“Ofelia is still working fulltime -- she sells promotional products -- but
we do manage a vacation each year, usually in the fall. This fall, the Grand
Canyon north rim.”
The Beloit College graduate’s newspaper job began in 1965, at the BJ.
Daddy’s connections got him the job. But he earned his wings rapidly.
As the age of 22, as a BJ police reporter, Clary got a
letter of thanks from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1965. He still has it.
Clary wrote a first person story which ran on page 1 with a
one-column photo of Clary and photos of the suspect and a police traffic
officer.
Clary’s piece was handled under city editor Bruce McIntyre.
Dan Warner, assistant city editor then, “may have had a hand in tuning up that
story,” Mike writes.
Dan (1959-69 at BJ) was managing editor by the time publisher Ben
Maidenburg told Dan to hire me and work out the money details.
Paula and I were on a ferry between Marblehead and Kelleys Island, in Lake
Erie, when the guy next to me noticed my West Virginia University School of
Journalism sweatshirt.
We got to talking about our newspaper experiences. I told him I had been
at the Akron Beacon Journal for the final 26 of my 43 years on newspapers when
I retired in 1996.
“I worked there, too,” he said. “I was city editor with about 20 reporters
when I left the Beacon” in 1967.
The guy, in a small-world moment, was Bruce McIntyre, who began at the BJ
in 1958. He was on the ferry with a friend.
We talked of people we both knew at the BJ: John S. Knight, Ben
Maidenburg, Bob Giles, Al Fitzpatrick, Ben James, Hal Fry, Dan Warner, Polly
Paffilas, Betty Jaycox and legendary reporter Helen Waterhouse, a features
reporter who enthralled readers but kept copy editors busy cleaning up her
copy.
Bruce moved on to Michigan to add to his journalism career. He retired as
president and publisher of The Daily Oakland Press in Pontiac, Michigan. He is
a former president of the Michigan Press Association.
Bruce and wife Natalie, who passed away in 2008, lived in upscale Orchard
Lake –- with only a few thousand people -- since 1983, where Bruce has been
mayor (2000-2004), councilman and planning commissioner.
Bruce is a member of two bank boards and a retired lieutenant colonel in
the U.S. Army Reserve. Bruce still keeps his hand in journalism as editor of
the Orchard Lake Chronicle. Among the residents of Orchard Lake, southwest of
Pontiac and northwest of Detroit, is singer/songwriter Bob Seger.
Mike Clary had a BJ reunion in 2005, but it was planned. Gathering in
Columbus for a trip down memory lane were Jim Ricci, who suggested the reunion;
Mike Cull, who made it happen; the late Don
Bandy; Bill and Marcia Hershey; John and Georgia McDonald, and Jim and Karen Toms.
Mike Clary -- who had two runs at Ol’ Blue Walls, in the mid-60s and again in the mid-70s with
Ricci, Cull and gang -- popped into my conscious because he sent me a copy of
what he wrote after his 2017 layoff. It is so damn good that I’m just going to
let Mike tell you in the words he sent to me:
In the 52 years since my first
newspaper job, in Akron in 1965, I have worked for several papers, in and
outside the U.S., and written a few thousand stories. I quit some of those jobs
to move on elsewhere, and sometimes the newspapers quit on me. I have not been
fired, but I have been laid off. So getting a call from the South Florida
Sun Sentinel editor the other night with word that I was no longer needed
wasn’t the first time I have been surprised.
“We’re having to let some good people
go,” she began, and with that I knew: the decision I had been toying with for
months was no longer mine to make. I was out. I was 75 years and 38
days old.
I cannot think of another profession
that would have suited my personality or natural inclinations any better than
journalism. The work fed my curiosity, invited me to explore people and places,
and refused to be routine. It also provided me with the perfect shield --
excuse? -- not to be thoroughly involved or to commit. I always wanted to
be there, to see what was happening, but I also relished the detachment from
the events that being a reporter required. And I liked the deadline challenge
of having to describe what had happened, or was happening, and what it all
meant.
