HAPPY FATHER'S DAY

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY FROM A PRINTER’S SON

By Steve Wright

That I earn my living as a writer is entirely because of my father, yet completely against his good counsel.

Since before I was born in 1964, dad worked at the newspaper. The paper was the Akron Beacon Journal, which he retired from after a 38-year career.

Ken Wright never earned so much as a single byline in the Beacon. Dad was a printer.
I used to think it a bit corny when his colleagues on the newsroom side of the Beacon talked about ink getting in their blood.

However, after writing my first story for pay 30 years ago and staying in this oft-troubling, always-trying business ever since, I think those old ink-stained wretches must have been on to something.

Dad is a child of Akron through and through -- pragmatic and practical, honest and hard-working as they come. Dad’s dad built tires in a big factory. At the time of my father’s birth in Akron --1935, it probably seemed like at least two out of three dads earned rent money at the rubber factories.

Dad entered high school at a time when rich kids and dandies dreamed of college and the rest focused on learning a trade that would pay the bills.

At Akron’s vocational high school, my father learned how to be a printer.

Even primitive mainframe computers weren’t in the printing trade picture back then. Instead, type was set line by line in hot lead on a Linotype. Today, Linotypes are in museums.

Dad took up with a number of mom and pop print shops in Akron in the fifties.

Mom, equally true to her Akron roots, worked in a tire factory. I think they intended on me being about 51 now instead of 45, but the Korean War got in the way of things, delaying family and career for a while.

Finally, in 1960, dad hired on full-time with the Akron Beacon Journal. It was a union job in a union town -- good pay, good benefits and a shot at working through retirement with one company.

Of course, most of dad’s graduating class bought into the same dream hiring on with the rubber factories. While many of them lost their work while the big tire companies scaled back or moved out of Akron, dad had a four-decade run at the Beacon.
He had quite a life for a tire builder’s son, for an Akron guy with a high school education.

While he worked his way through the composing room, dad learned about a new era dawning in the newspaper industry. It was called cold type -- the days of hot lead slugs off the Linotype were numbered.

Dad worked nights, took training classes and did everything but stand on his head to become computer literate in wild west days of high tech, the era long before personal computers and Internet.

Soon, he was traveling to exotic locations, like Detroit. Well, for a family living in a small town suburb outside of Akron, the Motor City was a pretty exotic location. Besides, dad and a bunch of the big bosses went to some strange restaurant up in Detroit where bear, rattlesnake and other wild creatures were on the menu.

Over time, dad’s success at the Beacon meant trips to Miami, where the Knight family chain’s headquarters sat on Biscayne Bay in a building dad likened to a waterfront luxury hotel.

Sometimes dad was lucky enough to escape parts of the blizzardly northeast Ohio winters for training sessions in sunny Florida or California.

Dad came to master computers so well that he took time off to computerize several big papers in Australia. I still remember feeling so proud when my father was halfway around the globe, bringing his Ohio printer’s work ethic to the land of barrier reefs, kangaroos and that beautiful landmark Sydney Opera House.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to work for a newspaper. I used to steal my mom’s grocery pad, hop on my bike and ride around the neighborhood looking for stories. I’d write headlines, lay out a piece of notebook paper, write the stories in my already horrible and declining penmanship and sell them to my folks for a nickel.

By the time I was a high school freshman in the fall of 1979, I had my heart set on a career in journalism. I was already writing a roundup of school news for the local weekly and I counted the days until I was old enough to drive -- mobility being a means to tracking down bigger and better stories.

My father, with all the seriousness of a birds and the bees lecture, told me he loved me and supported me, but wondered why in the heck I wanted to be a newspaper reporter.

To be fair, I’m not sure what dad thought of reporters. His primary contact with them was when they were either dumb or rude or both.

When the Beacon replaced typewriters and pastepots with computers and modems, dad trained many of the crusty old writers how to do their hunting and pecking for a video screen instead of their beloved typewriter paper.

He had to wonder how a reporter capable of forgetting his computer log-on a dozen times in a day was competent at explaining the complexities of local government in his stories.

Dad’s other contact with the newsroom was when the system crashed. Seeing hard-chosen words disappear forever into a cruel, hard copy-less chasm turned the most patient of professionals into whining babies at best, bellowing bullies at worst.

Coupling those experiences with his knowledge that reporters don’t get rich, but do work strange hours under constant deadline pressure, it’s no wonder why dad never went out of his way to steer his first born into journalism.

He was always fiercely supportive of my writing, but dad also never failed to mention that there’s more money in TV, more perks in PR and better hours in just about any profession a bright, communicative kid could choose outside of print journalism.

Nevertheless, dad watched as I joined the Beacon as a sports department part-timer while I was still in high school. During college, I struggled to find my way at the Beacon and in other endeavors, all the while marveling at the shadow cast by my father.

From the retired cops who manned the security desk to the back shop wiseacres to the top-level editors whose advice I sought while in journalism school at Kent State University, everyone loved and admired Kenny Wright.

I graduated, caught on with the Columbus Dispatch and dad stayed at the Beacon, rock-solid as ever. I kind of assumed he’d work till he was 100.

Picturing the Akron Beacon Journal without dad was like picturing the Cleveland without the Browns. Well, we know what happened to the football team for three long-absent seasons. Under much more amicable conditions, my dad decided to clear out his locker at the Beacon, in his words, “while your mother and I are still healthy enough to travel.”

His retirement party was amazing. People from every department of the Beacon crammed into the usually spacious John S. Knight Room. The room honors the late, longtime leader of the Beacon. It seemed so apropos that years ago, my dad had slaved to get the blown-up type just right to decorate the room with reprints of Knight-written editorials and landmark pages from Knight’s newspapers.

Walking through the newsroom I worked in as a snot-nosed kid part-timer, I cleared my voice and straightened my tie, mindful that I’d be called on to talk at my dad’s retirement party.
At that moment, I ran into a newsroom friend who’d been there as long as my father and who had been a dear friend during my part-timer stint in the mid-‘80s.

The man lavished me with praise about all sorts of articles I’d written. I routinely send my clips to my folks, but not since my college/joblessness after graduation days had I asked him to shove my stuff into the hands of fellow journalists.

But here this man was, talking up my stuff, and making me realize that dad passed out my clips to anyone who would pause to read them.

On the day I drove up to Akron for Ken Wright’s retirement party -- with a heart so full of pride for my father -- I realized more than ever that I don’t have to win a Pulitzer for him to be proud of me.

Steve Wright was a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch from 1987-2000, then the Senior Policy Advisor to Miami City Commission Chairman Joe Sanchez till 2010, when he left to write a book, create this blog and grow his communications firm.

The photo at the top is of my folks, Ken and June Wright, mugging it up Cleveland's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame for their oddball photographer son. My dad was bravely brightening the day before entering a year worth of horrific cancer treatments, surgeries, pain and recovery.