Yaborough’s PD farewell column

A fond farewell

By Chuck Yarborough, who along with Mark Dawidziak was canned by the PD

 

This is the column I wasn’t able to publish.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — In 1976, when I walked into the “newsroom” at the San Jacinto College Texian, I thought I was taking advantage of an offer to use the typewriters because I was too broke to afford one.

See, I didn’t have any money, and my father, a retired career Army officer who was REALLY pissed that I had turned down an appointment to West Point and a free education, wasn’t about to pay for me to go to some fancy-schmancy college. Enter San Jac, a junior college outside Houston.

I’d already tried and failed at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville, where Dr. Bratton’s sonorous lectures about organic chemistry and my distinct lack of talent regarding same had doomed my dreams of thoracic surgery.

I was 0-1, and not feeling all that great about my chances. But at least I would have a means to write whatever term papers were required at tiny San Jac, which frankly was smaller than Parma Senior High, where my daughter graduated 22 years later.

But my first Mass Communications 1010 class made me realize that I had found more a place to practice on a QWERTY keyboard; I had found my calling. It led me through a chain of weeklies outside Houston, a tiny suburban daily, and four other newspapers in the Lone Star State, the last being the Houston Chronicle.

From the Chronk I went to what has become what I believe is the last stop on my newspaper career: The Plain Dealer.

As you know, the paper on Friday laid off 18 of the 32 remaining members of Local No. 1 of The Newspaper Guild. At 63 — and tired — I am one of them.

I won’t go into the internal politics of things here at The PD; that’s not the purpose of this column. What I want to do is say thank you to those of you who’ve opened your arms to me in your hometown . . . and pfffft!to the rest.

I learned tons at all my other papers, including how to design a newspaper, how to write headlines, how to screw up someone else’s copy (I don’t think legendary Chronicle columnist Leon Hale, a personal hero, has ever forgiven me for changing “etymology” to “entomology” in one of his pieces) and that I was not, not, NOT cut out to be management.

But it’s The Plain Dealer that has given me the greatest thrills of 42 years in this business, at least so far. To be honest, I have no idea what the future holds, beyond a few plans.

First off, I’m tired. I got my first paycheck job when I was 15, driving a fuel truck at Charlottesville-Albemarle Airport in Virginia, and I’ve been unemployed for exactly 24 hours since then. So I probably will spend at least 10 minutes resting before sitting down in front of a keyboard, because I’m a writer and writers write.

My hope is to do the book that everyone keeps urging on me, one that talks about everything from inviting the soldiers who were on garbage duty into our quarters for coffee and a warm-up in Fort Richardson, Alaska, as a 4-year-old, to doing pirouettes at just under Mach 1 in an FA/18 with the Blue Angels.

Naturally, I’ll rehash the 150 jobs I did for The Plain Dealer during the On the Job Training series — everything from washing front-end loaders to digging basement foundations to repairing tattered luggage to assisting in both a surgery and an autopsy (for the record, they were separate people).

And how could I not discuss talking to the musicians who were my heroes as a kid taking drum lessons at Davy Crockett Elementary School, and even beyond that? I’ve done interviews with every member of Yes, two of the three members of Rush (I missed out on the late Neil Peart!), fumbled over words talking to my “freebie” (granted by wife Liz in ’78 because she knew it would never happen) Linda Ronstadt, discussed having the same drum set and pedals with Ringo Starr, had Slash flip me off with a smile, shared stories with Heart’s Ann Wilson about wearing out the “Dreamboat Annie” 8-track in my beat-up ’63 Impala (primary color was bondo) and more.

I’ve saved all those interviews, so expect to see a lot of that in the book, if it ever gets done and/or published, though there’s no guarantee of anything.

Of course, the time then-Cleveland Recruiting Battalion commander Lt. Col. Randy Stephan got me into boot camp at the age of 45 after writing a column lamenting my West Point decision right after 9/11 will play a major role. That experience was made possible in large part by the Fort Sill, Okla., media liaison Nancy Elliott (who has since become one of my dearest friends, as she and her husband, retired Sgt. Jim Elliott, even visited here and stayed with me).

And because of that, I was able to undertake the greatest, most challenging, scariest and most wonderful episode of my entire career, embedded with U.S. Army troops in Iraq in 2004 in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

So, yeah, in some ways, I can be bitter about what’s happening to newspapers in general and this one in particular. But technology has moved forward and life has changed. I’m a carriage maker in a world of jet cars.

But I can’t be bitter about what I’ve been able to do. I’ve had one hell of a ride in this profession, and I’ve loved almost every minute of it. I hate that it’s over, but I wouldn’t change it, and I know who buttered my bread.

Thanks, Cleveland. I love you.