“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.

If Bruce still has the email address he gave me, it is bhmcintyre@comcast.net

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?