Dayton Stories Project
Story Circle Session #032896.1
Dayton Daily News
Dayton Ohio
March 28, 1996

 Dayton Daily News Employees

Facilitator and Recorder: Marilyn Shannon  

Participants: Carl Beyer, Millie Bingham, Keri Cohen, Mickey Davis, Laura Dempsey, Bill Flanagan, Bill Garlow, Clem Hamilton, Karen Jackson, Max Jennings, Michael Jesse, Bill Koehler, Mary Jo McCarty, Vera Seiler McCarty, Meredith Moss, Maxwell Nathan, Ron Rollins, Sam Rubin, Diane Heckert Staub, Roz Young

This session lasts approximately 1 hour and 12 minutes.

Due to its length the interview has been split into two parts.

PART ONE

PART TWO

Max Nathan

I go back pretty far to the old Journal and Herald. The Journal, of course, was the first morning paper in Dayton. The afternoon Herald with The Dayton Daily News in the afternoon. My first contact with the newspaper was when I was editor-in-chief of The Steele High School Lion newspaper that claimed to have the largest of any high school newspaper in the country. I couldn't prove it, but it was on there. Our journalism class went through The Journal Herald. Jerry Fox took us through and I was very much impressed, although I only took journalism because I liked the teacher. Later on, when I was going to Wittenberg College, I got a job on The New Carlisle Sun. It's a weekly paper in New Carlisle, which was really my home town. Then I became correspondent for The Dayton Journal Herald in New Carlisle.

In June of '35 I was hired as a reporter on The Journal. I stayed with the paper. Sometimes it was pretty lean times. One time there were two and a half reporters covering the town. But we had four or five people on the desk saying, "Where's the copy?" However, things got better later on and the staff increased. But as a result of that, I became a generalist and covered nearly everything in town. Aviation to Federal Building, Federal Courts, everything going. We had the other full-time reporter on police and he covered the courthouse and everything else. One night I did twenty-two stories, most of it by telephone. They weren't king stories, but we covered everything in town. We got on the phone. We called the secretary and say, "After your meeting, will you give me a call?" And it worked.

Incidentally, President Coolidge, I had this when I was in high school. I don't know where I got it. But it shows President Coolidge—who incidentally went out of office in 1929—at the telegraph key starting the presses of the new Journal Herald building on Fourth Street. At that time, the paper was owned by Burkem-Harrick Publishing Company. Burkem was the actual publisher and Harrick was the United States Ambassador to France. That's why I guess his pal President Coolidge was willing to press the telegraph key.

I stayed there until I went into the army in 1942 and when I went away the cartoonist did one called "Max Nathan: The Beast of Dayton Going After the Axis." But what was interesting was the names of the people who signed it. A good many of them are dead or famous. But if I go into that it will take a lot of time, but it's here if you want to see it. I was in the army over three and a half years in World War II and when I got out I came back to the paper and I stayed until the end of the 1948. During that time I got quite a few scoops. In fact, I got the first copy-righted story I ever saw in Dayton since the time I started. They were investigating a high ranking general at the Field. They were investigating him in Congress. There was a Congressional Committee. Seems that he bought everything for the Air Force through his office and secretly he owned a company in Vandalia that he bought from. I don't think it was a big deal, but it didn't look good in Congress. He was buying billions and this was probably a thing where he may have made some money off of it, but it couldn't have been a whole lot. But the big thing was his secretary, his high-powered female secretary's husband was the president of the company and a lot of people felt that he set that whole thing up to give his secretary's husband employment out at the Field.

But we did the story and everybody was trying to get a hold of the secretary and her husband and I wasn't assigned to it but one Sunday morning my editor called me and said, "Max, I'd like for you to go out to the Lamar house and interview there." I said, "Well, no one can get in there. There are reporters here from all over the country." New York, Chicago, every place. You couldn't get to see them. They were locked up in their house and they weren't using the door. I thought, "Well, what good is it for me to go? I'm new on this and here somebody else has been out there for three or four days and can't get in." Well, I went out and I walked toward the house and there were reporters behind bushes and everything waiting for somebody to come out of the house and they'd grab them for a story. I walked up to the door and the knob was broken off. A reporter had broken the knob off the door trying to get in. We were rough in those days. To my surprise, the door opened to admit me. At that point, reporters came out from behind the bushes and everything. Everybody thought, "Well, this is open for everybody." No. They wouldn't let anybody else in. Later on, a reporter who was there from the Herald was admitted, but it was my story and I was in first and I was published first. How did I get the story? Well, the attorney felt confident that I could do a good job and a fair job and I got in and I interviewed him and it was a good story. It was carried all over. Even The New York Times had page one had a copyrighted story saying "The Dayton Journal Herald today said..."

Mickey Davis

I'm Mickey Davis. I started here in 1965. I'm a little too young to be here today. This is my thirty-first year which I call my Baskin and Robbins year because of the thirty-one flavors and I think I've seen them all and I remember starting here in '65 as a police reporter and a general assignment reporter and my mentor as a police reporter was Ann Heller and I also recall being enamored by some of the characters. Marj Heyduk at the time was an institution there. She wrote the Third and Main column. Of course, she was reputed to be the one that put Gorgeous George in wrestling to his flowing hairdo, his blonde locks. But what I remember—and so do a lot of readers—about Marj Heyduk is that she, with her column each day, she had a different hat on. She would change hats everyday for her column. So every month she would come in with thirty new hats and then there would thirty new half-column pictures to go with her column. She was really a reader's delight, but a photographer's nightmare. I think Bill Garland remembers some of those things. And when her column appeared in the paper with her little hat column picture—and I have four of them here that I brought with me, I treasure these and I 'm going to pass them around—but she had one directive to the people in the composing room and she said, "When my picture is in the paper, cut it off at the first chin!" And I didn't understand that then, but I do now. So, I'll pass these around to you and take a look at Marj Heyduk in her hats and her chinless features.

