Catching up with . . . Keith McKnight

Keith McKnight, the deputy Metro editor who took an October 2008 buyout from the Beacon Journal, is on the wagon after 30 years with the BJ. That would be the D. Kay's French Waffles wagon. Keith and wife Kay (whose name is on the wagon) make the rounds of fairs and festivals, selling their concessions.

After Keith left the BJ, at the same time that a score of veterans with centuries of combined experience did, he joined his wife in the enterprise.

When they're not selling waffles, or continuing to live in Wadsworth on Leatherman Road, they have a Christmas tree farm in Southern Ohio to visit.

Keith and Kay wound up at the altar because . . . well, let him tell it:

"I was at the Willoughby News Herald," Keith recalls. "David McClain, a teacher at the University of Maine, wanted to be a reporter. So I hired him.

"David introduced me to Kay. We met first by telephone and then on a blind date. It progressed from there." To marriage and, after Keith's BJ departure, to the French waffles connection.

How did David know Kay? They are McClains, brother and sister, in fact. Kay lived in Niles, Ohio.

Keith has been on the receiving end of a lot of awards for his journalistic endeavors. Such as sharing the Worth Bingham Prize for investigative journalism in 1990 with Bob Paynter and Andy Zajac. Ex-BJ Ted Gup, chair of the Journalism Department and professor of journalism at Emerson College in Boston, won the same prize in 1980 with the Washington Post. Dave Hess won it in 1978 with the BJ. Woodward and Bernstein won it in 1972 for the Nixon/Watergate thing, along with a Pulitzer.

Keith and Bob Paynter also were involved in a BJ Pulitzer, in 1994 for "A Question of Color" series.