A Few Benign Ghosts of a Newsroom Now Past

ARN Editor Dick Tarpley and seasonal help at the city desk

Merry Christmas Eve! While I seldom reminisce anymore about my days at the Abilene Reporter-News, I'm bowing to ghosts of Christmas past to conjure up a few newsroom spirits from long-ago times. Because of the length, I’m posting separately here not only a few newsroom memories but my thanks to longtime ARN colleague Roy Jones for his overly generous words about my quarter-century tenure at the Abilene Reporter-News — a period of such benefit, joy and edification that I cite Abilene, Texas, as my hometown even now. (Yes, I really do. Notwithstanding my early Yankee years, I remain a proud Dallas native, born at Baylor Hospital at the height of a seven-year drought that humbled much of Texas.)

I appreciate Roy’s “mentor-to-all” credit given me, even if it’s exaggerated to the extreme — a reflection no doubt of his Christian generosity and thoughtfulness as well as his understandable pride in his colleagues' work. Roy also kindly reposted for wider distribution my earlier Facebook post ruminating and rhapsodizing on the razing of the ARN building at North First (or Second) and Cypress just before Thanksgiving 2022. Regarding Roy’s accolades: While it’s true I assumed a number of diverse posts and interesting assignments in the Abilene newsroom, I regard myself as no more than a footnote character amidst so many more considerable talents, including Jim Conley, Bob Bruce, Al Pickett, Richard Horn, Warren Weber and Roy himself.

In an affectionate farewell column upon leaving the Abilene Reporter-News for the Waco Tribune-Herald in spring 2002, I reflected not on what I’d done in the newsroom and for the community (if anything) but rather what I learned under editors-in-chief Ed Wishcamper, Dick Tarpley and Glenn Dromgoole. Had I been permitted more room, I would have cited advice, insights and talents I picked up from fellow reporters, city editors, copy editors and photographers. The quality of journalists Tarpley (and others) hired was phenomenal, even as we young Turks sometimes questioned and even ridiculed his abilities and judgment, as all upstart reporters do with graying superiors and sage presences. Yet Dick’s insights into character, integrity and potential in terms of ARN personnel colored the newspaper long after his tenure as editor ended in late 1985. His contributions thus informed, alerted and entertained the paper’s then-significant readership across rugged, spread-out, always-hard-to-pigeonhole West Texas.

I remember three insights from Dick, perhaps not uniquely profound now but surely meaningful at the time: First, in reference to an ARN alumnus of enormous literary repute, Dick's caution that any story too good to be true probably was; second, regarding a young newsroom upstart in the early 1980s, that reporters should be better listeners than talkers, lest they drown out sources, stories and relevant details; third, Dick’s praise for my newspaper columns in the 1990s after I commented, during our last conversation upon my leaving Abilene, that my work as a daily newspaper columnist was a mere patch on the immensely popular columns of the great ARN Page One columnist Katharyn Duff, who reigned in that post for 18 years: Tarpley, by then retired but writing an excellent Sunday news column of his own for the ARN, pointedly disagreed, insisting my out-and-about Texana columns (started at the request of then-Editor Glenn Dromgoole) eclipsed Katharyn’s in that each had a beginning, middle and end and conformed to classic storytelling form and journalistic tradition. True? It no longer matters. Perhaps it's relevant to note that no less than Katharyn, a week after I began writing the Page One column in spring 1989, very charitably complimented my efforts in an endeavor I always viewed as a tribute to her own work — and then gently encouraged me to find my own style as a columnist rather than imagining hers as the only proper course. And, whatever else, I certainly never replaced Katharyn in the hearts and minds of West Texas readers, probably because of an easygoing, conversational style far more engaging than mine — the sort that conjured up Katharyn and her friends lunching and laughing and tale-spinning at Mack Eplen's Cafeteria just down Cypress Street.

Roy Jones, Jim Conley discuss culture

Of those other employees Dick Tarpley tapped and shepherded and helped advise in careers remarkable if not always appropriately heralded: I marveled at the glowing empathy my friend Jim Conley demonstrated that so ensured an authentic richness of perspective and humanity in effortlessly written prose, whether regarding a disreputable scalawag like West Texas flim-flam man Billie Sol Estes or a richly multi-layered, charismatic character such as globetrotting anti-communist and former Texas politician Jack Cox, both better known to a dwindling generation of Texans from the JFK, LBJ and John Connally era. (Jack, a Republican and a friend who lost his uphill gubernatorial battle with Connally in 1962, once told me that JFK never would have been assassinated in Dallas in 1963 had Jack won in 1962 because Jack sure never would have invited him to Texas.) I was in awe of the completeness and telling nuance in storytelling and the close and important knowledge of the law that so blessed Roy Jones’ much-cherished, highly readable courthouse reporting. I well remember, too, the vast carbon copies and printouts of past stories Roy kept nearby, always accessible if needed. I also recall the courtroom whimsy Roy shrewdly used to enliven his coverage, such as what a cattle feedlot owner said about the odor — that it smelled like money! Bob Bruce, by contrast, set the example for tidy conciseness and promptness, skills I never fully mastered unless lashed to the wheel of the ship. At deadline many of us in the newsroom — harried by city editor Gary Morton's understandably hollering "I need your story NOW! Just give me what you have!” — would glance over and see Bob, his duties for the afternoon edition finished and by then occupied with cleaning his fingernails before moving on to other matters.