Another thing I remember at that time about Marj was she was always carping that the Dayton newspapers didn't award twenty-five year watches to its employees and that upset her. So, this was in 1967, I believe, and she had been here from 1942 to 1967, twenty-five years. So, Marj took it upon herself to go out and buy her own gold watch and what this was was a replica of a pocket watch. A full-sized pocket watch with a fob and then had a plaque "Presented to Marj Heyduk on the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary with Dayton Journal Herald." And so all the people around here remember. They put it up outside the fifth floor elevator. Hung it on the wall. Took her picture with Glen Thompson presenting her the wall. Two days later, somebody stole the watch.
At that time, the editor of The Journal Herald was a man by the name of Glen Thompson. One of the things I remember clearly about Glen Thompson was the time that we were Sports. This is 1966 and a new fellow had come to the Sports department by the name of D.L. Stewart and Friday nights in the Sports department are pretty hectic with box scores and people calling in bowling scores and all that sort of thing and people calling wanting to know what the score of the game was. So one night we get this call and D.L. picks up the phone and the voice says, "This is Thompson. Who won the game?" And D.L. said, "Who's Thompson and what game?" Thompson said, "Monday you'll know who Thompson is." And he slams down the phone and D.L., being there only two months, realized what he had done and his heart sunk to his shoes. The next day, Thompson came into our Sports department and gave us a real lecture on proper phone deportment and D.L. thought he was out of there by then, but he's lasted thirty years.


Karen Jackson
I've been with the newspaper since '94, which hasn't been that long, and I don't really have a lot of interesting stories to tell but I do remember when I was attending Sinclair Community College and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and so one of my teachers instructed me, "Well, why don't you come on this tour and you can tour The Dayton Daily News." And so that's what I did and during that experience, I mean everything was nice until I went downstairs and those big rollers of paper were on the little tracks and they were going around as they were going into the press. It scared me half to death. I thought we were going to get run over by those things. What also interested me was, during out tour, we had those big templates that they gave all of us to take as souvenirs and I still have one of those and the other thing was, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and my instructor said, "Well, why don't you come down here and see if they have anything you can do." So, I took it upon myself to come down here one day and to take the test, spelling, grammar, that type of thing. I took it and was scared half to death. The lady said, "How old are you?" And I think I was like maybe seventeen or eighteen at this time. She said, "You're a good speller. Most people that are professionals come in and take the test and don't do really well on it. What type job do you want?" And things like that. This was summer, so I didn't have that long of a time, but I was able to come and just look around the news room and spend maybe about a month and a half touring, exploring and meeting people. I don't know who those people are now, but it was really fun.

Millie Bingham
I'm still writing two columns a week. I hope some of you realize that. My association with the paper was really though Ted. Ted's last position with the Cox newspapers was editor of the Editorial Page of The Journal Herald. When he left to become one of the first ombudsmen in the country—there were only five at the time in the U.S. and Canada— Jenny Cramer, a friend and I approached Arnold Rosenfeld with the idea we wanted to have a children's page or two pages in the Sunday Magazine telling local history and we named the page "The Young Bird," because a young bird knows its territory before it goes elsewhere. So, we worked on that. We pulled the history of the area and we had people tell stories to children and so forth. Well, within a year we had received state awards for it and then Arnold Rosenfeld said, "Millie, I know that you know how to save money. Would you write a column about helping the reader to save the cost of the newspaper?" That was in 1971. So, the result was...I did not name "Common Sense," one of the—I can't think of his name now— named it. I did not want to be Millie Bingham because Ted as a public ombudsman was a public figure. So, I chose Kate McQueen because Kate McQueen was a friend of mine and I was also writing a book for children on etiquette called The Ghost of Kate McQueen. So, I chose that and this is the fun part. That was in '70 and in '71 in February it started. So, it's twenty-five years now that "Common Sense" has been running and I've had a lot of fun using the pseudonym and I would go shopping as Mrs. Bingham and one time, over there by the river there was big discount house and there were people there ahead of me and I'd been cruising. I was checking it out and the manager—it was the lunch hour and they were busy—and he was helping at the cash register and two ladies ahead of me said, "Oh, we have Kate McQueen's column right here. We came because it was in her column." He says, "Oh, Kate! Know her well. Talk to her often." And then he checked back. He said, "May I help you?"
By the way, I was doing consumer information two hours a day, five days a week on an ABC radio station in Bloomington, Indiana, and that was in the forties. It's repetition. But one time a farmer with a riding stable said they had lots of manure, aged manure. They wanted to get rid of it. So, I listed it in the column. He said he could handle about three hundred people. I got a call from a nice lady who said, "I want to know where you get that stuff." And I said, "What stuff?" And she said, "Well that stuff you put in the garden. I don't want to say it out loud." I said, "You mean the manure?" "Oh, yes, yes, yes." So after about a day or two, the farmer called and he said, "Kate McQueen, I've got more jams and jellies than a pantry. People won't take something for nothing. Nice people who want the manure for their gardens bring me jams. One lady baked a pie. Another lady baked a loaf of bread." So you can see the fun that has been. And then they did a "Common Sense" book the next year in '72 and my husband died unexpectedly, very quickly, no previous warning, and I was asked to write full time for the paper so you've been stuck with me ever since 1973.

