Catching up with . . . Russ Musarra

After months and months of prodding, former BJ staffer Russ Musarra finally relented and provided this information via email:

Hi John:

At long last, here's that Musarra update you asked for.

Russ

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Here’s a brief 2010 Musarra update:

Current address: 8916 Falcon Drive, Streetsboro 44241
Home phone: 330-626-4188
Cellular phone: 330-322-8890
E-mail: rmusarra@neo.rr.com

Some important milestones:

Beverly and I became great-grandparents in September 2008 with the arrival of granddaughter Bethany’s child, Lily. We celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary on April 4, 2009, and welcomed our first great-grandson, Gage, born last October to granddaughter Megan.

Since I retired in February 2000, I wrote a general interest column for Focus, a monthly tabloid aimed at readers 50 and older, until it went out of business in 2004, and for a time wrote the Town Crier column for Akron City magazine and covered Hudson as a Beacon Journal news correspondent. I also served briefly on the board of Actors Summit Theater in Hudson.

I like to tell people I retired to work on books and I’ve worked on books ever since I retired.

"Walks Around Akron" is my third book project with Chuck Ayers. It’s a retrospective of the monthly essays we produced for the Beacon Journal from March 1987 through December 2000.

Our other book projects:

"Greetings From Akron" (subtitled "Celebrating Akron’s History in Picture Postcards"), published in 2000 by the Summit County Historical Society.

"Joe’s Place: Conversations on the Cuyahoga Valley," published in 1999 by the Cuyahoga Valley Association. Chuck was art director and with author Joseph D. Jesensky, illustrator of the book, which I edited.

After the Beacon Journal dropped them our walk essays were published by Akron City magazine in the early days of its operation, and then were picked up by Akron Life and Leisure magazine, which publishes them four times a year today.

My other post-retirement book projects were:

– A 192-page, limited edition history of the Akron Symphony Orchestra, written for its 50th anniversary in 2001.

– Al Simpson’s "Along the Towpath: A Journalist Rediscovers the Ohio & Erie Canal," which I edited for publication in 2003 by the University of Akron Libraries.

Bev and I moved to Streetsboro in 2003 after living 15 years in Northfield Center and 22 before that in Macedonia.

For recreation she and I work out at the Twinsburg Recreation Center, where we have a free membership thanks to our Humana health insurance, and we go to the beach at Sandbridge, Va., when we can with as many members of the tribe as can make it. (In case anyone is keeping track, we have four grown children, eight grandchildren and the aforementioned great-grandkids.)

Regrets?

Nothing major, except that I’ve failed to complete that second novel. (For those old enough to remember, the first, "Sleep With the Angels," written with ex-Cleveland detective Robert L. Bolton, was published in 1985. We concluded with a teaser about a second book, which, alas, never materialized.)

Click on the headline for photos of Russ, then and now.

"Walks Around Akron" book was first published in 2007, arriving in Akron after its printing in China and boat ride to Los Angeles and train trip to Ohio.

Ayers, former BJ cartoonist, is co-creator of the "Crankshaft" comic strip.

Russ succeeded the late Polly Paffilas as the BJ's About Town columnist, which he labeled "daunting" in a Polly retrospective following the 2005 death of the great Greek.