Photo uwyo.edu
George Gladney has gone west.
You won’t know the name, unless you worked with him or read him at the Los Angeles Times, the Colorado Springs Sun, the Gazette Telegraph, The Denver Post, or the Jackson Hole News, or studied under him at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.
But George stands tall in my personal history. He was one of the people who showed me by word and deed that there was a place in the newspaper game even for those of us who were a bubble or two off plumb.
When I got hired as a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun I was at loose ends following a brief tour of the dead-end gigs available to a dropout from a third-rate college. George was the police reporter, as I recall, and came to the Sun from the L.A. paper.
Back in 1974 the newsroom was stiff with talent, the best possible haven for a wannabe cartoonist shambling out of his teens into nowhere special if he didn’t pull his hairy head out of his hippie arse.
Bill Woestendiek and his wife, Kay, ran the outfit, sister paper to the Las Vegas Sun in Sin City. Carl Miller, who would move on to helm The Denver Post, was city editor. Bill Buzenberg, who would rise to veep of news at National Public Radio, was his assistant and an investigative reporter.
Bill McBean, another reporter, would abandon his typewriter for a paper route, claiming afterward that he made more money from delivering the Sun than he ever did writing for it. That didn’t last; he eventually got back on the scribbler’s horse in Denver, at the Post.
I was an actual scribbler; a cartoonist, or so I thought. But an adviser at Adams State College had told me just how few full-time, paid editorial cartoonists there were in the country and suggested that I cast a wider loop, maybe consider taking a reporter’s job as my entrée, a foot in the door.
Well, there I was, with both feet in and my dumb ass for company. Not a reporter; just a copy boy. And I didn’t even have the chops for that. When Carl handed me a stack of press releases to rewrite I told him I didn’t know how to type.
“Better learn,” he replied. And I did, whenever I wasn’t stripping and sorting copy from the wire-service teletypes, running copy and art to and from composing and engraving, and doing other scutwork so real journalists didn’t have to.
I learned something from all these people, starting with typing, thanks to Carl, who also passed on some firm hints about how to write for newspapers. Bill Buzenberg let me tag along and watch him interview hookers for a piece on the massage parlors infesting Bibleburg. The Woestendieks let me sit in on the copy desk on slow nights, learning how to fit copy, size art, and write heds.
George and Bill McBean took me out for drinks, told me war stories, had me over to their houses for dinner, introduced me to their wives; I soaked up their experience like a bar rag and felt as though I had become part of a family.
When I left the Sun to go back to school, this time at the University of Northern Colorado, George told me he hoped I’d come back as a reporter. And I did. But not to the Sun — to the Gazette, the bigger of the two papers in town. Because George was there, this time on the city desk.
He helped me sneak in the back door as a contractor — a little glimpse of the future there, yeah? I compiled the annual industrial edition, drew a few cartoons, and even wrote a couple of stories before getting hired in early 1978 as a for-reals general-assignment reporter at $155 a week.
And that’s where the rubber met the road. As George’s obit notes, he was “a meticulous editor and dedicated teacher.” He was not above crumpling up your copy and tossing it back to you. (We were still working on typewriters in 1978, and other people in the newsroom could actually see it when an editor threw your copy back at you.)
After a few rounds of journalism badminton George would call me over and explain in detail, citing irrefutable examples, precisely why I was a toothless cog in the Gazette‘s well-oiled machinery. Sometimes he and his opposite number Joe Barber would tag-team me. This could be like getting tossed around the ring by Mad Dog and Butcher Vachon.
It was the school of hard knocks, for sure. But man, if you don’t get kayoed, you learn how to roll with the punches and throw a few of your own. As Carl had told me once at the Sun, “We can teach you more about newspapering in a year than you’ll learn in four at college.”
But Carl also insisted I go back to college. Once again, good advice at the precise moment it was needed. Because without that journalism degree I would not have been able to stay and learn at the Sun, or follow George to the Gazette, where I learned even more, in the company of comrades from other schools, other papers.
