I grew up in Macon, Mo., a community of 5,300 people where U.S. 36 and U.S. 63 intersect in the north-central portion of the state. It was quintessential small-town America, where everybody knew everybody, and three major employers – McGraw-Edison, Stampers (later Banquet Foods) and Peabody Coal Co. – offered steady, reliable, career-long income.
My dad worked for McGraw-Edison until I was in college, when my parents first relocated to Sedalia, Mo., and then to Hurst, Texas. When I would tag along with my dad as a youngster, people working in the plant called me “Little Charlie” because I was, as they say, his spitting image.
Once both my younger sister and I were in school, mom took a job as a teacher’s aide in the elementary school. She was the aide to Mrs. Craig in my sixth-grade classroom, which certainly limited the opportunities for mischief.
I loved to read even as a 7-year-old, a trait apparently passed down from an aunt, Betty Crim, a professor at the School of Nursing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. It seemed during visits that she was always curled up with a book.
Once I entered kindergarten, my parents say I used to sit down with the local afternoon newspaper, The Macon Chronicle-Herald, and pick out the words I knew. Who knew then that newspapers would become a dominant part of my life?
Sports was another love, particularly baseball. Most summer days were spent imitating Major League players during backyard games with Greg Aurig, a next-door neighbor and childhood friend.
We bought packs of 10 baseball cards (along with the enclosed gum) for a dime in search of our favorite players. We swapped some, and the extra Russ Snyder cards – there seemed to be one of the Indians’ outfielder in every pack – would end up in the spokes of our bicycle tires.
Summer nights were spent at the youth baseball fields behind the school, either playing or chasing down foul balls and returning them for a nickel, money that usually was spent at the concession stand.
Playing for the Macon-Atlanta State Bank Tigers, we won the Midget League championship when I was 10. Stan Niederhauser and I combined for a no-hitter that season.
When we captured the title by winning the final game of the season (I can still visualize coming off the mound to field a squibber up the first base line and flipping it to first baseman Kemper Walker for the final out), Don Niederhauser, our coach and Stan’s dad, took the entire team to Dutch’s Frostop as a treat.
Eventually, I was given the job of keeping score at one of the two baseball fields on the nights I wasn’t playing. It paid $1.50 a game and there were two games a night, starting at 6:30 and usually ending around 9:30 or 10. If was my first experience of being in a press box.
Later, I was was given the opportunity to earn an extra $1 if I got the results from all games to The Chronicle-Herald by 8:30 the next morning. Between that and mowing yards, there was never a shortage of money for baseball cards, sports magazines, taffy and bubble gum.
The Chronicle-Herald was a small, family-owned newspaper. Frank Briggs was the owner and publisher. He succeeded Harry Truman in the U.S. Senate when Franklin Roosevelt tapped Truman as his running mate in a successful 1944 presidential re-election. Frank later wrote a daily column, “It Seems to B.”, that appeared on the left side of the front page.
His son, Tom Briggs, was the general manager, and Tom’s son, Jack, was the editor. Jack was who I reported to each morning with my baseball scorebooks and details from the games. There was something about the newspaper office, with people scurrying about and the teletype machines clicking away, that I found fascinating.
About the time I was in junior high, my second cousin, Tom Sneed, began covering Macon High School football and basketball for The Chronicle-Herald. It was a part-time gig in addition to his full-time job.
Tommy Joe, as the family called him, was 13 years older than me, a huge sports fan and someone I loved to hang out with. He let me tag along to football games and serve as a spotter.
To me, that was about the coolest non-paying job in the world. By then I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter when I grew up – that is, if my first choice, being the next Bob Gibson, didn’t pan out. (Spoiler alert: It was a good thing I had a backup plan to playing Major League Baseball.)
I played football from seventh through ninth grades. We only lost two games combined those three seasons and were undefeated as freshman. We all earned letters and a trophy for that achievement. But I knew there were not going to be many opportunities for a 4-foot-10, 97-pounder at the next level. Besides, baseball was my sport and there was no reason to risk injury that might derail that.
When I was about to enter my junior year, Jack Briggs approached me. Tommy Joe was no longer covering football. He wanted to know if I be interested in taking over. Interested? I couldn’t say “yes” fast enough, even though the job offer came with no pay, other than a gas stipend for away games.
I covered Macon football my last two years in high school. In retrospect, I didn’t know what I didn’t know about being a reporter. But I would race home after each game, sit down at the kitchen table and write a story – usually in chronological order without quotes – on the electric typewriter my parents had given me for my 16th birthday. And I would deliver the typewritten pages to The Chronicle-Herald office by 8:30 the next morning.
Talk about Big Man on Campus. Not only was I getting in games for free, sitting in the press box at home games and roaming the sidelines at away games, I was getting my byline in the local newspaper every Saturday afternoon.
I was on the school newspaper staff as a junior and was named editor as a senior. I knew I wanted to go to the oldest and most prestigious journalism school in the world at the University of Missouri. But the university had about 25,000 students at the time – or five times the population of my hometown. The thought of being in classes with 200 other students gave me pause.
Since the first two years would be general classwork before petitioning for acceptance in the Journalism School as a junior, I decided to attend Hannibal-LaGrange College, then a two-year school that offered a Dean’s scholarship and the opportunity to play baseball.
