Oblander in BJ print after absence of 2 decades

Terry Oblander’s byline is in the Beacon Journal again after an absence of two decades. He was just hired by the Beacon Journal as a part-time stringer to write feature stories of Medina County.

His first is spread over a big chunk of the Community section front with photos and the headline

"Hard times claim old hardware store" about a Seville store closing after 70 years because or the difficult economy. Click on the headline to see the story. There are more photos on Ohio.com

Oblander was part of the Beacon Journal staff that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for its coverage of a threatened corporate takeover of Goodyear and has won several Ohio and regional journalism awards.

A 1965 graduate of Olmsted Falls and Cuyahoga Community College (1967), he attended Kent State University through 1969, worked for the Kent-Ravenna Record-Courier from 1969 to 1971 and at the Beacon Journal from 1971 to 1990 when he joined the Plain Dealer.

Oblander was among 27 PD staffers who were let go by a phone call from the editor on Tuesday, December 2, 2008 a few weeks before Christmas.

Oblander is a lover of words–especially words at play. That explains how he got started doing the pun-based Public Squares Puzzle for the Plain Dealer. He collects books about words and about baseball history and has a baseball card collection of Indians players. Dabbling in family history, he also became interested in Germans from Russia who migrated to the U.S. in the mid to late 1800s.

It’s nice to read him again.