One of the first things you learn in newspapers is that you work behind the scenes:
Don’t insert yourself in the news.
But some rules are meant to be broken and this is one.
This year, we’ve chosen outgoing Times-Journal publisher Jim Poole, a fixture here since September 12, 1977 as our 33rd T-J Star.
A “C” student at Alleghany College, where he majored in history and then tried out teaching in Cleveland—“The kids were great. I was a horrible teacher”—Jim spent a year and a half working in an iron foundry before deciding to try a different kind of teaching: Writing.
Jim and his wife, Sandy, moved to West Virginia, where he earned his master’s from West Virginia University, and then like every college grad, began casting about for a job.
“We knew we wanted to be in Western, Pennsylvania or Upstate New York,” he said, in part because they had family and friends nearby, and so he started applying to newspapers.
“I got back a lot of mimeographed rejection letters,” Jim remembered.
Frustrated, he got in the car and started driving, walking into newspapers in Greenville, and Meadville, Pennsylvania, Ithaca, and Rochester, before—he’s a lifelong baseball fan—ending up in Cooperstown.
“They told me I had to talk to Charlie [Ryder, who ran Ryder Newspapers’ Mirror Recorder], so I got in the car and drove to Stamford,” a drive that would change everything.
“It was a Friday afternoon in July. Charlie liked to golf. What were the odds he’d be there?” Jim said.
But he was and offered him a job, on the spot, in Cobleskill, where he started work 10 days later, first as reporter under the late Perry White before becoming associate editor with Dana Cudmore after Mr. White moved to Stamford, and then editor after Mr. Cudmore moved on in 1979.
Later that year, the Ryders sold the Times-Journal and a half-dozen other papers they still owned to Dick Sanford and Catskill Mountain Publishing, another change and a good one, Jim remembered.
“Dick was very approachable,” he said. “He pretty much let everyone do their own thing. He felt you hired good people and let them work.”
Reporters came and went—among them Alan Ginsburg, who went on to work at the Gazette; former Suffolk County cop, Doug Stinson, who worked on a number of investigative pieces; and me, reporter at the T-J before becoming editor at the Mirror and then returning to the T-J as editor in 1992, when Jim bought it.
“I’d been editor for 13 years and was looking for something else…Dick offered to me” and with the support of his father-in-law, Don Stork, much as he’d said yes to Charlie Ryder so many years ago, “I said yes,” Jim said.
A decision he never really regretted, even as the newspaper industry changed.
In October, Jim and Sandy told the Times-Journal to Mark Vinciguerra and Capital Region Independent Media.
More change:
On January 1, Jim will become a part-time reporter,
“I like the work. I’m not sure I can imagine doing anything else. I don’t know what I’d do with myself otherwise. I think it’s going to be good.
“I still believe what Dick Sanford said about hiring good people and letting them work. I’m leaving some very good people here.”