Dick McBane chimes in on publishing police blotter

The BJ Alums article this week on newspapers dropping the publication of police blotters stirred memories in Dick McBane, who retired as a BJ reporter in 1997 and lives in Lilburn, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb five miles from Stone Mountain State Park.

Wrote Dick:

John ---

Dropping publication of police blotters, or related items, certainly makes sense because it is virtually impossible to keep track of every case without direct access to the court records.

When I was first covering the courts for the BJ in 1967, the policy was to publish the complete list of indictments whenever the grand jury returned its report. 

The trouble with that was the indictments included the name and crime charged, but not the age or address of the accused. In essence, that meant checking every case file to include the necessary information. 

I believe the BJ dropped the indictments as impractical shortly after that and we concentrated on the major cases.

But, while we were still doing the indictments I was working late one night when I got a call from a man who had been indicted for sodomy. He complained that he had never engaged in sex with an animal. 

I had a copy of the Ohio criminal code handy and read him the legal definition of the term and before I had finished he was saying, "yeah," "okay," "I did that." 

Of course, that didn't count as a confession and my memory isn't good enough to recall how his case actually turned out.

While I had my share of major cases covering the Summit County Common Pleas Court for the BJ, the most bizarre ones were from the Marietta, Ohio, municipal court when I was working for the Marietta Daily Times. 

One involved a fellow charged with leaving the scene of an accident. It seems he was parked on a remote country road making out with a female when a car pulled up behind him and his paramour. That car was driven by the woman's husband.

Before anything else could happen, the lover backed into the husband's car and then drove off. In court, he claimed his action was taken in self-defense. While he won a certain amount of sympathy, he was still found guilty, even if the collision wasn't really an accident.

--- Dick

Dick and wife Marilynn observed their 51^st wedding anniversary last October. They lived in the same Akron house for 37 years before moving to Georgia.

Dick and Marilynn live near their oldest son, Lachlan, wife Cheryl and their three sons and one daughter.

“Our younger son, Roderick, went to the University of Houston, discovered he could play softball year-round, and still lives in a Houston suburb" with wife Cindy and sons William, 4, and Connor, 2. "They were with us in Georgia for Christmas," Dick reports. "While a good time was had by all, it was a bit exhausting for me and Marilynn."

As the great-grandfather of 4- and 2-year-old boys, Dick, I can echo those sentiments. They are whirlwinds at that age, but invigorating -- and exhausting -- to be around.

“Lachlan is a violist with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Roderick is a math professor at Houston Community College,” Dick writes. 

In 2005 and despite Hurricane Katrina bashing New Orleans, Roderick married Cindy Wagner in Albany, Louisiana, on Saturday, Sept. 3. At that time Roderick was an actuary with the American National Insurance Co. in Galveston, Texas. Cindy was an accountant in Houston, Texas.

Albany, Cindy's hometown, was roughly 50 miles north of New Orleans, suffered relatively little damage, but electric power had not been fully restored by the time of the wedding. So the ceremony was moved to a church that had power (and air-conditioning).

Dick has visited many of the minor league baseball parks in this country and has written books about the minor league days, including "Glory Days: The Akron Yankees of the Middle Atlantic League 1935-41" and "A Fine-Looking Lot of Ball Tossers" about the independent Akron professional team of 1881. He is a member of Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).

Dick retired from the BJ on the same day as the late Don Bandy, the superb rewrite man who retired to Bradenton, Florida and took part in some of the Siesta Key reunions involving retired BJ editors, reporters and printers.

Dick was among the five BJ Guild retirees who won the healthcare lawsuit against the BJ in 2012 and had their benefits restored to retirement-day levels on Jan. 1, 2013 and were reimbursed for the difference between their retirement-day healthcare coverage and what Canadian David Black tried to impose on them in 2007.

Forty-five retired printers also benefitted from the lawsuit, which began when the late Dave White and his widow, Gina White, put up $2,500 to get the ball rolling. Gina still lives in Venice, Florida, about 15 miles south of the Sarasota home they had owned for decades.