Roz Young
I've been sitting here trying to think of something significant to say in my vast and lengthy career at both newspapers. Actually, the first job I applied for was in 1934 at The Dayton Herald. I talked to the city manager and he said, "Well, what kind of job did you think you could have on this newspaper?" I said, "I want to be an editorial writer." Because I had taken one course in college on editorial writing. That's all I knew. He said, "We don't hire women on this newspaper except in the Society Department. However, if you would like to work for nothing, we would let you gain some experience." So I worked for nothing for two weeks and my parents said, "Now, we didn't send you through college to work for nothing. So, we're going to send you back and get another degree and you can be a school teacher." I didn't darken the door of a newspaper again for ten years. But in 1944 I became a feature writer on Dayton Daily News and wrote Features.
The publisher of the paper at that time was James M. Cox and he was a most unusual person, but he knew he wasn't paying; now he probably didn't pay the men well either, but I know he didn't pay the women well. He was a patronizing kind of person and he was interested in our welfare. So, he had a vegetable garden at his home at Trails End and he hired a woman cook and said that all women who worked on The Dayton Daily News could have lunch. He opened up a little room on the fifth floor; somewhere near the roof there was a skylight. It was hot in there in the summertime and he had Clifford, his chauffeur, gather all the fresh vegetables from his garden that he could spare and when he brought him down to the paper, he brought the vegetables and the woman cooked it and we all went up there and had, I think we paid something like fifteen cents for a plate lunch. Might have been a quarter. I think now, in all these years, how women's status on the paper has risen since those days when we were relegated to a cheap little lunch on the fifth floor, and I'm glad that it has.
Now, I worked from 1944 until 1970 and then I was invited by Glen Thompson, and I wanted to tell you, I don't know if you know that Glen is out at Bethany. I drop in to see him every once in a while. He can't hear and he can't see very well, but he's still Glen. Well, at any rate, Glen invited me to become a columnist when Marj Heyduk there was a vacancy. A large vacancy. So, I inherited her job and her office and I worked there until I retired of old age in 1982. In the meanwhile, the News had taken over The Journal Herald, so I was back with the News again, and I'm still here.

Ron Rollins
I'm one of the editors here. I'm been here almost ten years. I guess one of the most remarkable, maybe the most remarkable thing I've seen here in those years was all the falderal surrounding the dismissal of our then-publisher Dennis Shere, which almost everyone here remembers, I'm sure. For those who don't remember the story, Dennis was fired after he refused to publish a classified ad by a gay and lesbian group that had to do with AIDS lectures and whatnot and before he was let go, there were two remarkable demonstrations out front of our building. One by members of the group whose classified ad he had turned down, which was a fairly colorful and dramatic picketing outside our front door of people with signs and men in dresses and whatnot. It was an interesting time and when Dennis was fired, he was a member of Far Hills Baptist Church down in Kettering and the corner of the street out in front of building at Fourth and Ludlow was packed with protesters on the evening after his firing was made public in the newspaper. I don't remember how many people were out there. There was an absolute sea of people, which was the point of the story that there was just a remarkable sight. At about four-thirty, five o'clock in the afternoon. I believe he was fired on a Thursday. He was called down to Atlanta for that and on Friday afternoon, the Dayton Police Department had to shut down Fourth and Ludlow because there were easily a thousand people, maybe more, just jamming the streets. Parents with kids and signs and bullhorns and it was a remarkable rally of people who thought that he had been wrongly fired by Cox. The story involves me only in the way that it involves pretty much everybody who was at the newspaper and had to sort of fight your way through the crowds. The night side crew, of which I was a member at the time, likes to park at the four-hour meters between here and Sinclair Community College and then at four-thirty when they open up the parking lot out back, move your car into the free parking for the rest of the evening. And there were several of us that were trying to fight our way back there while the police were closing down Fourth and Ludlow because of this sea of people that were emerging apparently from all over town to come and protest out in front of our building. That got us on the six o'clock that night. There were easily a thousand, fifteen hundred people out there.

Mary McCarty
I've been writing for the paper for three years and more importantly I'm the daughter of Vera Seiler McCarty, class of '53 here. But it was on the wall downstairs. I've been in journalism for sixteen years and for some reason the story that's coming to my mind is not anything I accomplished in all that time, but the time when I screwed up in a particularly embarrassing way. It was over a real routine story. It was early in my career when I was reporter for The Kettering-Oakwood Times and it was one of those things. I forget even what the story was now. It might have been some community event that I was promoting and it was one of those things easily handled by a phone interview. I'm changing the names here to protect the innocent. I called this woman, her name was Gwen Smith and we did a phone interview. I noticed the woman had kind of a nice voice. You know, sort of had that Lauren Bacall thing going. Anyway, it was a very common name, Gwen Smith and I thought, well, you know, I don't need to check the spelling on this one. So the story runs that next day. First thing I get in the office I get a call. The person says, "Hello, this is Gwen Smith." And I said, "Hello," and I said, "Oh, God. What did I do?" Usually when people call you first thing in the morning after the story appears, it's not good news and Gwen Smith says, "Well, I'm very, very upset with you." I said, "I'm sorry. What did I do?" "You've referred to me in this story as a woman." I didn't know quite what to say. I said, "Oh! Well, isn't your name Gwen Smith?" He said, "My name is Glenn Smith." Not only was there the stinging humiliation of this particular moment but then the particular challenge of how do you write a GIR or a correction for this. You know, do you say, "We referred to Glenn Smith as a women when he's really a man." So I finally settled on "Was incorrectly referred to as Gwen Smith. His name is Glen Smith." I guess the reason this story has stayed with me for all these years is that it taught me three things. Always, always, always check the spelling of the name even if it happens to be Gwen Smith and no story is routine and anything that you write about someone in the newspaper could require years of therapy later. Choose your words carefully.

