as well as editor and I still feel the sting of that event.

As far as I was concerned, I was through with journalism. I joined the Army and worked as a journalist in Hawaii and Turkey. I also worked as "subject matter expert" for the Defense Information School in Indianapolis. After I retired from the Army, I changed my mind about quitting journalism and took a berth on the copy desk of the Journal Gazette in Fort Wayne, one of the few two-newspaper towns left. I retired last year after 11 years and am pretty much loafing, at least for now.

On the personal side, I've been married to a patient saint for 32 years. One daughter lives at an Army base in Georgia (her husband was in Kuwait when the second sandbox war started). My oldest daughter works in the theater in Atlanta; a third daughter is an architect in Cleveland and my youngest just earned her second degree from Purdue.

Ronald H. Kuhne
531 Marston Court
Fort Wayne, IN 46826-5609
Tel: 260-471-5127
ikolq@aol.com