Fifty years ago this week, I tiptoed into the news cave of the Daily News-Democrat in Festus for my first day as a professional journalist, fresh from Mizzou’s School of Journalism, from which I’d graduated on the four-and-a-half-year plan, having encountered a few academic difficulties along the way.
I’d been hired by Harold “Doc” Wright, owner and publisher, to become the first full-time sportswriter in the paper’s history. Doc is no longer with us – the five-day Daily News-Democrat isn’t, either. Even its building, at Main and Mill streets, burned down a decade or two ago. The lot is now a pocket park.
Doc took me around that cold afternoon to meet some local hoops coaches – Ralph Boyer at St. Pius X, Burr Sims at Festus, Arvel Popp at Crystal City, Bill Stotler at Herculaneum, Gene Steighorst at Hillsboro.
They were friendly and seemed glad that Doc had finally sprung for a sportswriter to give their teams a little recognition.
Back at the paper, I got to work beside longtime editor Sam Schapiro, a pipe-chewing WWII vet whose landfill of a desk hadn’t been cleared since he sat down there in 1950, the year I was born. He was the classic, rumpled newspaperman.
Sam had a wonderful sense of humor, could do a creditable Groucho Marx imitation and was a stickler for details large and small, as all good editors are. He wanted the story fast, he wanted it right and he wanted it complete. If he had to ask a reporter to call back six times to get it all, he would.
His pipe smoke made the windowless bunker that was the newsroom look like a perpetual fog machine, while Doc’s cigars took down visibility in the front of the building.
(Twenty years later, when we opened the Leader, that gasping-for-air experience cemented the decision to make the building smoke-free before most public places were.)
Helen Uding was the News-Democrat’s obituary writer. The only way to get the obits then was to call each funeral home and take down the information over the phone. This was tedious, time-consuming and had to be done with care.
Sam was relatively patient with Helen, who was many years his senior, even though a deadline was looming. But he’d lose it when he caught her – before she’d written a word – calling one (or all) of her sisters to tell them who’d died.
“Helen,” he’d bellow, “maybe our readers would like to know, too – today.”
Our sole outside reporter, Jack Lovelace, was a Festus native who’d graduated a few years ahead of me at Mizzou. We worked together for three years, then competed against one another for a decade or so before rejoining forces when the News-Democrat was sold for the last time in the mid-1980s. We’re still friends today.
Jack’s mom, Nettie, lived a couple of blocks from the paper and would fix us hot dogs for lunch at least once a week, knowing they were more filling than the peanuts Doc paid us with.
Eventually, I figured out that the best way to escape that situation was to start our own peanut factory. After a decade-and-a-half with the old Suburban Journals post-Doc, I got the opportunity when a chance meeting with advertising saleswoman extraordinaire Glenda Potts turned into a kitchen table plot to start our own newspaper.
When Pam LaPlant, a rosy-cheeked 16-year-old stuffing papers in the circulation department back in 1973, bravely chucked her high-up front office job at the Journals to join the pirate ship, and we snagged sports maven Warren Hayes and editor Peggy Bess, the Leader was ready to roll in 1994.
The start-up was exhilarating and exhausting for the first few years. We worked together, ate bad food at our desks together, mourned parental passings together and built a company together.
Over time, we grew from a staff of five to more than 20, from one newspaper to four, added a website and got into the 21st century only eight or 10 years late. After a mere 14 years of head-to-head competition, our former employer, the Journals, went belly-up in 2008.
I retired in 2017, Peggy in 2020 (a little prematurely), to help the paper save expenses when the pandemic hit, as did her husband, Gordon, who took over sports after Warren died of cancer in 2010. Both Besses still work part-time. Glenda and Pam retired last year, the last founders out the door. Publisher Peggy Scott, a pirate at heart, now steers the ship.
One recollection of the early, pre-Leader days seems a little more significant now than it did at the time. Sam Schapiro’s father, Maurice, moved to Festus in the late 1970s to spend his golden years with his son and his family. Maurice, nearly 90, was a newspaper man from the first quarter of the 20th century who had done it all. I was a 27-year-old greenhorn who’d just moved into news and been given his first newsroom at the old Courier Journal (at 123 Main St. in Festus; there’s a clock shop there now).Â
Maurice would come hang out at my paper (which competed with his son’s paper across town) and ask if there were any freelance assignments available. Once in a while, he would turn in a piece. He had great stories about things he’d covered as a young reporter in Ohio, including the Youngstown flood in 1913.
I hope I listened intently and respectfully, having come to realize that, sooner or later, if we’re lucky, we all become Maurice.