Laura Dempsey
I'm been at the paper for about fifteen years and I got to be working at the paper just because I could type fast. I was looking for a job—I was between jobs I think—and they had an ad in the paper for someone who could type. So, I came down and took a typing test and the job that I applied for had been filled but the woman there said, "You can type fast, let's get you on a shift that nobody else wants which is three a.m. to nine a.m. typing obituaries that came in overnight." So I would try to get up in the morning at two-thirty and come into work which I never could do. I'd roll in about five a.m. and Sam Rubin, who's here today, had the wire job for The Dayton Daily News. So he came into work about four, four-thirty? He'd always beat me and I was supposed to be there at three and he knew it and I'd roll in about five and he'd always say, "Hi Laura. Out getting doughnuts again?" And I'd say, "Yes, Sam. Thanks." But I could type so fast that it didn't matter. I could do the job and check out at the same time.
Eventually I worked my way into the copy desk for The Journal Herald. Hired by a man named Dave Wolgarth, who's since been gone. But that was a job I always wanted. I realized that they were in charge of reading everything over the paper. Making sure everything was spelled right and the grammar was right and then there were things I've always been interested in and always been good at, so that's what I wanted to do and that's what I ended up doing. But the way The Journal Herald copy desk worked was, nothing was secret, nothing was private. If you made a mistake it was shouted across the room and that's how I learned most of the stuff that I know even though I read a lot and always was good with words and spelling. I remember one day, Dave Wolgarth coming downstairs. He'd go up and check the headlines. He was a page one editor and he'd go up and check the headlines before the paper went in every night and then he came down and he said, "Ersen," that's my maiden name, "Ersen, there's no such word as 'towards." And everybody heard it and everybody laughed and I said, "Okay." And he was right and I've never forgotten that and I always see the word 'towards' which people use all the time and I think of Dave Wolgarth and I'm lucky that I have him.

Bill Flanagan
I came to work for The Journal Herald in 1966 and I worked for The Journal Herald until we took over The Daily News and I left employment here in 1986. A good lot of things come to mind being back in this building. One thing that seems to be strong is the sense of competition we had. Back in those days The Journal Herald and The Daily News were in the same building but we hated each other and it was a fierce competition. It was hard to convince people of it, but people would call us and say things like, "Well, you're in the same building." We didn't talk to each other. We didn't want to be on the same elevator with each other. At least I didn't want to be on the same elevator. This may come as a shock, but some of us would go drinking next door and we even had sides of the bar. There was The Journal Herald side of the bar and The Daily News side of the bar and we never crossed unless they had a good looking woman working in the Living Section of The Daily News. That's what comes to mind. And you reminded me, we lost an editor, too. We didn't have the demonstrations outside. We had the distinction of having an editor here who twice on page one published the word. The second time he did it, he was called up from Atlanta or something. I don't remember the specifics. I know he quit, but it was pretty much a firing.

Ron Rollins
They said it was "indefensible."

Bill Flanagan
Yes. It was the story about the two police officers who were hauling tobacco. Two federal agents got in a fight and one of them killed the other one. But what I found remarkable about it was the next day when we came to work. I agreed with his decision on both times to use the big word, but I was really angry the next day when I came to work. For some reason I was over at the city desk at the time and I got to get all the phone calls and I mean the phone was ringing and ringing. The demonstrators called us. I found it remarkable that some point in the afternoon after God knows how many phone calls, a woman called and as soon as she started talking, I had put my automatic "Un-huh" on because I figured here we go again. It's going to be again about using the big word. No, she wanted to correct our use of "lie" and "lay." She had read the big word and that didn't offend as much as our misuse of "lie" and "lay."

