Word: seltzer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ordinarily, Louis Seltzer would have been smiling. It was the end of an exhausting, satisfying week In which the Cleveland Press had run a series of touching stories about a Hong Kong reunion it had arranged between soldiers serving in Viet Nam and their Cleveland families. Yet Seltzer had tears in his eyes much of last Friday as he cleared out the last memorabilia from his office and bade his staff farewell. After half a century with the Scripps-Howard Press, and 38 years as its editor, "Mr. Cleveland" was reluctantly retiring...
...from Offis Boy. Under Seltzer's guidance, the Press successfully urged the rebuilding of much of Cleveland: a new airport, a "shoreway" along Lake Erie, a community college, and a transformation of downtown slums into office buildings and broad plazas. The Press has appealed to Cleveland's 40-odd ethnic groups by sending a "nationalities editor" abroad to file stories on Clevelanders' relatives still living in the old country. And editors take turns manning newsroom phones to answer readers' queries on everything from how to change a diaper to how to call an ambulance...
Growing up in Cleveland, Seltzer did not have any particular reason to like his city. His father, a carpenter who wrote 49 Western novels in his spare time, was almost penniless. Louis had to quit school in the seventh grade to take a job as office boy for the now vanished Cleveland Leader. Within a year, he was writing his own light Sunday column, "By Luee, The Offis Boy." But at 15 he was already a has-been. His city editor fired him and told him he was not fit for journalism...
...Press by offering to work for a week without pay. He moved up fast. By 17, he felt secure enough to marry Marion, whom he had discovered playing a piano in a silent-movie house (Marion, however, had to put up the 750 for a marriage license). By 19, Seltzer had become the paper's city editor...
...Luckily, Seltzer has a replacement whom he has groomed to fill his shoes. Thomas Boardman, 46, joined the Press as a copy boy in 1939, rose to become chief editorial writer. He plans no major changes at the Press, and staffers welcome him. Says one: "He's a fast, lucid writer, a shirtsleeves editor, a heavy smoker, a good drinker and an excellent companion. He can see right into the gut of any situation...