HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) - If you tapped into Don Hatfield’s veins, they may well be flowing with ink.
The great-great-grandson of “Preacher Anse” Hatfield walked into the Huntington newspapers building in June 1953 just a couple days shy of his 18th birthday.
Late sports editor Ernie Salvatore hired “The Kid,” or “Hattie,” on the spot to be a part-time sports writer for the Huntington Advertiser, and Hatfield, who then had yet to even start Marshall University, dove headfirst into a life in newspapers for a whopping 75 cents an hour.
From that day in 1953 until 2000, Hatfield spent 47 years on a wild newspaper ride that would take him from a part-time sports writer to president, publisher and editor who chalked up 32 years with the Huntington newspapers before being promoted to Tucson, Arizona, where he worked for 15 more years as an editor, publisher and regional manager for Gannett.
It is that life in newspapers that is the subject of Hatfield’s third book, “Newspaperman: A Memoir,” (623 pages, Bowen Books) that is now out now in local shops such as Empire Books and News, The Red Caboose, and The Huntington Museum of Art gift shop as well as on Amazon.com, and in local shops.
Hatfield will have a book signing from to 5 p.m. Saturday, May 19 at Empire Books and News at Pullman Square.
Hatfield, who previously published a book of his newspaper columns as well as a short story book, said the memoir has been six years in the making as he began compiling dozens of behind-the-scenes stories of some of his experiences through the decades.
“I never really intended to write a book, but I wanted to write something to leave my sons. My youngest son, Joel, told me once at dinner that these are great stories, and you’ve got to get them down and write a book,” Hatfield said, “I said, ’Well, I didn’t work for The New York Times, and I wasn’t a war correspondent, and there are thousands of people out there with better stories,’ but he said, ’You have unique material because some of the things that you did here weren’t done any place else, and beside that,’ he said - and others have said this too - that ’there are all kinds of books out there by New York Times editors and publishers, but how many books do we have out there about small to medium and large-sized newspapers such as you have been responsible for?’”
He finished a first draft, put it away, then edited it and revised it, but progress on it was stalled by tragedy.
“Both of my sons (Chris and Joel) passed away two months apart four years ago, and I really lost interest in the project even though the second draft was finished. But friends kept urging me to do it,” Hatfield said.
His wife Sandy passed away in September 2017 after a 10-year battle with cancer. Hatfield dedicates the book to his wife (who was a writer and arts advocate) whom he credits with always supporting him and encouraging him to reach higher as a journalist.
“She was always a part of my career, and when I was a publisher she was always on all the boards around town,” Hatfield said of Sandy, who was a Raleigh County native. “When we were married we were driving back from our honeymoon in Daytona Beach and she said, ’What do you want to eventually become?’ And I said sports editor and she said ’Well I would think you would want to become something besides a sports editor.’ It kind of hurt my feelings, and I pouted all the way home, but she was right.”
After Sandy passed, Hatfield credits a number of good friends for encouraging him to complete the project, including friends Tammy Stewart, Paula and Brandon Horton and Kelsey Murphy, as well as former co-workers and copy editors Charlie and Pam Bowen, whose Bowen Books published the book.
It starts with that day he walked into the office in 1953 and then traces the pivotal moments through his retirement in June 2000 after spending 15 years in Tucson, Arizona.
“When I leave Huntington and go to Tucson that is like page 362 (Chapter 37) so the bulk of the book is in Huntington,” Hatfield said. “The last chapter before the postscript is what did I learn and what did it mean.”
In that chapter, Chapter 54, “In Retrospect,” Hatfield lists some of the values and practices he learned in almost 50 years as a journalist and manager of people.
Among those couple dozen items include such values as “Never lie to get to the truth,” ’’Don’t promise what you may not be able to deliver,” ’’Praise in public and criticize in private” and “Listen.”
Hatfield said he learned from the best, and learned on the job from the beginning as Salvatore hired him, took him under his wing and sent him out to cover history as it was unfolding locally.
“As I say in the book, I followed him out and then followed him for the next seven years,” said Hatfield, who was first hired for 20 hours a week at 75 cents an hour.
After a week they asked the young, eager journalist if he wanted to spend another 20 hours as a city reporter.
“I thought my God I am going to make $30 a week.” Hatfield said with a laugh, “I was like, ’I am on my way.’”