Bill Koehle
I came to the old Dayton Herald in 1948 and I retired from The Dayton Daily News in December of 1992. I would like to talk not so much about things I've done, but rather about some of the old types of hassles you had to put up trying to make a photograph back in those days. It wasn't easy. For instance, at The Daily News, I think it was around 1955, '56, the only color shot in the paper was on the old Comerica cover. To produce this was really a hassle because you had what they call a single shot camera. It was an old converted Graphlix about that long. Sort of a big oblong box with the lens on it. It had three slots for film holders for the three primary colors. In 1955 and '56 they were still using glass plates for this project. It's unbelievable, but they were. But you went out on location and you made your cover shot and then you came back and you had these three glass plates. Now, the key to the thing, if you got these three mixed up, out of rotation, you had to go do it all over again. Then the processing and shipping of those plates and everything. The emulsion on them was so fragile and everything like that. It took approximately, at that time, if I remember right, about two weeks to produce a color photograph for that magazine. One color picture. Two weeks.
Then another oddball thing, we did sequence pictures. Ohio State football and U.D. football and we had a converted Bell-Howell movie camera that shot fifty foot rolls of film. Well, it was usually the new kid on the block that got the job of developing this film. Now, if you ever imagined trying to develop a fifty foot roll of film when you're brand new at the trade, it's quite a hassle. So, it came my turn to do it and I was at The Daily News by that time, and so I went back to the darkroom and I had this fifty foot roll of film and you had a thing that looked like an inverted garbage can about this big around and you had to wind that film in these slots to develop it. Well, I'm back there and I'm nervous, I knock this roll of fifty foot film on the floor. What do I got? I got spaghetti down there. Fifteen minutes later Homer Hacker, who was my boss at the time, came back and he was pounding on the door, he says, "Bill, how you coming along?" I said, "Homer, I haven't even got this project off the floor yet!"
In fact, last night I called—I worked with Bob Tamaska at the time and I called him last night—to verify the story but the very first strobe units with these old speed graphics were wet cell units and just imagine carrying a car battery around with you was about what it amounted to. So Bob and I were out at U.D. U.D. was in what they called Division 1 football at the time and they were in a pretty crucial game, it was on a Saturday night out at Baujan Field. We're out there and it's pouring cats and dogs and so the game starts and they sent two guys out there because we had a Saturday night deadline of photos to Sports, I think at that time it was nine thirty. The game didn't even start until eight. So, we're out there both shooting and it's just pouring so hard you can't see what you're doing and I turned around and I saw Tamaska jump up in the air and fly back right flat on his back about ten feet behind me. What happened was that wet cell strobe unit shorted out on the camera and actually knocked him up in the air and ten feet back on his back and when I got over there, that old wet cell strobe unit was still arcing over him. I had to figure out some way of cutting the connections on the thing. Some of those things could be a little bit dangerous at the time. I just want to tell you that I trained under three excellent people. I was very fortunate. I trained the late Bob Dody and Al Wilson and also Homer Hacker and I learned a lot from these guys and I had a good career and enjoyed it.

Clem Hamilton
My career in this building overlaps both newspapers. I came to The Journal Herald at the other end of the street in 1952 and left in 1957 to go to The Milwaukee Journal. It was a couple months after we come into this building. However, in the old building we didn't have a liquor storage. The photography took care of the liquor. About every Friday night at nine o'clock when the doors closed, the partying began. That's something else beside the point. Flanagan and I knew each other first when I was at The Daily News and he doesn't realize my old Journal Herald background because Flanagan has always looked at me as the enemy, I think. He doesn't realize how The Daily News was my enemy for many, many years and I can cite one good example. As he mentioned earlier, we didn't speak to the reporters from The Daily News. We had nothing whatsoever to do with them at the other end of the street. It wasn't difficult because we didn't pass their path as much. One time I was in Chicago, Wrigley Field, to cover the Cleveland Browns and the Chicago Bears and I sat in one seat in the press box. Russ Guerra who had come up with Ben Garliko, Ben was writing Sports for The Daily News. Russ was between us and Ben was on the other side and through an entire football game, Ben Garliko and I did not say one word to each other. I hated him. Later I came to know him and kind of liked him, but at that time I hated him.
This also should be noted that in 1949 when The Journal Herald became The Journal Herald, talk about a weak sister, we were the weak sister to The Daily News which had everything and we were fighting to increase that circulation and make an inroad, little by little. On Saturday we had what Marshall Strass, who was the city editor and, in my opinion, one of the best city editors that Dayton has ever had. Marshall got the idea for a blockbuster in the Saturday paper. A big story. The idea behind it was that we had no Sunday paper. We couldn't compete really with The Daily News which had the Sunday paper and I think the cost of the daily paper then was a nickel and we charged ten cents for the Saturday paper which had a comic section. That was our Sunday paper, the Saturday paper, and we had a blockbuster and the comics and charged a dime. I left in 1957, as I said, to go to The Milwaukee Journal and Ritter rescued for me for a second time, Ritter Collett the Sports editor rescued me in 1962 and brought me back to the Sports department at The Journal Herald. In the meantime Glen Thompson had become the editor. I must tell this story about Glen Thompson even if it goes over my allotted time. Glen, after I came back as Ritter's number one bobo, Glen decided he was going to have Ritter and I in the office and tell us his plans for the Sports department and he recited everything he wanted the Sports department to do and concluded it by saying, (Hamilton is imitating Thompson's voice and accent) "Now this may not be the way The New York Herald Tribune does it. This may not be the way The New York Times does it, but this by God is the way The Journal Herald is gonna do it!" Now if you can close your eyes and see Glen Thompson, I think that was a pretty fair imitation.

