Tom Suchan report from Wichita

Tom Suchan worked at the Wichita Eagle for Davis “Buzz” Merritt, author of Knightfall, the great critique on Knight Ridder. Posts on Buzz appear in the April 2005 archives of the blog on April 26 and 30. Here is a report from Suchan:

After 13 years in beautiful Akron, I left the Beacon Journal to go to work for Larry Flynt in September 1977. He was just beginning his legitimate publication, Ohio Magazine, and I was the executive editor.

My period there didn’t go real well. I started work on the day after Labor Day and left the following year on Valentine’s Day. (It was my holiday career.)

With the help of Scott Bosley, I got a job at the Wichita Eagle in May 1978. (It was quite a shock to my system since I hadn’t been further west than Chicago at that time.) I came in as Sunday editor and then moved up to assistant managing editor.

My years in Wichita were good. The editor, Buzz Merritt, was the first Knight editor to go to a Ridder paper, and he worked hard to improve the quality.

In 1989, I left the newsroom to try something completely new at the paper. I became manager of development. The aim was to find new and exciting ways to make money for the paper, and we did. We published books, directories and the like.

My professional career stopped in 1991. I stopped working (or retired) in March of that year. I was 48 at the time.

I had three main goals to accomplish after I left newspapering: to write the Great American Novel, to grow the perfect tomato and to volunteer.

Unfortunately, the novel never came to be … and I have a drawer full of rejection notices to prove it. The tomato experiment failed, too. Growing tomatoes (and corn and beans and cucumbers) on five acres just west of where we lived got to be just too much. (I’m sure everyone knows that summer temperatures in Wichita are well over the 100-degree mark.)

The volunteering bit was a great success. I found that everybody’s looking for a guy with a relatively strong back to do a variety of jobs.

And that’s where I am now. However, I am a bit surprised at the kind of tasks I’m being offered. They don’t have a thing to do with journalism. Rather it’s food.

We work at a camp for the handicapped … in the kitchen whipping up wonderful goodies. We work at a soup kitchen in downtown Wichita. And we work at a homeless shelter preparing meals.

“We,” by the way is my wife, Kay, and myself. She still continues to work outside the home at our parish school, coordinating programs for special needs children. Our four children all live in the area, and we are finding ourselves doing lots of babysitting for our 11 grandkids.

About the only writing I do anymore is for our parish monthly newspaper. I have a regular column.

We would love to hear from any and all of you in Beacon Journal-land. The particulars are:

Tom Suchan
1734 N. Westfield
Wichita, KS 67212
(316) 722-7809
E-mail: tksuchan@swbell.net