Sadly, I suspect Carl’s advice is no longer relevant. Back in the early Seventies, at the minor-metro papers that hired me, editors like Carl and George could spend some time breaking in the noobs. An assistant city editor would call you over to demand an act of contrition for some sin of commission or omission. A copy editor might have some thoughts about condensation and clarification. A typesetter could catch an error that had eluded everyone else and that observation would find its way back to you like a bad check.
If the error slipped past the typesetter, the page proofer, and the press check, and actually made it into print, the managing editor might want a word. This would be truly educational. Envision a very angry principal, swinging a larger “board of education.”
Even George made a few mistakes, and like good students we did too. (Actually, we did not require coaching in making these kinds of mistakes, but we were finally getting paid, and could afford to make bigger and better ones.)
This was why the list of phone numbers taped to a drawer at the city desk listed as many taverns, titty bars, alehouses, grog shops, gin mills, cantinas, and buckets o’ blood as it did home numbers. In extreme cases some expenditure of shoe leather was required, but by then we were seasoned reporters, kinda, sorta, and dogged in the pursuit of The Story, or whoever was supposed to write or edit it.
After a few years we all moved on to other opportunities, because in the newspaper game this is how you get a raise or a better job, or at least a different one. If you’re inclined to keep making some of the old mistakes or maybe acquire a few new ones, it’s also how you get a fresh nest to shit in.
George eventually left the newsroom entirely and settled down in academia, where he could continue gently and relentlessly squeezing the dumbass out of young eejits afflicted with delusions of grandeur.
One of his students recalls: “I learned so much from that man that I still find myself quoting him and referring to him as someone who influenced my life in important and meaningful ways.”
Me too. And you as well. You probably never read George Gladney, or worked with him, or studied under him. But if you’re reading this, you are under his influence.
Because it was George who told me back in 1974 that I should start keeping a journal. And that’s just another word for “blog.”
Mad Blog Media 
You started at $155/week at the GT??! Sheee-it. I got $140, and came after you. They’re probably down to a penny a word by now, considering that history.
George was a helluva lot of fun, and he taught without preaching. I think of the time I came back from the scene of a freight-train-vs-car full of teens, one of whom had been separated from his or her head, which ended up in the middle of the road, upright, as if buried to the neck in asphalt. GG edited my story, then came over and suggested something along the lines of “Take care of yourself. These things have a way of sticking to you for a while.”
Boy was he right about that.
Remember, I’d already slipped in through the window George left open, so they had to give me a leetle bumpski when they fucked up and hired me full time. According to my journal that $155 a week was “about half again as much as I had been making working on the industrial edition.”
And it beat the shit out of the $65 a week I had been getting at the Sun.
I remember that head story. Jaysis H., etc. And the time that kid dropped his newspaper bag on the sidewalk with an unexploded Fort Cartoon mortar round in it. It sure exploded then, Bubba. Didn’t take much of a tarp to cover what was left of him. I decided I did not care to cover the cops after that one.
Whaddaya think M-dogg was getting? He came after both of us, and from California, too, where Abraham Lincoln Hoiles had freed the slaves. As I recall he was not properly appreciative of the traditional $15 holiday bonus with the tax taken out.
A very fine tribute to a wise mentor. I hope that you had a chance to cross paths with George over the years.
“You went to working doing what? Bicycles? Who the hell gives a sheet about bicycles?”.
I wish I could say that our paths crossed again, but it never happened. I don’t know if it’s genetic or acquired behavior, but moving around like a hobo on amphetamines ever since I was hatched I became accustomed to losing track of people (“You’ll make new friends,” they said.).
I do keep in touch with a few folks from the glory days, though.
Chris Coursey (see the first comment on this post) is the journalism bro I’ve known the longest. We went to UNC together (and were roommates a time or two), and as he mentions we worked together as reporters at the Gazette in the late Seventies.
Mike Geniella is the runner-up. I met him when I joined the Gazette; I think he was the features editor, a sort of sub-honcho, and like George he’d been around the block a time or two and wasn’t shy about providing a few tips of the trade.