HLG was a small, private school with a lot of rules – some of which I may have skirted. My saving grace was I was a good student, my parents’ checks always cleared the bank and, about midway through the second semester, I started dating a daughter of the president of the Board of Trustees. Peggy Kenison later became my wife.
I entered Journalism School in August 1977, three years after Richard Nixon became the first president to resign from office. Everybody, it seemed, wanted to go to J-School to become the next Woodward or Bernstein of Washington Post and “All the President’s Men” fame. I wanted to become the next Dick Young or Bob Broeg or any of the other legendary sportswriters I grew up reading in The Sporting News.
It was at MU that I began to learn some of the things about reporting and writing that I didn’t know. The two years I spent writing and editing for the Columbia Missourian, the local morning newspaper produced six days a week by journalism students under the tutelage of veteran newspapermen determined to prepare us for the real world, was priceless.
In the months leading up to graduation in May 1979, representatives of newspapers from across the country came to interview students for job openings. I had a couple of solid offers – one from The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, and The Herald-Whig in Quincy, Ill. I could have stayed at MU, gone to graduate school and served as a teaching assistant in J-School, but I was tired of being a student.
I was familiar with Quincy. We had two television stations growing up in Macon – WGEM and KHQA – and I knew about Quincy High basketball and most of the schools on the Missouri side of its sports coverage area. And I had spent several dozen nights at the Forum Show Palace in downtown Quincy at the height of the disco craze during my HLG days. Not to mention the starting salary was $180 a week, $20 above the national average for entry-level reporters.
I planned to spend a couple of years at The Herald-Whig and move on. Only I never left until I retired in 2018. Quincy-area sports, high school and college, in the 1980s and 1990s were fun to cover. Plus, I had the opportunity to step into the national stage from time to time to cover the World Series, the Masters, and major college football and basketball. The best of both worlds.
The Herald-Whig was another family-owned newspaper that was committed to covering the communities it served, and sports was a major focus. Moreover, Peggy and I started a family of our own and liked the idea of raising our three kids in Quincy. I flirted with some other job opportunities at bigger papers, but either turned them down or finished as the second choice.
I was promoted to sports editor in 1986 and spent 10 years in that job. I was perfectly content with what was a great job with a high profile in Quincy. Then, in the summer of 1996, Joe Conover, The Herald-Whig’s editor, approached me about filling an opening as news editor.
Joe saw me as someone who had many interests beyond sports. I could talk politics, history and U.S. presidents as easily as the impact of the designated hitter rule. He saw me as a solid writer and editor, and thought I could transfer the sports staff’s energy to the news staff. And, he said, if I wanted to move up the ladder with the company, this would be a good move.
I saw it as a challenge, since many considered sports the toy department, and accepted. For the first time in nearly two decades, I worked regular hours that included nights and weekends off.
I remember the first Friday on the job, I went home in time for dinner, ate, fidgeted for a while and finally asked Peggy and the kids, “So what do you guys do on Friday nights?” I was accustomed to being at a sporting event somewhere and had no clue. Saturday was no different. It took a few months to acclimate to the new life.
Mike Hilfrink became executive editor when Joe retired in 2001, and I moved up to replace Mike as managing editor. I then replaced Mike as executive editor when he retired. In addition to overseeing the daily news operation of an award-winning staff, I was a member of the editorial board for 17 years.
In that role, I helped shape the newspaper’s position on a variety of issues. That often meant sitting face-to-face with federal, state and local elected officials, discussing why this pending bill or resolution would either be good or bad for West-Central Illinois or Northeast Missouri, and making the case to our readers through our editorial pages.
The Herald-Whig was blessed to have many talented reporters, editors and photographers over the years. Many used their experiences in Quincy as a springboard to bigger newspapers; others, like me, chose to stay because The Herald-Whig annually was judged to be among the best in Illinois.
I made the difficult decision to retire in early 2018, in large part to spend more time with family, which had grown to include seven grandchildren.
Peggy had retired the previous fall after being elected Quincy city treasurer five times, and she seemed to enjoy no longer having to shoulder the stress of that job, which included going before voters every four years to keep it.
The decision has proven to be a good one. The Herald-Whig no longer was immune to the advertising and circulation declines that had affected newspapers across the country for more than three decades. Positions have been eliminated, page counts trimmed and budgets reduced.
Then, three years after I left, the Oakley and Lindsay families that had operated the newspaper for nearly 100 years, sold it to a small media company headquartered in Arkansas, resulting in more jobs and coverage being lost.
The Macon Chronicle-Herald suffered a similar fate.
The Briggs family sold its interest in 1973, although Jack Briggs continued as editor for several more years. In fact, he called in the early 1980s to see if I would be interested in the sports editor job there. He couldn’t match my salary at the time in Quincy, so the conversation didn’t advance. However, we remain in touch today.
The Chronicle-Herald had a series of owners until it was sold by Gatehouse Media in 2014 and shuttered by its new owner, which operated a competing weekly, ending 104 years of publishing.
In November 2019, in an effort to stay active, I took a job as a paraeducator at a Quincy elementary school.
I work one-on-one with a student in a regular classroom. It’s seven hours a day, 181 days a year – a schedule considerably less rigorous than that of a newspaper editor. No nights, no weekends and no summers, leaving plenty of time for golf and grandkids.
It has been both challenging and rewarding. And I get recess twice a day.