Al Pickett and his sports crew young and old astounded me with their razor-sharp accuracy and eloquence on demand, accomplished under unbelievable deadline pressure — something I quizzed Al about during our lonely, post-midnight drive back to West Texas after jointly covering a big high-school playoff game in the biting cold in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. (I was doing last-minute color for the paper that night.) I could write fast but never with such ballsy confidence and finesse as the ARN sportswriters. From the ARN city desk, too, I watched Warren Weber offer passing pearls of wisdom about better writing on the fly (likely borrowed from his well-stocked home library of Hemingway, whose lean style shaped more than one generation of American journalists). More importantly, he calmly counseled reporters skeptical about particular assignments on just how much better and more rewarding their labors might be if they earnestly invested themselves in the task — advice I tried (however successfully) to emulate during my own subsequent tours of duty as a city editor in Abilene and Waco — duties, incidentally, for which I had almost no training except for the sterling examples provided by Warren and other long-suffering city editors at the ARN.

Bill and Richard gauge wine, the news

And there was ever-modest, witty, thoughtful, intellectually curious Richard Horn, who evenwhen consigned to rigorous desk duties such as his all-too-brief tenure as ARN opinion editor was constantly fleeing the newsroom to attend town-hall and city council meetings to enrich his newspaper editorials and columns. When I abandoned the ARN city desk to personally pursue the endangered Concho water snake with herpetologist Okla Thornton one day in summer 1986, my intrepid companion was none other than Richard who, like me, couldn’t resist an outing that one ARN reporter had already quit over. Our efforts along the picturesque Concho River and our subsequent coverage inspired further research that found the harmless little water snake wasn’t as endangered or threatened as originally thought, ultimately clearing the way for Ivie Reservoir (or, as some of us oldtimers like to say, Stacy Dam, out of respect for the small community obliterated by reservoir waters in parched West Texas). How I miss those early evenings Richard and I gathered at Cypress Street Station, right across the street from the ARN, where we toasted the day's hard-won victories and lessons with a glass of wine and we dissected news of the day and intrigue of the newsroom. We were such regular and animated sights at the bar that Cypress Street Station proprietor Brian Green proposed framed artwork of us sitting in the bar, which out of modesty we vigorously discouraged.

I was awestruck at so many of my colleagues, including ARN photographers David Kent, Gerald Ewing, John Best and Don Blakley, who in the darkroom and on the scene taught me so much about picture composition and urgent, up-close-and-personal photography, the sort that constitutes craft but very often rivals art. Such is daily journalism, warts and all.

Even in retirement, some of us toil in journalism. At the bidding of pal and former boss Steve Boggs, I continue to write rigorously researched opinion columns and editorials (some actually invested with shoe leather and moxie) and edit the occasional columns of community colleagues on the Waco Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors as well as other columnists. (I thought ARN editors, in challenging years when shrinking corporate budgets threatened to strangle newsroom capabilities, were shrewdly resourceful in tapping experienced ARN exes for specific assignments and part-time duties including seasoned, all-knowing veterans Larry Zelisko, Scott Kirk and Jerry Reed.) Warren and Josie Weber, standout veterans in the newspaper profession, tutor budding journalists at Pima Community College in Tucson. Many former colleagues, while retired or now engaged in other honorable professions, so far as I know continue to champion this honorable and increasingly misunderstood profession, even as family members and friends and neighbors sometimes echo rhetoric of our being "the enemy of the people,” often voiced from perspectives of willful ignorance hard to imagine being so prevalent just a few decades ago. Other colleagues including Dick Tarpley, Bob Bruce, Katharyn Duff, Gerald Ewing, Don Blakley and Gary Morton are no longer around to hear such blasphemy.

To newspaper supporter and retired nonprofit leader Doug Worthington’s fun questions to Roy and others in Roy's Facebook reposting of my earlier thoughts on the razing of the ARN building, the array of collectible beer bottles in my newsroom office of some 15 years could survive only so many moves later on and have now joined their more common cousins in the landfill. And Roy was right. I didn’t drink from most of them but collected them from well-traveled colleagues (such as Roy from his military travels). And my newspaper dispatches from a riotous river canoe trip came as I traversed the Texas Colorado, not the Brazos. Some “amateur writer” of dubious repute wrote of a canoe trip down the Brazos — and, yes, his reflections gained some repute. (OK, I'm joking — John Graves' "Goodbye to a River" remains an absolutely stellar piece of writing, required reading for anyone interested in Texas literature.)

As for another question that arose among ARN exes about favorite parts of the building now razed and gone, I claim rich memories from just about every nook and cranny of the second-floor newsroom, though perhaps most especially the long, darkly lit, carpeted corridor behind the newsroom whose windows showcased, in all its magnificence, the mighty ARN printing press — like the work of so many of us once at the Abilene Reporter-News and other newsrooms across America, now consigned to history.