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Joe Smekens, a 45-year News-Banner employee who served in a number of capacities, most notably as sports editor and managing editor, will retire Friday from the newspaper on his 65th birthday.
Smekens began his newspaper career at the Warsaw Times-Union in 1962, fresh out of Linotype school. When an opening in the News-Banner’s Linotype department occurred, then-publisher Roger Swaim, who had helped Smekens land the job in Warsaw, called him. Joe’s first day at the Bluffton News-Banner, then located at 222 W. Market Street, was May 23, 1963.
Smekens’ involvement with the News-Banner actually goes back further than that, as his family passed a newspaper route for about 10 years on Marion, Williams and Morgan streets from Wiley south to Spring Street. It had 148 customers, he recalls.
“We didn’t ride a bike,” he says. “We walked the route each day. My mother didn’t think a bike was the proper way to pass papers. We made sure the papers were on the porch, or more often, inside the screen or storm door.”
Joe and his two older brothers were mostly responsible, although his sisters helped out on occasion.
Collection day was Friday, with part of Saturday spent going back to those who weren’t home or “didn’t have the change the day before,” Joe recalls.
“The News-Banner was 35 cents a week back then,” he remembers. “It always aggravated me when people came to the door and said they didn’t have the change. I wanted to tell them that I had change,” he says with a chuckle.
Joe gladly gave up the route sometime in high school when he was able to get a job at the Kennedy Drug Store (located where Duane’s Sweeper Shop is currently) as a “soda jerk.”
“That was a lot more fun than passing papers in the rain and snow,” he says.
As he neared graduation from Bluffton High School, a job in the newspaper business appealed to him.
“Being a Linotype operator was considered a good, secure job back then, and paid pretty good,” he explains. “And being around the paper like I’d been, I knew Roger Swaim was considered a good guy to work for.”
Ironically, during his senior year, one of his classes toured the Rem Johnston Printing Co., a job printer that still exists, owned these days by one of Joe’s friends, Dave Moss. Joe knew then that he planned to go to Linotype school and said as much to Mr. Johnston.
“He said ‘Oh, you don’t want to do that. Linotypes will be obsolete in 10 years.’” Joe recalls. “Well, that put me back a bit. I went home and told my dad but we agreed that Mr. Johnston didn’t know what he was talking about.”
Of course, Joe notes now, although Johnston turned out to be right, he was just off a few years. Linotype machines were mothballed in Bluffton 14 years later in 1975, not the ten that he predicted.
So after his graduation, Joe went to Linotype school in English, Indiana, then one of only three or four such schools in the country. After completing his training, Roger Swaim helped him land that first job in Warsaw.
“I was just a kid so I would come home every weekend,” Joe says. “I lived in a boarding house in Warsaw for $8 a week.”
A Linotype, which is basically a huge, clanking typewriter that sets type in lead metal for the old printing presses, was good, steady work, if not sometimes tedious. Joe worked his way up so that he was eventually doing the “more fun work” ... setting headlines and advertisements as opposed to just straight type. At that time, everything that went into the paper had to go through the Linotype setters, including national and state stories that came over the wire services.
It was school consolidations that changed Joe’s life and his career.
“It was 1968, when Norwell and Southern Wells were started,” Joe explains. “Before that, Bluffton was the only school in the county that had a football team. So with Norwell, we had two football games on Friday nights that needed to be covered. The sports editor, Ken Weber at that time, asked if I knew of anyone who would want to write, and I said I’d do it.”
From that time forward, “I was a Linotype operator by day and a sports writer by night,” Joe says. “I really enjoyed talking to the coaches and writing the stories. It just seemed like it was something I was meant to do.”
When the News-Banner converted their printing methods to the new offset method and built a new building on N. Johnson Street in 1975, his Linotype days were over. He became a full-time assistant sports editor for Gary Books, who had since become the paper’s sports editor. Joe also wrote feature stories and helped with the police and court news. “I also helped paste-up pages,” Joe remembers, “and most everyone would go back and help insert papers whenever we needed to. Of course, Jim (Barbieri) was so fast at inserting. We all tried to keep up with him, but couldn’t do it.”
Joe recalls, after some reflection, that “for the first three years I covered football, every county team I covered lost their game.
“Of course, I covered many Southern Wells games in their first years, and they were winless for three full years,” he says. “But I would also occasionally cover a Bluffton or a Norwell game, but each time, our team lost.”
Ironically, the first game Joe covered in which the Wells County team won was also Southern Wells’ first victory. “I was there for that one,” he notes proudly.
He also recalls that his baptism into covering high school basketball was a memorable one, with his first game being a Southern Wells-Adams Central matchup which went three overtimes.
When Gary Books left the News-Banner in 1977, Joe was named the paper’s sports editor. “Gary was a good mentor, and so was Gene McCord.” Joe says. “I learned a lot from them.”
The sports desk was becoming an increasingly busy place as girls sports were becoming more common. The main sports — football and basketball — still commanded the community’s main attention, though. Joe remembers fondly the many events covered, the weekly “Between Games” columns, the game previews and his predictions and how the community was focused on those sports, a time before cable television and the other entertainment options people have.
But a Smekens family trait, heart problems, would change Joe’s career.
He had his first of five heart attacks in 1986. He was off work for an entire month and it happened at the same time the News-Banner was being sold by the Swaim family to the Witwer family and Barbieri.
Barbieri, who was named president and publisher, as well as editor, along with new principal owner George B. Witwer decided to move Joe into the managing editor post, where he would have fewer hours and perhaps less stress. It was at that time they hired Paul Beitler to take over the sports duties.
“I didn’t ask for this job (managing editor) but I came to understand it was the right thing to do and it has been a good thing and also with many rewarding memories.”
