Saturday, Oct 29, 2005 is the tenth anniversary of the death of Patrick T. Englehart who died in Ocala, FL, of T-cell lymphoma at the age of 70 in 1995. He lived in Ocala the last five years of his life since retirement in 1990. He was one of the most colorful and talented editors of the Beacon Journal where he coordinated coverage of the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State University which won the newspaper’s first Pulitzer Prize.Four students died during protests against the Vietnam war.
Englehart was then state editor. He began his career at his hometown paper, the Zanesville Signal, in 1947. After his graduation from Northwestern University School of Journalism in 1952 he worked in Fairmont, WV, and Evansville, IN, before joining the Beacon Journal’s wire desk in 1954 under future executive editor and publisher Ben Maidenburg.
Patrick Theodore Englehart was born August 25, 1925 and was raised in Zanesville. He lived in Mogadore for many years and was a past president of the Mogadore Lions Club. He and was a member of the Village Charter Commission and Board of Zoning Appeals, of which he was chairman.
His survivors were his wife, Marge, a former teacher, and four children, Peter, Phillip, Mary Pat and Andrew.
He was a Navy veteran of World War II. His ashes were placed in the Florida National Cemetery in Bushnell, a veterans cemetery.
Many had their favorite stories about Pat and some perhaps may leave their memories of him in comments here.
~liggett
When the BJ still was a PM paper, we State Desk editors came to work by 5 a.m. Pat would call up a reporter to check a fact in a story and his first question to the reporter, who probably got to sleep by 3 a.m., was "What are you doing up?"
ReplyDeleteMy favorite Englehart quote: "You sound like a man with a paper asshole."
An ambulance would drive by the BJ, sirens blaring, and Pat would pick up the phone and ask: "Where's the ambulance going?"
His test for clarity was: "Would my mother understand this story."
Pat willed the BJ to its Pulitzer for coverage of the 1970 Kent State shootings that killed four and wounded nine students. He had boxes and boxes of photos and memos and dug into them any time he thought that someone had gotten his/her facts wrong.
Pat drove you crazy, but at the end of the shift he made you feel so good about the job you had done, with the help of the cigar-smoking, Rolling Rock-drinking best editor that I ever worked with.
I was 38 when I came to the BJ, but I learned more about editing and reporting from Pat and Harry in one year than I had learned in my previous 16 years that included stints in West Virginia, Florida and Dayton, Ohio.
When I first joined the bj family...and it was a real "family" then, I was a copyeditor. Pat would work the slot (for all you new folks, that's equivalent the copy desk chief these days)..passings out stories and then checking headlines, etc when copyeditors got thru with them.
ReplyDeleteThe only problem was that Pat had scanned the story before hand and already had a headline in mind. And these were pre-computer days, so you had to count the letters one, one and a half and two, depending on the letter to make it fit.
So you threw the story back at him when you had sweated over making the headline "sing and fit" and he'd throw it back to be rewritten.
Several times I got a bit miffed, I'd throw it back at him and say: "Pat, you already know what you want it to say, so please write it and lets get on with business."
And he would do so.
He was a newspaper man's newspaper man. And as far as I'm concerned he was the top reason we won the Pulitzer for Kent State Coverage.
My favorite Englehart story is one I tell every year when I teach lead writing to my high school journalists. (I always have to close the door when I tell this story.)
ReplyDeleteI was writing obits at the time and a 5-year-old boy had been killed when a huge tree just fell over on him while he was crawdad (sp?) hunting down in Wayne County somewhere. I had to go down to get a picture and interview the family. I wrote a feature obit/news story and I can't remember the lead now, but I do remember Pat shouting across the newsroom...."McCarthy! Did you write this horseshit lead?!" Needless to say, I rewrote it.