Going back to when it all began

I am gazing down memory lane and thinking about some of the early columns that have appeared in this space.

The first one saw the light of day in 1954 and was called “Our Peripatetic Reporter Writes” It was my introduction to column-writing and has been appearing off and on with some degree of regularity ever since.

If you recall any of those columns “then dearie you’re much older than I.”

In those early days I wrote a column three days a week. Don’t ask me how I did it. But it was purely local about local people and events.

It seemed to be well received. As it turned out the Wednesday column was always about restaurants and was called The Wednesday Grapevine. I gathered information for it when my buddy Bob Hardgrove and I would traipse around to eateries in Lake County earlier in the week and take notes. Most of the places and people I wrote about are no longer extant.

Bob was a longtime and very successful realtor in Willoughby. He used to boast, with a large measure of hyperbole I’m sure, that he had sold every house on Glenwood, Waldamere and Highland Drive three times.

As my daughter Kim, is typing this Greg Patt is looking over my shoulder and saying “where are you going to go with that?” Be patient, I replied, you’ll find out.

While the Wednesday column had a theme mostly about dining out, the Monday and Friday columns had no theme. But pointless? Perish the thought.

Unless you think everything I have inflicted on you since then has been pointless. Hold your horses! I am not prepared to enter into that debate at this point in my life, which my best buddy the late Victor Hugo Bouse called “The twilight of a mediocre career.”

Of those early columns, one of my alltime favorites was written when my buddy the late Marion Beloat ordered new coveralls for his workers at his company across from Lost Nation Airport. He drew a picture of how he wanted the names written on the shirt pockets.

But he wanted script writing not block lettering. So he wrote in his sketches of the uniforms “script lettering” on each shirt pocket.

Sure enough, each of the several dozen new uniforms came back with the name “script lettering on the pockets.”

I have to confess that I pilfered the name Peripatetic Reporter from a retired army guy who worked here and who called his weekly output “Our Peripatetic Editor.”

I merely changed editor to reporter.

Now that we remember all that stuff, let’s fast forward several years including two years when I was in the U.S. Army and three years when I worked someplace else.

In June of 1973 the owner of The News-Herald, Harry Horvitz asked me to leave that other job which was in politics and return to The News-Herald.

I will never forget the dinner meeting we had at the Howard Johnson’s at East 55th and Route 2.

I told him I would only come back as editor. He said, “that is what I had in mind.”

And that is the title I held ever since that dinner meeting in 1973. Boy, that span covers a lot of general managers and other high-ranking personnel at the paper.

Harry told me the job involved a lot of responsibility on my part. But he added that he had confidence in me. I was glad of that; if there was anything I needed at that point it was the confidence of a great publisher like Horvitz. We remained close until his passing many years later.

In September of 1973 at one of our weekly strategy meetings (he held similar meetings at all five papers he owned) he took me aside and said “I want you to write a Sunday column for the paper.”

We were about to launch our Sunday edition. I can handle that, I told him.

“And I want you to call the column The Editor’s Notebook.” You will note the column still has the same name.

The name was no coincidence as it was the same title as was on the Sunday column written by our editor, Irv Leibowitz at the Lorain Journal. “Leibo” and I became fast friends. We spent many pleasant times together. He was a tough, street-wise cigarchomping and yes, a little foulmouthed guy who had been editor of the daily paper that folded in Indianapolis. When that paper went out of business, Horvitz grabbed him and placed him in Lorain.

There you have it, Greg. This column was a history lesson all along. One of these days I’m going to have you sit in this chair and see how your attempt at a column works out. Nothing to it? See I told you how easy it was.

Jim Collins