“It’s interesting,” Joe says. “That was 22 years ago and some people still refer to me as a sports writer.”
The biggest story Joe has covered in his 45-plus years was the Pretzels, Inc. fire on Christmas Day, 1997. Barbieri was out of town, so Joe coordinated the coverage and wrote the main story; Glen Werling and Paul Beitler took the pictures and McCord also assisted. It was only a few days later that the Dutch Mill Restaurant fire took place, another major event.
“It was kind of a running joke for years around town that the Dutch Mill would go up in flames some day because of the way it had been constructed and added onto over the years,” Joe says. “I remember driving to work that morning and seeing the red sky and all the smoke, I knew immediately what was happening.”
Joe also has poignant memories of The Blizzard of 1978. He was one of only four News-Banner workers who were able to make it into the office and managed to put out a newspaper. “Of course, it wasn’t delivered for several days, but we didn’t miss a day of printing a paper,” Joe says.
His career included an opportunity to interview Johnny Unitas and to meet Johnny Bench and other sports figures and celebrities.
His most memorable sports events that he covered include the 1976 boys basketball sectional at South Adams, when Bluffton defeated three teams on their way to the sectional crown, all of which had beat them during the regular season.
“They beat Southern Wells, then came from way behind to beat Bellmont and then Norwell in the finals,” Joe recalls. “That Bluffton team just had this momentum going. It was exciting, and fun to write about.”
He also highlights when Southern Wells won their first basketball sectional in 1982, a feat made special as it was before class basketball.
“Of course, our sectional teams then went down to the Marion regional,” he says, a perennially tough regional mostly because of the outstanding teams that Marion High School always had.
“But one year, 1978, Norwell gave Marion a real game,” he says. “Norwell led them the entire game up until the final minute of overtime. It was a great game, one of the best I ever covered.”
Joe is perhaps proudest of the series of articles he wrote just a few years ago during the final season of the old Bluffton High School building and the noted “Tiger Den,” as the basketball court was known. The News-Banner reprinted those articles in a special section, and the series won Joe an award from the Hoosier State Press Association.
“I lived and breathed the Tiger Den and all its history that year,” he recalls. “It did give me a great amount of satisfaction. So many local people gave me input on that series. It was really fun.”
Although his memories are mostly centered around the stories, it is the encounters with people that Joe says he will miss the most.
“I always enjoyed the contact with people,” Joe says. “Talking with the coaches and getting to know the players over the years. And people would stop me on the street and want to talk about that week’s games. It’s been fun.”
And he’ll miss the police scanner, too. “I’ll miss not knowing what’s going on,” he admits.
Joe and his wife, Barb, have no immediate plans for retirement. His son, Brady, has been wanting him to help out with his enterprise, Smekens Education Solutions, a school consulting firm based in nearby Warren. “I’d like to do something that keeps me around people,” he adds. And he won’t rule out doing some writing for the News-Banner, but not right away.
“I’ve been blessed to work with a lot of good, special people, in and out of the office,” Joe says, noting that many of them are gone now.
Barbieri, of course, is the most notable. “From early on, he was always supportive of what I was doing, not once was he critical of the opinions I expressed in my columns. And of course, you could ask him anything and he’d either have the answer or get it very quickly.
“And there’s a million stories about Jim,” he added. Barbieri’s death in April, 2006, he admits, was difficult. “Jim WAS the News-Banner in many ways from the first day I worked here,” Joe says.
“It’s kind of remarkable, how we (the employees) have gotten along,” he notes. The News-Banner’s office is basically one big room, with news, advertising and composition workers all in close proximity. “But everybody has respected each other and we all care about each other and our families,” he said.
“And of course, I cannot forget to mention my wife, Barb,” Joe adds. Besides being supportive of the odd hours, evening and weekend duties, he credits her with getting him through the heart attacks and the heart bypass surgery in 2003 that gave him “a new life.”
“I’ve felt better the past five years than the previous 20,” he notes. “It’s no exaggeration to say that I wouldn’t still be here without Barb being with me through those times,” he says.
“My son and daughter (Angie Harris) have also been very supportive over the years. They spent a lot of weekends as kids tagging along with me to ball games and never complained. They remember things about some of the games that I have long forgotten,” he said.
Looking back, Joe has few regrets.
“I always tried to get as many names in the sports stories as I could,” he remembers. He liked to get the names in of those who weren’t necessarily the stars.
He has equally enjoyed many non-sports stories about Bluffton people in the more recent years.
“It has occurred to me that my stories, and my byline, are in a lot of scrapbooks,” he says at the close of his career. “Thinking about that gives me a lot of satisfaction.”
Perhaps the nicest compliment was from a reader who told him that his columns were “like you were just talking to me.”
The lone regret that is worth mentioning, he says, was not following-up on an interview opportunity.
He had written a lengthy historical account of Bluffton native Everett Scott, who had had a distinguished major league baseball career that included several years on the same New York Yankee teams with Babe Ruth. It turned out that his widow was living in Fort Wayne, had been shown the story and wrote Joe a complimentary letter.
“I called her up, we had a nice conversation and I promised to drive up to visit her,” he recalls. “I just knew she had some good stories to tell.” But before he could do that, she passed on. “I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it’s always stuck in my mind.”
But Joe has very few bad recollections.
“Forty-five years ago, I never dreamed I would do all that I’ve done, where I’d be today” he says. “But people thought I could do some things and they gave me some opportunities and I’m thankful for that.”
miller@news-banner.comAn open house will be held Sunday in honor of Joe Smekens in the clubhouse at Timber Ridge Golf Course from 1 to 4 p.m.
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