The Saga of a Job Transition

I really enjoyed my time as a newspaper journalist, both at the Messenger and Sunday News and then seven years at the Burlington Free Press. I learned a lot, grew a lot as a writer and met tons and tons of great people…coaches, student-athletes and parents.

My first year at the Free Press did not start out in sports. I was hired as a news writer and assigned the education beat. I think I was kind of proud that my writing and interviewing abilities rated me the position as education reporter with general reporting duties as well. But, you have to play it pretty straight with general reporting. In sportswriting, you have the opportunity to add a tinge of opinion, frivolity and humor to your writing. Sports is considered the Toy Store of the newspaper…a fun place to visit, and based on reader feedback, good local sports coverage is also a circulation builder. Don Fillion was the sports editor and Mal Boright the assistant sports editor when I signed on with the Free Press. I didn’t dislike being a news beat reporter, but I loved sportswriting. Fortunately for me, Mal had the chance to be sports editor of the Valley News in the White River/Lebanon area, opening up the slot for me as assistant sports editor.

Don Fillion and I got to be good friends and we hired a group of really good kids to help us out. Some were in their junior or senior years of high school and a couple may have started at one of the area colleges. Mike Donoghue, who retired from his news position at the Free Press in 2015 but still writes for The Islander and is frequently cited on line, joined us as a senior at South Burlington High. South Burlington also provided Mike McGee and Steve “Swish” Casey both very capable writers. Mike went on to work at the Portland Press Herald in Maine. Another addition to the staff was Tom Sivret, a high school star in Randolph, VT who went on to play basketball and baseball at UVM. Tom joined us for two years after graduation from UVM and then moved on to become the sports editor of the Barre Times Argus. Andy Gardiner joined the sports staff at the Free Press after getting a Master’s degree at UVM. He made the desk behind mine home in 1974 and stayed with the Free Press until 1982 when he joined the staff of USA Today as it began its role in the newspaper role. He returned to the Free Press for a while (The Free Press and USA Today are part of the same publishing group), but eventually returned to USA Today in 2000. He retired in 2012 and returned to South Burlington, making contributions to Vermont Public Radio and the Middlebury College athletic department. A four-time Vermont Sportswriter of the Year, he is one of many friends who have been inducted into the Vermont Sports Hall of Fame.

Another Hall of Famer, Ted Ryan formerly of the Rutland Herald, took my place as assistant sports editor and took over the UVM hockey beat. He had a 50+ year career in sports journalism before retiring in 2019. Broadcasters Ken Squier, George Commo and Tony Adams are also friends who are Hall of Fame members and Ernie Farrar, a radio personality was inducted for his support and activities in the sport of boxing. Former Free Press colleagues Don Fillion and Mal Boright are also in the Hall of Fame as is Dave Morse, sports editor of the Rutland Herald and my traveling cohort during Middlebury’s undefeated 1972 season.

I probably would have stayed with the Free Press a long time, but Dick Whittier, UVM’s sports information director, tipped me off to a job opening for a sports information director at St. Lawrence University. I really enjoyed my time covering Middlebury and Norwich athletic teams and thought working with an entire college athletic program might be a lot of fun. I applied for the position and went to Canton twice and Saranac Lake once for interviews. The first interview in Canton included the Director of Public Relations, Thurlow Cannon, who I would work for, Duane Ditman, vice president for development  and University President Frank Piskor. Round two in Canton included a round of golf with Dick Metcalf, chair of the department of what was at one time called sports and leisure, and meetings with several coaches and round three, in Saranac Lake was to meet athletic director Bob Sheldon and football coach Ted “Bear” Stratford at the Colgate and St. Lawrence camps on Saranac Lake. I think they had to offer me the job before my mileage reimbursements outpaced my paychecks.

I moved to Canton in late July 1975. I lived in a dorm for the first three weeks of my Canton residence, and then found an apartment in the home of Don and Maureen Leet, Don was SLU’s lacrosse coach and part of a low stakes poker group I found myself part of in short order. I stayed in that apartment for about eight years, moved to one on Pine Street in Canton in the late 1980s and finally moved out to the country, the Stiles Road were I rented a small house from Leslie Weisenfeld at first and then Ron Pike. I stayed on the Stiles Road, except for a brief stay in an apartment in downtown Canton after an electrical fire pretty much destroyed the little house. Ron buried the remains of the house and brought in a mobile home…which I dubbed the “Tin Mahal” and I stayed there for the rest of my residence in Canton…which ended when I moved “home” to Vermont four years ago.

