Mr. Fain’s Maroon Upholstered Chair

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Note: I was asked to recount my memories of Victor B. Fain, long-time editor and publisher of The Daily Sentinel in Nacogdoches. Mr. Fain was inducted into the Texas Press Association Hall of Fame at the mid-winter conference going on this weekend in Galveston. So I decided to expand those remarks into today’s offering.

I was working as a dogcatcher for the City of Nacogdoches in 1977 during my final semester at Stephen F. Austin State University, a depressing job I was desperate to escape when I spied the ad in the Sentinel’s classified pages: Part-time position as lithographer at The Daily Sentinel. Hours: 7 a.m. to noon. Some weekend work. I didn’t really know what a lithographer did, but I had worked in high school as a photographer for the Longview paper. How hard could it be? I called my dad, who had once worked in a silk screen printing shop. He explained what the job entailed: shooting page negatives, stripping in halftones, burning plates for the press.

I scurried down, applied and was hired. Apparently everyone else who applied knew even less about being a lithographer than I did. I was hired by Lee Wayne Cooper and introduced to Mr. Fain. The Sentinel office was downtown then, and the paper came out right after lunch. So we started early. Every morning, Mr. Fain stopped at Shepherd’s Restaurant across the street and had the same breakfast brought to him. Often, the three of us in the lithography department would take a break and eat breakfast there as well.

I recall walking by one day as he and Daddy Bear Weaver — the production manager who immediately dubbed me “Hippie” for my long, bushy hair — were finishing up pasting up pages on the slanted layout tables. I spied a headline that didn’t look right: It had the word “plague” in it, only it said “plaque” instead. I pointed it out, hesitantly, to Mr. Fain. He took the cigar out of his mouth — nearly everyone smoked back then — and said thanks.

After several months, I became the newspaper’s first full-time photographer, and not long after we moved into the “new” building on Colonial Drive. It’s hard to believe that was 40 years ago this spring. I would arrive at 6 a.m. and listen to Horace McQueen on the radio while I processed film and made prints. By 8 or so, I would take a stack of prints for Mr. Fain to thumb through and pick the ones to be published. He had a large office with a fine walnut desk and credenza, and a plush maroon upholstered chair. On the wall behind the desk hung a painting of a rolled-up copy of The Daily Sentinel, not terribly well done but emblematic.

I decided during that stint working for Mr. Fain, who was soft-spoken and unfailingly kind to his employees, that someday I wanted to sit in that office, with its large desk and maroon upholstered chair. I wanted to be publisher of The Daily Sentinel.

Nearly a dozen years passed — graduate school in journalism, first at Missouri, then at the University of Texas; five years running The Rambler in San Augustine; a year teaching at Kilgore College; another year in exile publishing the Fort Stockton Pioneer, after which out of desperation I called Joe Murray, publisher of the Lufkin Daily News and told him I would take anything to get back to East Texas. I went to work the summer of 1989 as editorial page editor there. The paper’s owner, Cox Newspapers, had bought The Daily Sentinel the previous year. A year later, I became managing editor of The Daily Sentinel, working for the finest editor I have ever known — Glenn McCutchen.

In 1993, Glenn was transferred to Lufkin, and I applied to be editor and publisher of The Daily Sentinel. I flew early to Atlanta from Shreveport, was interviewed, offered the job, and got back on the plane to Shreveport, arriving late. I drove straight to The Sentinel office and sat in that maroon upholstered chair. My dream had been realized.

Mr. Fain now occupied an office on the other side of the building. He asked me not long after I became publisher if he needed to move out.

“Mr. Fain,” I said, “You have an office here as long as you want it.”

He told me to call him Vic, but I never could. He was always Mr. Fain to me. And he occupied that office the rest of his life.

When I moved to Lufkin, the new publisher wanted a new chair, since her feet couldn’t touch the floor. I asked if I could have the maroon upholstered chair. I kept it for another 10 years or so, finally letting it go during another move.

It has been a great run. It all started with Mr. Fain and that chair.

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