8 attend monthly BJ retirees lunch

Updated to include report by Tom Moore. Photos provided by Moore. Click on image to enlarge for better view.

By TOM MOORE
Eight folks showed for the BJ retiree luncheon this month The number might have been small, but the talk made up for it as we discussed old friends and remembered those who are no longer with us.

Printer Francis Reeves came with Ed Hanzel and his wife, Norma. I had not seen Francis for a lot of years. But I remember him working the bank, proofing type in the old hot-type days…a fellow who got along with everybody….as did his brother the late Red, also a printer and one hell of a makeup man.

Francis had a good story or two, among them, the time an editorial type was close to deadline…need the galley of type a printer was carrying. The printer stumbled and dropped the galley, spilling it all over the floor. Francis recalled he thought the editorial person was going to have a heart attack.

But the printer was only fooling. The type he spilled was garbage!

And he was an eyewitness when I was overseeing page one and grabbed the phone to talk to the copy desk. The phone cord ran into a buzz saw…..those metal saws that were kept running all the time. I, of course, had to get an answer to a questions, sp I went to another phone and dialed the desk and told them I’d “been cut off.”

Ed Hanzel said Bob Pell wasn’t feeling up to the luncheon. Also missing were John Olesky, who had a doctor’s appointment, and a couple three other regulars.

I picked up Dave Boerner and we had a nice chat on the way over and back. Dave is involved in a project right now…editing his home movies and photos to come up with a DVD that will be a history of his family.

This was the first luncheon I’d made in four months. The first one I missed was because of company from Canada…the daughter of the late Brian MacNamara who worked briefly for the Beacon Journal in the women’s department. Brian and I worked together in Lorain and then in Columbus. He came to Akron and worked for Malone Advertising, taking a job that I
turned down.

The next luncheon was one of those appointments all of us oldsters
face—doctor checkup. And the last one, we were in Bowie, Md., getting daughter Kathy’s house ready to go on the market. Kathy in June completed 30 years with
the EPA and is retiring and coming back to Akron.

By the way, she’s an BJ alumni…she was a weekend copykid…way back when.

Back to the present. I announced I was wearing my Dave White memorial belt buckle…the pride of the collection of 150. Dave, a retired composing room honcho, and Gina, his wife, live in Florida. Dave had this great buckle decorated with a horse’s head. I admired it and told him so and I keep insisting that if he kicked the bucket or retired, he should leave a buckle for me. When he retired, he came out into the editorial room, stopped at my desk and placed the buckle before me.

Now Dave and I had our clashes in the heat of battle. And we didn’t mince words at times. Many times we would yell at each other a few words that did not include “you’re a horse’s head”….Our words were aimed a bit lower on the horse.

Also attending the June luncheon was Tim Hayes, Carl Nelson and Cal
Deshong.