Sam Rubin
I am probably one of the oldest ones here. I came to The Daily News in 1939. Anybody have any concept of 1939? Before World War II. Does anybody have access to a fax machine? Everybody has faxes, right? Nobody realizes The Dayton Daily News was actually a pioneer in what we call fax now. In those days, prior to World War II, they called it wire photo. Which was actually a wire photo, it was actually a fax. We pioneered it. We were the first newspaper in the state of Ohio that had a wire photo machine which was a God awful immense thing about half the size of this room which today you could do on a chip. One day I took it upon myself to go in and get my picture taken with the guy who ran the wire photo machine. I thought it would be historical. I still got that picture at home. But anyway, it was a tremendous undertaking in those days where you had to line up a way to send the picture say from California to Dayton, Ohio. Very few newspapers had it, but you had to line up each city on a particular time. Like the marking on the clock. If it said "This is going to send this picture at 9:40 a.m.," every city on the network had to start that picture at 9:40 a.m. or you lost it. That was the beginning of I think what we call fax today and we were a pioneer and ever since then, we got better and better.
But as for people here, I know everybody remembers Si Burick. Si was actually one of my mentors here. The other was Jim Fain. Si was what you'd probably call a behind-the-scenes-power here. He was a very quiet, unassuming fellow. Sports editor for fifty years (End of Side A). I remember one day, I sat at the front of the office there when I was working on the editorial news and everyday I used to see James M. Cox come through the door. He was getting pretty well up in the age at this time and The Dayton Daily News was getting more and more people working at that. Pretty soon this editorial department was full of people. So, one day James M. got off the elevator and he was talking to Si. He was a very quiet spoken person, Mr. Cox was, but he talked to Si and he was looking around the room and I heard him say "You mean all these people work here? You mean we're paying all these people?" Of course we've grown since then. I remember Si was quite an extraordinary type of fellow. He was responsible for my watching my very first opening day game with the Cincinnati Reds. Si was just about ready to retire. He was in very bad health and so they asked that day—because he couldn't drive in—if I would drive him to the ball park. So, it was my privilege to drive Si to the ball park and you never saw a guy who got so much VIP treatment by his peers. Everybody there would just kowtow to Si. He was the king. From the parking lot to the press box, they just wouldn't leave him alone. He was a real gentlemen. So, Si was my mentor, outside of Jim Fain. I'm still here. I left here in 1983 and I'm still a faithful reader.

Carl Beyer
I came to The News in 1957 first as an assistant state editor. Later I joined the copy desk and in 1965 I was made news editor. As everybody has been talking here, I'm reflecting back on my career and it just dawned on me how much of my career has been involved with death. Maybe it's because I'm getting older, I don't know. Some of the major stories, most of the stories that made a lasting impression on me were those, I guess, that were involved with death and I recall particularly one day when I was sitting in for Sam as wire editor and Max Konoff, the Sunday editor, called over to us and said, "Has somebody shot the President?" And I said, "Not unless it's happened in the last five minutes because I just checked the wire room." And he said, "Well, a lady just called in and she thought she heard somebody say that the President was shot." So, I went into the wire room, and back in those days you had a room where you had these batteries of teletype machines. I think they must they have had eight or ten teletype machines that chattered away in this room, and as I opened the door, bells started ringing and of course that was sign that there was a major story, a bulletin coming across. And I looked at the machine closest to me and it says, "Kennedy Shot in Dallas." And of course, that was a start of a big story and the words that still freeze in my mind is as I was gathering the wire copy as we were getting an extra edition out that day, was just the words that came across, "FLASH: CBS Says 'Dead." You think of Presidents being assassinated, Lincoln was assassinated and Garfield, but not modern day Presidents. That just didn't happen and that really made a lasting impression on me.
Then, I think, further on down the line, a few years when the telephone rang in my bedroom at night and I answered it and Greg Favre, who was our managing editor at the time, he's now the executive editor of The Sacramento Bee. Just the one sentence. He says, "Carl, they just shot Bobby." I said, "I'll be right down." Fifteen minutes later I was on my way to the office. Then there was the assassination of Martin Luther King and I guess we had a big story when a twin engine plane, I believe it was a Beach Craft, from              Airport in Urbana rammed into the side of a Dayton-bound DC-9 coming down. All forty-eight aboard that DC-9 were killed. And the last was the Challenger explosion. These are just things that vividly stand out in my mind as things that have happened and the way that we covered. Nowadays, everything comes on the television, even with the Challenger. But back in the early, why, you just tore up the whole newspapers, stopped the presses, made over a new one. Like something out of the old movies. But it was a time when everybody worked together and took charge and those are some of my memories.

Bill Garlow
I'm now the picture editor. I started with the paper in January of 1964 and I think that I want to tell some of the funny instances which I think is part of the history. Mickey Davis is beginning to smile because I'm going to tell the one about Mickey and myself which when we were both new to the newspaper and our job was to go out and do a story on a dirty bookstore which was at the place that the Convention Center is now. Mickey and I, this was our first big story, we both went over there and we went inside and they said, "You can't photograph in here. You can't do anything. Get out. Hurry up. Get out." So Mickey and I went out and talked to each other and said, "Well, we can't go back without anything or we'll be in real trouble." So I said, "Mickey, you hold the door open and I'll go inside and I'll take the photographs and then we'll jump out and go." So, Mickey pushed the door open and followed me inside and I started taking pictures real quick. I think Mickey grabbed magazines so he could get a picture over his shoulder and the man chased us all the way back to the newspaper.

Mickey Davis
Let's say he was six eight and three hundred pounds.