After I left for The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson, Mike and Chris both split for The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., where they settled in like ticks on a fat hound. I took advantage of their hospitality an obscene number of times when I was out of work for various perfectly indefensible reasons and trying to sucker some California newspaper editor into hiring me despite my track record of ignorance, indolence, and insolence.
During one extended period of joblessness I was shuttling back and forth between the Coursey and Geniella households; whenever my welcome wore out at one spot, I’d relocate to the other. Like a roach, I proved impossible to eradicate. Only an offer of employment could dislodge me.*
Third on the podium is Merrill Oliver, who may hold the record for Most Daily Newspapers Worked For (U.S. Division). He was the last of our little quartet to join the Gazette staff, as a photographer, and ever since he has been changing newspapers faster than a clean freak with a diarrhetic puppy. At one point we were both in the Pacific Northwest — Your Humble Narrator at the Corvallis Gazette-Times in Oregon, Merrill at the Tri-City Herald in Washington state — and we got together now and then in Corvallis, the Tri-Cities, or Seattle.
We all stay in contact by text, email, and phone, and gather in corpus from time to time, although the times are fewer and farther apart lately. Mike keeps pushing for a big reunion and maybe one day it’ll finally happen.
*Despite applying to nearly every paper in California and getting interviews and tryouts at more than a few of them, I didn’t get a single, solitary job offer until after I landed what would be my final newspaper gig, at The New Mexican in Santa Fe. The last Cali’ outfit to reject me got in touch to say they’d changed their minds and would I care to start immediately? No thank you, I replied; these folks pulled my fat out of the fire just as my unemployment was starting to run out, so I think I’ll stick around for a while. And I did.
O’G, we are peas in a pod, that was caught in a hurricane. I also suffered the peripatetic fate of a military brat, and ended up working in multiple states as a result.
This is a quite the homage to the man homage. We don’t get many mentors in life. Well done buddy!
Thanks, matey. The phrase is overused, but George really was one of a kind. The whole Sun newsroom went out of their way to try to make a silk purse out of this sow’s ear, for reasons known only to them, and I will be forever grateful. That I turned out to be a one-tube saddlebag on a beater bike is my doing, not theirs.
As for the Gazette … there are a million stories that could be told about that place, and nobody who wasn’t there would believe a word of any of ’em.
His student (Diane) got me thinking. It’s interesting the folks I end up quoting on repeat. There isn’t really a direct line to their competence, station in life, or what I thought about them all in all. Doing the Army thing for 24 years, you always have a boss who wants to mold your, or at least flatter himself by thinking he’s mentoring you. And sometimes they do in fact teach you a thing along the way. But remembering their actual words? Doesn’t seem to be a connection between the two.
As a wet-behind-the-ears butter bar Second Lieutenant, I had three battalion commanders. Can’t say one was better than the other two. But No 1 and No 3 are wispy grey memories, and I quote No 2 all of the time. (Listening to students tell me why they didn’t finish the project, I’ll say, “Those are all interesting excuses, and none of them apply.” Something I heard at a command-and-staff meeting every week for 18 months. Or when someone broke something in the motor pool trying to fix something else before beer-thirty on Friday: “There’s never time to do it right, and always time to do it over.”)
I lived with my dad for 18 years, and spent maybe 18 weeks with my maternal grandfather. Can’t think of much important my dad said, but I quote Pappy Joe about once a week. “Get what you can, and can what you get.” Or once, telling me how I tended to work harder than my brother: “I’ll pay him by the job and you by the hour.” “Never trust a skinny chef or a man with a clipboard in a clean pickup.”
A toast to everyone no longer with us, but whose voices we still hear.
We all need a few good voices in our heads, if only to shout down the other ones.
Seems that email is the only way to reply, I tried WordPress…bupkis…
Keep fighting the good fight, love your stuff!
marc…from WMass
Hey, Marc, glad you like the show. No Oscars yet, but no paid admission, either. So, winning, amirite?