No. 685 – Youngstown

Performer: Bruce Springsteen

Songwriter: Bruce Springsteen

Original Release: The Ghost of Tom Joad

Year: 1995

Definitive Version: The studio version

This was my favorite song off Tom Joad when it came out, but a few years later it took on added significance.

My sentiments about The Dispatch were questionable when I started, and it got worse as my tenure went along. The Dispatch was, and is, a family-owned newspaper, and as such it’s subject to the vagaries of the family that runs it.

And the family that runs The Dispatch was (and maybe still is for all I know) one of the most powerful and well-connected in Columbus. The Wolfes had their fingers in many a pie. I guess it’s gotten a lot better than it used to be, but for a long time, if a story that was sensitive to a certain contingency in the city broke, The Dispatch was the place for it to go and die.

My favorite example: The Dispatch reported that Woody Hayes, legendary Ohio State football coach, resigned after punching a Clemson player in a bowl game. Every other paper, as far as I know, told the truth: He was fired. Why The Dispatch changed that story, I don’t know, but obviously someone somewhere wanted it that way—as if Hayes’ actions, which everyone saw on TV, weren’t embarrassing enough to himself or the university.

And Business, my department, did a lot of dirty work. It’s not that I recall that other papers were noting particularly atrocious deeds that we covered up, but we for sure didn’t report anything more controversial than a bad financial report. No one did any enterprise reporting of any real meatiness, and one-source stories were a-OK.

After coming from a paper and department that competed as best it could with the Detroit papers, this was distressing. But, as I’ve mentioned, the options for a journalist in Columbus were scarce. And when Debbie and I bought our house in June 1997, my options were limited to Columbus, period.

I tried to make the best of it, and for a while it was all right, and I recommitted to the department after my brief flirtation with moving to sports. But in January 1998, everything took a big turn for the worse. It all started when I got to work one day and there seemed to be a murmur in the newsroom as I went to check my mailbox.

On the bulletin board in the mailroom was a terse typed notice—two sentences—saying the business editor and assistant business editor had been reassigned and a new business editor and assistant were named. This was the first I had heard of this.

Let me restate that: Upper management blew apart the Business department and the people who actually worked in Business found out about it at the same time as (or later than) other people at the newspaper. And they didn’t even have the stones to tell us in person. Deplorable!

But the ultimate indignity was who they promoted to run the department. About a year before this, we hired a reporter who had been at the Youngstown Vindicator. (There’s your tie-in.) Harvey seemed like a good enough guy, but it didn’t take long to see that he was a poser. No matter the task, he’d complain about it, ask why it needed to be done and then whine that he never had enough time to get everything done.

As you can imagine, this sentiment didn’t play well with a copy desk that had to work in the evenings and always extra hours Thursdays and Fridays to get everything out on time, when Harvey NEVER stayed past 5.

So not only did the Brass announce in cowardly way the changes in Business, they also promoted the biggest jag-off in the department—if not the entire paper—to lead the department. The editor at least apologized later that day for the announcement, but the damage had been done, and my attitude went down the drain.

Fortunately, Harry continued his 5 p.m. departure policy regardless of what was going on in the department, so I had to deal with him for only an hour or so each day. In retrospect, of course, I should have been more professional in my interaction with the new management, but one can mask a general contempt so well. I had a mortgage, a fiancée and no reasonable job options. I was trapped.