First Posted: 7/31/2014
For two weeks people have been asking me if I am retiring. The answer is yes. And no. And sort of.
First of all — and let’s squelch this right off the bat — I am not retiring as a professor at the community college. That rumor cropped up a few years ago and spawned a “Show Ed Some Love” Facebook page, created by a couple of well-meaning students, which was rather nice, I’m told, but let’s not go there again.
I am, however, retiring from the Sunday Dispatch. Or, better put, I am retiring the title “editor” as associated with my name and the Sunday Dispatch.
To which I say, good.
I was dubbed editor of the Dispatch in 2000 when invited to re-join the paper I had worked at both full- and part-time for a good portion of the previous 33 years. But I was never comfortable with the title.
Specifically, I served as a part-time editor the past 14 years. To me that role dove-tailed quite nicely with my full-time gig, college professor. I was always proud to say I did what I taught, journalism. But the word “editor” never sat right.
It might sound crazy, but as far as this newspaper is concerned, I always believed the editor should be named Watson. Again, it’s purely a personal thing, but I began working here under the paper’s founding editor, William A. Waston, Sr., which to me was tantamount to working for Joseph Pulitzer.
When I began, at all of 17 years old as a part-time sports writer while attending college, staffers at the paper, sensing my youthful enthusiasm, used to caution, “Wait. Working for Bill Watson is like being in the Army or the priesthood, ‘cept those guys get time off.”
It wasn’t long before I knew what they meant. I had to cover a football game on the night my sister got married … and I was in the wedding party. Mr. Watson thought he was being lenient by allowing me to attend the afternoon reception for a couple of hours.
I worked under Mr. Watson for just about 10 years until his death in 1977 at the age of 64. The highlight of that stint may have been in my first year when I put a bride’s photo in the paper a week before she got married. I still imagine her crying her eyes out on Sunday morning knowing everyone saw her gown before her wedding ceremony.
I wasn’t there on Monday when, as I was informed, Mr. Watson hit the ceiling. I had seen him blow his stack at others and it was terrifying. But by the time I arrived for my normal shift on Wednesday afternoon, he had simmered down. He called me into his office and said, “I assume you know what you did.” Afraid I’d cry if I tried to speak, I just nodded. “Let me tell you something,” he went on. “There’s not a mistake you can make in this business that wasn’t made before you. Just don’t make the same one twice.”
That day, I’m convinced, is the day I chose this profession as my career.
Then there was the guy everyone called “Pidge.” William A. Waston Jr. went by the nickname he was given as a pigeon-toed kid falling over his own two feet trying to stretch a double into a triple in a baseball game.
Six months into my job at the Dispatch, the paper went from hot lead composition to cold type — the first in Northeast Pennsylvania to do so — and from that day on, I, an art major, became Pidge’s right-hand man. The two of us spent countless hours working within three feet of one another laying out Dispatch pages back when cutting and pasting meant literally cutting and pasting.
The Dispatch grew exponentially in those years and along with it our workload. Sixty-hour weeks were the norm and a lot of that time was designing and “pasting up” ads. And then on Saturdays we became a daily paper. I’d get in about 9 a.m. and didn’t go home til 2 a.m. the next morning. The press started up at around midnight, which brings to mind the night they had just started when we got a tip St. Cecilia’s Church in Exeter was on fire. Pidge shut everything down and sent out a photographer and a reporter. About 30 workers stood around for a few hours getting paid to do nothing but there was no way the Dispatch was coming out the next morning without that story. We ran a dramatic photo of the wooden church engulfed in flames on page one.
This story is going to sound self-serving but I have to tell it because it made me feel so darned good. One week when we were bombarded with advertising — I’d guess it was political season — we all worked until about midnight Friday night and still had a long way to go to produce a paper. At times like that, Pidge would say to us, “We’re down 40-0 and tomorrow is the fourth quarter.”
I got up and went in the next day at 5 a.m. Pidge showed up about an hour or so later and from that day on, he’d often talk about the time, “We were so busy, I went into work at 6 on Saturday morning and Eddie Ackerman was already on his second pot of coffee.”
I would do anything for that man, and he knew it.
Pidge’s younger son William A. Watson III, he of the well-earned nickname “Cowboy,” never served the Dispatch as editor but cut his publishing teeth here and went on to achieve much success in the business. His brother John Watson succeeded his father and as editor convinced me I should write a weekly column. “Write about whatever’s on your mind,” he said, and I’ve been doing just that since 1984.
Which brings me to the part about retiring but not retiring. This is my last issue as editor of the Dispatch, but I’ve been encouraged to continue my column in the paper which I hope pleases Dispatch readers as much as it does me.
So, you will still see me on the pages of the Sunday Dispatch. You just won’t see my car out front at 11 p.m. on a Thursday or Friday night or before the sun comes up on a Saturday morning.
You might be thinking, “I bet he won’t miss that.” Part of me thinks that too. But another part of me knows I will.