Bill Garlow
Right, that sounds better. Another funny instance that happened at The Journal Herald, a lot of times we would leave, and I was working for The Journal Herald, we would leave all at the same time to have lunch and we'd take our radios and go someplace and as we were leaving the office one time, we parked across the street in a company lot, and The Daily News photographers were all coming back from lunch and Bill Koehler was with us and they all said, "Hey, Bill! Where you going? Where all you guys going?" He said, "You didn't hear about the plane crash?" "No." "We can't discuss it. We have to leave." So we got in our car and started leaving and a little while later on the two way radio came the call from The Journal Herald news desk and said, "You better head to Wright­Patt. We've heard there's a plane crash." "Where did you hear that we have a plane crash?" "Somebody called and said that there's a plane crash and you'd better head out to Wright-Patt right away." So we started heading out there and I find out later that what had happened is Skip Peterson, who's now chief photographer, had gone back to the paper and said, "The Journal Herald's running out on a plane crash. You'd better find out where it's at." So their desk couldn't find anything out about the plane crash so they called in and the woman reporter said, "My husband is a pilot at the air base and we've heard there's a plane crash. Can you tell about it?" And it set our newspaper off thinking there was a plane crash and we chased the plane crash half a day.
Another real quick one. We had a police reporter and in the mornings at The Journal Herald, we only had two photographers on in the morning, a police reporter and a secretary. And this woman came in, and you can keep your divorce out of the newspaper if you apply the papers and everything else and as a record the paper's policy is to keep it out. This beautiful woman...and the police reporter sees this and he directs this to the secretary and they start filling out the notes and the police reporter runs out afterwards and says, "Lila that woman was really beautiful. I'd like to get a date because she's getting divorced." So he sends her a dozen roses from the sheet that she filled out and the next morning the husband called thanking him for the dozen roses. He sent them to the wrong address.
Back to the plane crash in Urbana, on a little more serious note, Al Wilson and a then-reporter by the name Mary Ellen Wolf who was our top reporter, was the reporter for the day in the morning. We heard there was a plane crash and Al Wilson and Mary Ellen went to the assistant city editor and said, "There's been this plane crash." And he said, "Well, where is it?" "It's up in Urbana." He said, "Nah. That's out of our circulation area." Well, as Carl knows, it was enroute to Dayton. It was the biggest plane crash for ten years and we almost missed it and the photographer and reporter said, "To hell with the editor, we're going out."

Keri Cohen
I'm an editor. I've been here almost nine years, which still surprises me. I came to this newspaper as a feature writer. My husband had gotten a job in the Jewish community and I really wanted to continue writing but I had tremendous people skills, so they said I could be an editor and they made me Lifestyle editor which was like a tremendously burdensome job and it put my people skills to the test because the people at a newspaper are always so colorful and wonderful and egotistical and for somebody who had never been an editor before, I was glad that I didn't have the Entertainment team at that time because there were such egos. Wonderful, talented people, but sort of in the prima donnaesque range. Such as Terry Lawson and Betty Dietz Krebs and Ann Heller was on my team and she was on the lower on of the "test your mettle" range. But, not only were they temperamental and yelled and voices were all raised, but a lot of times they were right and it was an interesting sort of lesson in quality.
Someone like Betty would leave these very, sort of constant notes. She would circle things in red that were wrong in the Lifestyle sections and put them on the bulletin board and you dreaded seeing them, but you knew that she was right, almost always, about what she was saying. But Betty had her shortcomings. She was a pack rat like a lot of journalists were. She was also the book editor and so all the books, a tremendous amount—Laura can attest to that—would come to Betty and she would try to parcel them out to other people, but they would never quite get out fast enough and there were stacks and stacks and her office became a fire hazard and we were actually ordered by the fire marshal to do something about Betty's office. So we kind of put our heads together and we said, "Betty, come on. You've got to do this." And she made, you know, a feeble attempt to do it, but I think it just broke her heart to really try and part with these things and finally editors came in over the weekend and just got rid of everything in her office and she came in and she was so amazed. She went, "I'd forgotten what color the carpet was.

Meredith Moss
I've been writing for the paper for over twenty years now and I see from the tablet I sent around that everybody seems interested in having another story circle, so I'm going to pass and save you my stories for the next story circle.

Diane Heckert Staub
I came to the paper right out of college along with Vera Seiler McCarty in 1950. We were in the Society department. I was there until '58 and then after an intermission, I came back to work on the Sunday magazine for two years in the early sixties. I think I'm going to start out that I can't remember exactly when it happened. Sam may remember, but I think it was the days when I was in the Sunday magazine because my memory is of the City room in the new building, rather than of the old building. It was the days of hot metal, of course, when deadlines were later because somehow, before all that technology arrived we could get an edition out on shorter notice. This has always mystified me. But at any rate, the final edition came out and you could hear the presses thundering away downstairs and they handed the copies of the edition and it was everybody's duty to sort of scan through the paper and see if you saw any problems and so everybody sat there reading, scanning the headlines, going through stories and meanwhile nothing was said and the presses kept rumbling and all of the sudden, my memory is that it was about twenty minutes later, maybe not that long, there was sort of a yelp of pain. What had happened was that the masthead had gotten scrambled. Everybody read from the — line down and the masthead on the second section said, "Dayton Daily Snews."
Betty Dietz, there were people who tried before you to get her to clean her office. We were all jammed into one smallish room in the old building in the 1950s, before the new building was built, and Governor was present in those building almost daily. In fact, my first encounter with him when I came to work for The Daily News and was sitting in the receptionist desk plugging for staff writer which I got to be then. It was summertime and in walked this roly-poly white haired man with a cigar in his mouth and he stood there regarding me and I said, "May I help you?" And he said, "I'm just the janitor here, girlie." At which point I looked over my shoulder and Elizabeth Wyman, the famous old society editor was sitting there open mouthed, wondering how this would work out.
Vera and I had a lively period in the absolutely old style, segregated women's society department days when there were scarcely any women anywhere except right there. One of our big chores was to write the weddings and sometimes we would have to write stories about this long of maybe thirty-five or more weddings for one Sunday paper and we developed an exhaustive formula for varying the language to describe tulle and —. The features were incredibly simple and pared down in those days to compared to what Mary and her other cohorts write today. They were designed to be done in one single brief interview. They didn't really like to let us get out of the office very often. I think they thought we would go shopping or something. Which wasn't a problem for me later when I was trying to write Fashion columns and couldn't go out to look around very much to see what was in the stores. But, it was still that post-World War II period when the women were basically supposed to be homemakers when social issues, if they were covered at all, were covered by the standpoint of the social organizations who were staging charity functions in order to benefit whoever who was only briefly mentioned. It was the threshold of the new world that came on later and it was the end of the days in the grimy old building from the beginning of the century which is buried somewhere under this stuff.