Before walking into the newsroom at the
Akron Beacon Journal for the first time, to begin my job as a city desk clerk
-- set up for me by my father through a barroom conversation with a newspaper
personnel boss -- I knew nothing about journalism. Although I was an
English composition major in college, I did not write for the school paper, nor
did I ever think about making a career of being a reporter. But I did
like writing, and words. One of my favorite recollections of my father
was seeing him at the breakfast table, with a cup of coffee and a cigarette,
doing the crossword puzzle in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He also liked
the Reader’s Digest feature on improving your vocabulary, which listed 10 or 20
words and definitions. Some of these words, as I recall, were ones I might have
heard before, but was fuzzy on the meaning, and some were new. But if you
could just drop one or two into a conversation, they were yours to keep.
The newsroom at the Beacon Journal was a
constant buzz that immediately zoomed right into my brain. I was assigned
a seat on the city desk, a grouping of several desks where city editor Bruce
McIntyre and his two deputies, Bob Henretty and Dan Warner, directed reporters,
edited copy, and barked into telephones with an excited urgency that suggested
that whatever was going on -- and it may have been nothing more than a
minor traffic accident or a commission meeting -- was the most critical,
important event to have happened in greater Akron in years, and that we needed
to cover the hell out of it, and if we did not, the newspaper might perish and
heads would roll.
McIntyre was in his early 30s, Henretty
and Warner just a few years older than me, and all projected a quick
intelligence and wry skepticism that I would come to appreciate as a defining
characteristic of newspaper folks. They shared a sense of humor and an
interested detachment that provided perspective, allowing them to see both the
newsy drama and patent silliness of some of the stories we covered. But
if they did not always take themselves seriously, they took the job seriously,
and they worked it with a nervous energy that animated them incessantly.
They were never relaxed. They were twitchy, anxious, hyperkinetic.
They smoked cigarettes, exhaled in clouds of impatience, wrenched their
neckties askew, and by noon their white dress shirts were wrinkled and damp with
underarm sweat.
Wow! To me, a 22-year-old who had
been idling in graduate school and now had an expiring student deferment and
was in imminent danger of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, this was a world
that beckoned. The clatter, the bustle, the banter, the smoke, the smell of
paste pots and sweat --- I think now that I recognized the romance and the
promise of this business.
My job was to keep track of things, to make
lists of pending stories, and what was called overset -- those stories that
were written and set in type but did not make that day’s paper and were being
held until the next day’s edition. It was a new position, so there was no
model for the job or any predecessor for me to be compared to.
While I might have been able to make
lists and keep track of things, it soon became clear to me that being an
amanuensis -- as a couple of the more senior reporters teasingly called me --
was not going to be my calling. I wanted to write.
There was a city desk column, called
Good Evening, that became a repository for odds and ends, stories too brief to
stand alone, or announcements of a bridge tournament, or reunion supper for
retired B.F. Goodrich shipping department employees. It became one of my jobs
to monitor these leftovers, short bits about club news and missing pets and to
know their expiration dates so they could be fed into this local page roundup.
My previous work experience -- again,
thanks to Dad -- was limited to summer jobs in factories during breaks from
college. I worked on an assembly line in a Barberton plant that made
storm windows. My job was drilling holes in the corners of aluminum rails and
then pinning the rails together around a sheet of glass. Another summer
job was in a sweatshop Cuyahoga Falls plastic boot factory, where every three
minutes I stuck my head in an oven and pulled out a metal mold, dunked it in a
tank of water and then ripped out the boots before the next mold came down the
line.
These jobs, my father instructed, were
to expose me to the type of work I did not want to do for the rest of my life.
“You’re in college,” said Dad, who forever regretted that he did not have
a chance to go to college himself. “Learn something.”
Now I started to learn. The phone rang.
“City desk,” I answered, and then listened as the caller complained about
the newspaper’s content, its wet-driveway delivery or the decision to cover a
township council meeting rather than her father’s retirement gala. But
callers also reported in with tidbits of news that could be fashioned into
brights that fit easily into the catch-all city desk column. I started to
seize on these morsels and turn them into stories, and that only whetted my
appetite for more.
One of my neighbors on the city desk
complex was Oscar Smith, BJ stalwart, a quiet, courtly man who was music critic
as well as chief obituary writer. He was elderly, walked with a cane, and
I remember him pounding out the obits on the Remington upright typewriter just
as I did, with two fingers, but slower. So when deadlines loomed and
Oscar fell behind, I started to help out with the routine obits that were
written in a formulaic way that I can remember to this day: Elmer McGee, who
worked at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. for 36 years until his retirement in
1960, died Wednesday at Collins Nursing Home after a long illness. He was
67. Born in Wheeling, WV, McGee was a member of St. Sebastian Church and the
Masonic Lodge #83 F.& A.M….
