Recalling My Years at 4920 Colonial Dr.

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I learned from a former reporter’s Facebook post that the Daily Sentinel, the Nacogdoches newspaper where I spent more than 15 years of my career, is moving, presumably to a smaller building. The building at 4920 Colonial Drive is more than twice as large as what is needed these days.

Emily Taravella’s well-written (as always) post said that past employees were invited to come take mementoes that would not make the move — plaques from the wall of honor being one example. (The wall of honor is what we called the journalism award plaques hung just outside the publisher’s office.) Emily literally made the trip down memory lane and brought back some memories. If you are FB friends with her and missed the post, go take a look.

Her post sent me down memory lane as well. I started at the Daily Sentinel in 1977, when it was still downtown. I was working as an animal control officer while finishing up at Stephen F. Austin State University, a job I was eager to escape. The Sentinel had an opening for a part-time lithographer. I had worked in high school first as a paperboy, next in the mailroom stuffing circulars into newspapers, then became a part-time photographer and darkroom jockey. That meant I spent most of my hours either in the darkroom or making the Fairchild engravings of photographs. About once a week I was sent out on an assignment when one of the “real” photographers was not available.

I called my dad and asked him what a lithographer did. As a commercial artist who once worked in a commercial silk-screen shop, he explained that a lithographer shot full-page negatives of the pasted-up newspaper pages, shot halftones of the photographs, and burned the plates that went on the offset press. I marched down to the office and announced I was fully qualified to be a lithographer. Apparently, there was little competition for a part-time gig that paid poorly, and I was hired, working alongside Lee Wayne Cooper and Bobby Skillern. They quickly figured out I had no clue what to do but kindly taught me. It was not exactly difficult to pick up.

The following year, we moved into the new building on the north side of town, at the foot of Colonial Hills, then a fairly new subdivision. At first, it looked as if the building was in the middle of a cow pasture, because technically it was. But the city began to grow northward with the extension of University Drive to the loop.

By the time we moved into the new building, I was the paper’s full-time photographer, having graduated from SFA in December 1977. Each morning, I got there at 6 to develop the previous day’s film and make prints for the then-afternoon paper, which hit the presses about 11 a.m. I would take the prints to Vic Fain (known to all of us as Mr. Fain), the longtime editor/publisher, and he would choose which photos were going to that day’s issue. I would take the winners to the production manager, Weaver Blacksher, aka “Daddy Bear,” who had immediately dubbed me “Hippie” because of my long hair and beard. He meant it in a newsroom banter manner, which is how I took it.

Mr. Fain sat in a large upholstered, maroon chair. As I worked there another year, then went off to graduate school, in the back of my mind was this thought: Someday I want to sit in that chair. I want to be the editor/publisher of the Daily Sentinel.

Improbably, that dream came true. I will not bore readers with too many details, but in 1990 — 11 years after I left for graduate school — I became the paper’s managing editor. Three years later, Glenn McCutchen (who had hired me and remains a close friend today) went to Lufkin in the same role. I became the Daily Sentinel’s editor/publisher. Mr. Fain’s chair was still in that office. The night I got back from Atlanta from the job interview, before going home I went to the office and sat in Mr. Fain’s chair, which would be mine for the next decade. I drank a beer in celebration.

During that decade, I worked with some fine young journalists and some not-so-young. The photo that accompanies this piece was taken in 2003, the year the Shuttle Columbia exploded over the skies of East Texas — both the biggest and most tragic story that any of us ever covered. It consumed our lives for a few weeks. I was proud of those folks then and now.

Thanks for the memories, Emily.

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