Vera Seiler McCarty
I came to this building when I was fifteen in 1943 and my sister Marita worked in Classified Advertising and she didn't always get very good advice, but she knew I wanted to get a part-time job while I was in high school and she said, "Well, Vera,"— Bill Kelly was Classified manager then— "Vera just go down and sit on his desk and say 'I really need a job.' Just give him a sob story." So I did that. I don't know if I sat on his desk, but I think maybe I was a little more aggressive than I normally would be and I did get a job and I worked there seven years. I remember, I think when I started U.D., I was making like sixty-five cents an hour and my kids can't believe to this day that I went to the University of Dayton and paid as I went. I think I earned enough in the summer to make a down payment and then every month, or maybe it was every week, I went to the cashier's cage at the University of Dayton—they called it the cashier's cage—and Brother Dapper was the cashier and we called him Dapper Dan the Dollar Man. Every week, I plunked nine dollars across that cage and then by the end of that semester I was paid up and then I had to start all over again. But I did that for four years and it is kind of amazing that anybody could do that. But that was fifty years ago.
In 1950 then when I graduated from U.D.—Classified was on this floor, by the way—and then I went down one floor to Society and I worked for Nora Dyer when I was here in Classified and then Liv Lymon was my superior when I was in Society. Liv taught me a lot about Dayton history. I didn't know anything about the Meads and the Talbotts until I started working for Liv. We worked on old manual typewriters and we sent our copy up on a dumbwaiter, you know, from the third floor to the fourth floor which was the composing room and right by the chute were steps leading up to the composing room.
Anyhow, about the Society stories, I do have a couple of very brief stories. We wrote about these nine-inch wedding stories and one was when Herb Kale married his southern belle named Sibley down South somewhere and I do remember that we were all quite amused and I don't know if we used it in our story, but one of the musical selections at Herb's wedding was My Hero and we were all annoying with Herb. We could get quite abusive with that. When we got the Home edition we did check for errors and if we saw something serious we'd take those steps three at a time to try to get it corrected for the final edition. But the worst boo-boo I can ever remember was when one Sunday in June, I presume, whoever wrote our headlines married a certain bride off to the pastor of Holy Angels and well, we never heard from Father MacFarland, but the bridegroom, who was Ben Ambrose from U.D., called us rather indignantly the next day from his honeymoon. So, I saw Ben forty years later at our U.D. reunion and he could laugh about it then. That's one of my stories about Society and there are many others, but maybe I better save that for another time.

Mike Jesse
I'm not really here to tell a story, but I'm the library director here and so I've inherited a great amount of history about both of the papers and we have archives and clippings and photos, some of which are up here, that go way back to around the turn of the century and even though I was born in Dayton, I didn't grow in Dayton and had no memories of it and so, to me, Dayton was new to me when I moved here three years ago and immediately began digging into all of these records and so on. I've been collecting stories as part of my job including why Governor Cox built this building the way he did and the thing about the cafeterias. As a matter of fact, shortly after I came here, when this floor was being remodeled they temporarily moved the library up to what was then the fifth floor cafeteria and my temporary office was in this little cubby hole and I noticed it had a hole in the wall that looked like it used to be a dumbwaiter shaft and it turned out that was where the cook used to make the meals that went down to Governor Cox. There was dumbwaiter that went down to Governor Cox's office. So, I'm not here to talk about that so much, but I'm very interested in the history of the papers and the history of the area and what comes of this, I've requested that the library get a copy of the tapes and records from this and any other conversations that happen and we're going to try to keep the history of the paper.

Marilyn Shannon
I have a really brief newspaper story and that's my connection with the newspaper as a reader and a paper carrier. When some of my kids were in elementary school they decided they wanted a paper route and you know how the story is going to end, don't you? My husband and I both did a lot of carrying of the newspaper and it was at that time we only got The Dayton Daily News and this is The Journal Herald of course and so then we started getting The Journal Herald. I remember many mornings getting up at five thirty and carrying papers and I have to tell you though, I ended up with a tremendous figure. That did a lot for my figure carrying the paper from five thirty to six thirty for a particular time. I never thought I could get up and really start moving without a cup of coffee, but I learned that I could. Even today, should I be up, really up, and out taking a walk, I really do fondly think of the days when I carried the paper.