(That colleague Oscar Smith, by the way, would have been 68 years old
when I first sat beside him in 1965. According to the archives, Smith retired
from the BJ in 1966, and died in March 1971 at the age of 74, a year younger
than I am now.)
When possible I also jumped on the
chance to get out of the office to write a feature story. One of my first
assignments was to West Akron where a retiree had painted a series of
presidential portraits on the raised panels of his wooden garage door. While
the story was otherwise forgettable, it became indelible to me because a couple
of the veteran reporters acknowledged the piece with a make-believe missive
from the White House. “Dear Mr. Clary,” the letter said. “Thank you
for the mention in your riveting report on the garage door. Best wishes, Lyndon
B. Johnson.”
I made no secret of my desire to become
a reporter, and within a few months my ambition was rewarded. Hired as a police
reporter, traditionally a starter job for young reporters, I began at a
first-year newspaper guild salary that I recall was just shy of $100 a week.
Now my days began at 6 a.m., when I would show up at the grimy Akron
police department, where the BJ cop reporter had a desk in the office of the
police hit-skip department. In those days the department was two people,
grizzled detectives Donohue and Siemaszko, chain-smoking lifers who were
counting down the days until retirement while welcoming the chance to have as
much fun as possible with a know-nothing college boy on the make in his new
profession.
On a Saturday morning in October 1965 I
returned to my hit-skip department desk to find Siemaszko interviewing a young
man about his involvement in a crash. When I heard Siemaszko say the man’s
name, I thought it sounded familiar. When the interview ended and the man
left, I told Siemaszko that I thought the name of the man he was talking to was
the same as a burglary suspect I had just heard investigators mention in the
detective bureau upstairs.
“You’re nuts!” Siemaszko said.
No, really, I insisted. Call
upstairs and find out.
Siemaszko did call his colleagues
upstairs. And he was told that this man’s name was nothing like that of the
burglary suspect they were looking for. I was wrong. But,
serendipitously, the man was wanted by the FBI for jumping bond on an armed
robbery charge from California. Yikes! Hours later detectives scooped up
the suspect on the federal charge.
Back in the newsroom that afternoon, I
recounted my tale of bumbling crime-fighting to Dan Warner, and he immediately
said, “Write that.” Really? “Really. It’s a good story.”
On page 1 of the next day’s paper the
story appeared under my picture and the headline, ‘I’m Thumbs Of Law’s Long
Arm.’ When McIntyre sent the clip to the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover wrote back,
saying that Clary had “certainly demonstrated his alertness” in recognizing the
fugitive.
Well, not exactly. But for this
neophyte reporter, the incident provided my first page 1 byline and a solid
lesson in the possibilities of daily journalism and what constituted a good
story. Those stories did not always have to be exposes of public
corruption, reports on police investigations of gruesome homicides or the
fallout from factory closings. Sometimes, reporters stumbled into tales worth
telling, and, if lucky, had someone around to point them out.
Impatient and restless, I left the
Beacon Journal in 1966 with a little experience and a certain knowledge of what
I wanted to do. I worked for newspapers in the Bahamas and Australia and
freelanced from San Francisco before returning to Akron and the BJ newsroom in
1973 for three years more. After that stint I went on to work for the
Miami Herald, the Los Angeles Times and the Sun Sentinel, with lots of
freelancing in between.
I have been a freelancer and
suddenly I am again. It’s a job description that underscores another
benefit of being a reporter: you never have to admit to being retired. True,
there are no daily deadlines, no phone calls from impatient editors. And
there are no biweekly paychecks. But I can still cling to my identity as
a working reporter.
Just the other day a musician friend,
once one of the premier bandleaders and Latin percussionists in Miami, called
to say he was out of two-year drug rehab program, healthy and sober. He put a
band together, he said, and was starting to gig at a downtown club. I
went to see him. He sang, danced rumba around his conga drums and wove a
tapestry of Afro-Cuban rhythms that had everyone in the place on their feet and
shaking their hips. “I’m back!” he declared.
Man, I’ve got to write about that.
It’s a good story.
See what I mean about Mike still being an exceptional story-teller and
writer?
