Saturday Diary: I was told, 'That's Craig.' And so it was ...
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Former Post-Gazette Editor John G. Craig Jr. died Wednesday of metastatic cancer at the age of 77.
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Fall 1972: I am languishing in my first reporting job in Greensboro, N.C., and looking for better work closer to my ancestral homeland, New Jersey. America is a place where people succeed on talent, not on whom they know, so I put the arm on my college roommate, who works for the newspaper in Wilmington, Del.
Months later, I am summoned for an interview. The city editor, a nice, casual guy, says right off the bat, "You've got the job. One thing, though: You have to talk to the top man." So I'm led down the hall to an office filled with books. Just visible through a cloud of cigar smoke is a prominent head that belongs to John G. Craig Jr., executive editor.
Craig, as I recall, is not looking up from his desk. He's reading something -- maybe Foreign Affairs or baseball stats. Not a small-talk guy, he breaks the ice with a cosmic question: "What do you want to do in this business" (which comes out "bidness")? I'm reeling. All I want is a job at your newspaper, dammit. What comes out is something lame like, "It would be nice to work for one of those newsweeklies someday."
Craig looks up for the first time. There's a tight curl to the lips. "I don't like it when young bucks come through Wilmington, earn their spurs and move on," he growls. "I want my reporters to sink roots into the community, settle in. If it were up to me, I wouldn't hire you." Wow, that's it already? "But it's not up to me." Come again?
I stagger back to the city editor's office in shock. But my roomie and the city editor tell me to shake it off. They're laughing. "That's Craig," one of them says, as if explaining a key mystery of the universe. It was indeed Craig.
And it was my introduction to the man's carefully honed "hands-way-off" management philosophy: "People are going to do whatever they want to do." In this case, make lousy hires. But John believed in letting his players play.
First Published May 29, 2010 12:00 am
