Editor's note: This is the third part to a column in honor of former TIMES publisher and editor, Jack Beisner, by his son, E. Calvin Beisner.
He taught me to care about soldiers' safety when we watched "Combat" with Vic Morrow and "12 O'Clock High" with Gregory Peck, and how to laugh when we watched "The Dick van Dyke Show" and "The Andy Griffith Show" while enjoying my mother's fresh-baked desserts downstairs in the rec room, and how to laugh even harder when my mother came back from the kitchen with fresh mugs of hot cocoa for my youngest sister and me and stood in front of us with a puzzled look on her face and said, "I remember Gretchen's cup was in my left hand, but I can't remember which hand Calvin's was in."
He taught me to ride my brand new bike, and how to share it with my sister when she wanted to ride it, and how to forgive her when she disobeyed my command not to try to turn on it and did anyway and fell and scratched up its paint. He taught me to endure pain when I spun out on my bike at the bottom of a hill on a gravel road and chewed up my left knee, and how to make peace and be reconciled with my friends when we got into fights -- and how to wrestle and even box (a little bit) but also how to walk away from a fight.
He taught me to write the way a good reporter does, inverted pyramid style, with a strong lead that grabs the reader, and to tell a story straightforward, being fair to all sides and (not as in this piece) leaving my own opinion unwritten. And he taught me the courage of a good journalist when, after months of investigation, he wrote a story about a mafia family, put it on the front page of his newspaper, called his friend at the Binghamton FBI office and told him what he'd written, heard the agent say, "Jack, you can't do that! They'll kill you!" and he said, "Too late now, it's on the press and hits the streets in an hour. I hope you can move fast." The FBI moved and eventually arrested and got convictions on the mafia don and much of his "family," but not quickly enough -- not before they bombed my dad's office that night (when no one was there). And he and the other newspapermen in the region taught me teamwork even among competitors when they let Dad's staff use their shops, their equipment, and their presses to keep publishing the Tioga County Times & Gazette until his office was rebuilt. And he taught me that even children can make news when he reported in the paper that my two little friends and I, discovering a small fire in the nearby woods, put it out all by ourselves.
He taught me to be amazed at the bigness of our country when in the summer of 1966 he moved us from little Owego, N.Y., to Los Angeles, Calif., and we drove all the way in our 1963 Chevrolet Impala that we'd named Betsy, and we crossed the great plains, saw the Rocky Mountains growing slowly out of the horizon before us for the first time, drove through them, drove across the Painted Desert and saw the Grand Canyon, then drove across the California desert, with a canvas bag of water tied in front of the car's grill to help prevent overheating, and arrived in the middle of downtown LA to stay at first in the Hilton, which we were sure was the most luxurious place in the world, and how to be content when his company moved us after a few days to a dumpy little place about eight blocks away.
He taught me to work hard at school even though the sophisticated big-suburban schools of Alhambra were way behind the backward little schools of Owego, leaving me bored beyond description, and how to play basketball and then tennis, at which he had excelled so much in high school and college that he'd been nicknamed "Bill Tilden," one of the top pros of the day, for his rocket-fast serve. (He'd earned straight As all through college at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus except in one physical education course. He'd arrived a couple of hours early the first day hoping to find someone to play a match. He did and beat him 6-2, 6-4, 6-2, only to learn he was the coach. At the end of the semester he beat him again, 6-2, 6-4, 6-2, and the coach gave him a D for lack of improvement. Dad was more proud of that grade than all his A's.) He took the family and me and out-of-town guests to Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm over and over because his job as Administrative Executive of the California Newspaper Publishers Association gave him free tickets whenever he wanted them, and there we rode amazing rides and saw dazzling fireworks at night. He took my mother and youngest sister and me to a dinner put on by the Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge at the Independence Hall replica at Knott's, where I got to meet honorees John Wayne, Jimmy Durante, Kate Smith and Lucille Ball. And he took me with him to his office at work from time to time, first in a downtown skyscraper, then in another out near Los Angeles International Airport, one of the world's busiest then, making Broome County Airport seem piddling small by comparison.
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Editor's note: This column is the third in a series by E. Calvin Beisner, son of Jack and Mary-Lou Beisner, who owned and published The Times of Northeast Benton County from 1978-1989. He served at various times as reporter, editor and assistant publisher as well as in other capacities. He is now Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation www.CornwallAlliance.org. He and his wife, Deborah, an artist, live in south Florida.
Editorial on 07/12/2017