I was fortunate to have three great PR Directors to work with: Thurlow Cannon, a true gentleman with diverse talents and interests, Floyd Lawrence who took over upon Thurlow’s retirement and was one of those genuine nice guys and Lisa Cania who was very personable and organized and who I think I irked a bit with my attitude toward early morning work hours and long staff meetings and retreats. I was on an arrive late, work late schedule for a good part of my early years at St. Lawrence, but it eventually shifted to an arrive early, work late on game days and leave at 3 or so on others schedule. I probably wouldn’t have lasted 40 years in the sports information position had not someone come up with the idea that my reporting line change and my office move to the gym.

Through the efforts of Pete FitzRandolph, dean of students at the time, with I suspect some help from Dick Metcalf, I was to report to the dean and reside in the Augsbury Center where I had better access to the administration (Dick and Bob Sheldon) and the coaches. My office, once described as a sanitary landfill without the seagulls, was moved to the gym and off we went. It was a mental positive that I really didn’t realize until after I was there. Working in the PR office, I was the one who did the seven day weeks while the others had their weekends to themselves and I was the one who sauntered in later in the morning and left in the evening. In the gym, I was one of the early crew to start the first pot of coffee and read the paper before getting down to work and the coaches were in and out at all hours, every day.

I transitioned from typewriter and mailing lists to computers and email lists…using a Xerox telecopier, a fax machine and a ditto machine in between. I started out with a Mac computer due to its graphics ability as we wanted to provide our printers with “camera ready” materials for media guides and programs and the like. The university was a PC based operation and wanted me to switch, and when some key programs for publishing became available for the PC operating system I did make the switch. I had big monitors (at least three of which were stolen out of my office during my career), a photo scanner and various and sundry other plug ins. The greatest addition to my tool box was a Nikon digital camera which enabled direct download of pictures to the computer. Along came the internet and its voracious appetite for content both written and graphic. Like my introduction to Adobe’s Pagemaker, Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and a brief adventure with Quark, I learned the ins and outs of internet publishing pretty much by trial and error as I got more confused by the user’s manuals the more I read them. I will say that I was pretty adept with Pagemaker/InDesign and Photoshop and somewhat competent in Illustrator when I retired.

When I started at SLU we had 13 sports…when I left there were 35 varsity sports. I started with just me in the office and got tons of help typing play by play and other things at games from secretary Beth Cheney. The other secretaries at the PR office, Rita Hewlitt and Mary Hought helped out with the Monday mailings and running some of the various things we sent out on the ditto machine. At some point, probably six or seven years into my career, we started bringing in interns or graduate assistants to help with the coverage load. Eventually, with the continued growth of the athletic offerings, we added full-time assistants and when I left and to this day there is a staff of three sports information professionals with various student help along the way.

I did look around a little bit during my career for other perhaps bigger opportunities. I interviewed at Washington and Lee, the University of Connecticut and Yale. In all three cases I think I interviewed well…John Toner the AD at Connecticut and former football coach, asked me to stay an extra day because the committee was really close between me and another candidate. The other guy won out because of local ties, and that was the only of the job pursuits I would have taken. I enjoyed my tour of Washington and Lee and had great chats with various coaches, but it didn’t seem right to me and at Yale, athletic director Frank Ryan, the former Cleveland Browns quarterback seemed to want a personal PR guy rather than a sports information director.  As I said in my retirement column for the St. Lawrence, there were bigger places, but there weren’t better places.

One guy I have to thank for my long and successful St. Lawrence career was Dick Metcalf. He was a sounding board, a mediator, a tutor and above all else a good friend. We played cards together, we golfed together a few times, and most important he was there to guide me through the rough waters when a coach or AD and I had differences of opinion. I certainly wouldn’t have lasted 40 years at St. Lawrence without Dick’s guidance and friendship and for that I am eternally grateful.