One writer’s roots
We’re merging the editorial boards of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The (Toledo) Blade
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and its sister paper, The Blade, of Toledo, Ohio, under the direction of publisher and editor-in-chief John Robinson Block, are about to engage in an effort that, to my knowledge, has never before been tried in American journalism. We are, with the help of John Allison, Dan Simpson and Joe Smydo here, and my colleagues Wynne Everett, Tom Troy and Will Tomer in Toledo, going to merge two editorial boards and, to the fullest extent possible, two editorial pages.
For all of us, this is going to be fun.
The trick will be to make our pages fun for our readers, with meaningful and compelling commentary on local, state, national, international and cultural topics. Our range is wide. Our subject matter is inexhaustible.
And our mission is a simple, though not an easy one: insight.
Those of us who labor on the opinion side of journalism go to our reading, our discussions with fellow journalists, academics and policy makers, and ultimately our keyboards in search of insight. It’s not good enough to rehash and deplore. We must give readers some nugget of thought to take away from every piece we generate.
I have been writing commentary and opinion since 1980 (one of the first pieces I wrote was on the death of John Lennon, for the Post-Gazette) and professionally since the mid-1980s when the late and great John Craig, editor of the Post-Gazette, plucked me out of the academy.
Mr. Craig had me try out as a sort of glorified intern at this newspaper, and when I’d more or less passed the test, he called me into his office and said, “I think you could do this work.” But why would I want to? I loved teaching. Well, said Mr. Craig, you will have a very large classroom and you will have a more varied life.
Soon I was on my way to my first professional job as an editorial writer — in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Two years later Mr. Craig pursuaded William Block Sr., that great gentleman, to hire me in Toledo.
At about the time I went to Winston-Salem, Mr. Craig took part in a panel discussion at a national journalists’ convention on the elements of good editorial writing. As usual, he eschewed piety for provocation. Most editorial pages are dull, repetitive and sanctimonious, he said. Our first rule shouldbe: Don’t be boring.
Say something. Make a point. Provoke thought.
Our search is a search for insight, which means that one has to be willing to risk giving offense.
It also means a resistance to orthodoxies, ideologies and isms.
I never heard Mr. Craig articulate a second rule, but he epitomized the independent journalist. Writers and journalists must have no side, or tribe. In this age of team journalism, and almost total predictability in opinion writing, the opinion writer must have roots, but no permanent alliances. He should follow the evidence and his own reason to where both take him and be able to surprise himself.
My own roots are in Ohio and the values I learned from my father, mother and grandfather there — service, compassion, and work — and in Pittsburgh, where I learned to write and to think.
I earned two graduate degrees at University of Pittsburgh and taught at Washington & Jefferson, two places etched deep in my memory and heart. I have come back to this city, and to Pitt, often since I left in 1985, sometimes to visit with old friends or fellow students, sometimes to show the place to my kids. Pittsburgh has been my Mecca.
I had three mentors at Pitt — Richard Cottam, who shaped my ideas about nationalism and American foreign policy; William Keefe, who cemented my interest in American government, especially Congress and political parties; and John W. Chapman, who did not so much teach me political philosophy as teach me how to read and absorb it.
Professor Chapman’s graduate seminar was held as his home in Squirrel Hill, just above CMU and behind the Pittsburgh Golf Club. We walked there, rain or shine, through the two campuses and up the long hill. The seminar was two to three hours long, once a week, andwe broke half way through for sherry. Everyone wrote a paper, every week, and presented it. Mr. Chapman said: “You don’t know what you think until you write.”
John Chapman was a magnificent man — insatiably curious, eccentric, rigorous, uncompromising, ever amazed and amused. When he became aware, on one occasion, that I had a difficulty in my life, his solution was to take me target shooting. He was a classic liberal who became one of the first neo-conservatives. He wrote his dissertation on Rousseau and was a colonel in military intelligence in the Air Force Reserve. He let me write my dissertation on Hannah Arendt, though he considered all forms of existentialism to be “madness.” To the extent that I am a writerand thinker, or an honest arbiter of ideas, it is due to him.
It is thanks to him that I later discovered the writers and thinkers who formed my mind — Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Michael Oakeshott, Russell Kirk, Isaiah Berlin and Walker Percy.
It was the opportunity to study with John Chapman that brought me to Pittsburgh many years ago and kept me in Greater Pittsburgh for roughly eight years. I lived in Shadyside, Squirrel Hill and Bloomfield, as well as “Little Washington” before my wife and I went south, then west, then east to raise our children.
More on words and ideas in the weeks and months to come; these offerings are to say “hello.”
Our search is a search for insight, which means that one has to be willing to risk giving offense. It also means a resistance to orthodoxies ...