One of the early interesting stories in the book is about how Hatfield, who had lettered in football, basketball and baseball at Vinson High School, used his connections as a player when Salvatore assigned him to become the first local white reporter to cover Douglass High School, Huntington’s segregated black high school.
Vinson at that time in the 1950s was the only local high school playing Douglass, and Hatfield in his high school playing days got the mission impossible task in basketball to try to guard Hal Greer.
“I held him to 26 points,” Hatfield recalls, laughing.
A year later, that connection with Douglass and coach Bill Congleton helped Hatfield get the scoop back in 1953 that Hal Greer was going to be the first black player for Marshall College. Later, as editor, Hatfield would hire the first African-American reporter for Huntington newspapers - Angela Dodson - who would go on to write for The New York Times.
“Bill Congleton would be a part of my life for years to come,” Hatfield writes. “He became a leader in Civil Rights. He helped me as a young managing editor of the ’honky press’ during a time of great strife. He helped me in recruiting young black journalists. And when many years later my wife and I moved from the suburbs to the city, just three blocks from his house, he came by our house frequently.”
After seven years as a sports writer, Hatfield, upon encouragement from his wife, headed over to the hard news side of The Advertiser.
“I wanted more than anything to be a sports writer, but after seven years of writing sports I was tired of it,” Hatfield said. “I moved over to the news side on the copy desk and just kept moving up and became managing editor of The Sunday Herald-Advertiser.” Then when the newspapers were combined into The Herald-Dispatch, he became executive editor of the H-D.
Just a few years later, Hatfield would become publisher, and then became a regional VP for Gannett in charge of four Ohio newspapers, a Pennsylvania paper and The Herald-Dispatch.
In “Newspaperman,” Hatfield has chapter after chapter of interesting behind-the-scenes stories about some of the biggest stories Huntington newspapers covered during the 1960s and ’70s, when tragedy seemed to be around every bend.
He was the editor on the night of the Marshall plane crash. He drove reporter Jack Hardin to a wooded area where a killer on the lam turned himself into Hardin. He was making a last-minute check of the wires Nov. 22, 1963, when the AP wire “Flash” came over with an urgent bulletin that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.
And in the chapter “The Nightmares Continue,” Hatfield describes being managing editor for the Sunday Herald-Advertiser and dealing with a continued string of West Virginia disasters, including the Silver Bridge Disaster in Point Pleasant, the Buffalo Creek flood, the April 1978 Monongahela Power Company construction tragedy that killed 53 workers at a power plant at Willow Island near St. Mary’s, West Virginia, and, of course, the Marshall plane crash coverage which he chronicles in the chapter “In the Darkness of Our Day.”
“This book deals with all kinds of tragedies because this is West Virginia and we have had plenty of them,” Hatfield said. “The Marshall plane crash I was a very big part of the coverage as I was putting out the Sunday paper … In those days you had a police radio right beside you, and you sort of train yourself to listen to only the important stuff, and I heard the call, and I was like ’Is that a plane down at Tri-State?’”
Hatfield writes that he did not get home until 3 a.m. that morning, after which he sat shaking on his couch in the dark drinking a beer while his wife and three kids slept.
Of particular interest to journalists and history buffs is that Hatfield chronicles the many historic changes that happened to the Huntington newspapers over the years.
In 1986 - once their kids had graduated high school and were in college - Hatfield and Sandy moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Hatfield became regional vice president and was over newspapers in El Paso, Santa Fe, Tucson and a USA Today print site outside of Phoenix. Hatfield was also the president, editor and publisher of The Tucson Citizen.
Hatfield chronicles those years in about 20 chapters covering some of both the Tucson paper and Gannett’s initiatives.
In closing, Hatfield states that he feels blessed to have worked in the newspaper industry and to have cherished the time spent telling a community’s stories.
“Clearly, the golden days of newspapers are behind us,” Hatfield writes in Chapter 54. “But there was a time when newspapers were special. Editors and reporters were important. Columnists were treated like celebrities. Everyone read them, and everyone felt like they knew them. No home was complete without at least one daily newspaper. If your town had two, morning and evening, your home probably had both. If you were fortunate enough to write for a daily newspaper, you carried a certain pride. People knew who you were. You mattered … I have been extremely fortunate to have lived and worked in a time when newspapers were not only relevant, but considered a necessity in every home.”
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Information from: The Herald-Dispatch, http://www.herald-dispatch.com
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