Ashtabula, OH Sports Editor arrested

One place I worked, one of the ad reps was a coach in a sport where most games took place right after school. Was quite a surprise when he could never meet his sales goals.

 

Why are you glad you didn't get the job? How does the SEs criminal actions affect you in a meaningful way? What if you could have taken his job?

 

Could you have worked for someone accused of what he's been accused of doing? Like I said: looking back, I'm glad I didn't. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn't want to be associated with that newspaper or him.

 

I can refer you to the last three guys who worked for Don. One thing they all have in common is that they all hated the experience. They didn't know what he was up to away from the office, but it was no fun working for a manipulative, controlling, pathological liar. Same goes for people who worked with him before he became SE. Would you want to work with someone who routinely stole items from your desk and deleted files (including story notes and such) from your computer files? I know people who ended up taking anything they didn't want to disappear home with them every night.

And the lies! Like having terminal cancer and other diseases, like his brother fighting on the front lines in Desert Storm when he never left Germany, like his father routinely showing up in the middle of the night to beat him up, etc. He routinely would show up to work having clearly been worked over and it was always his father or some random guy on the street who did it. Some co-workers thought he did it to himself for attention and sympathy, but some now feel that girls' fathers probably delivered some old-school justice to him.

Yes, Don was great fun to work for or with during his 28 years there. He should have been fired for 100 different offenses — including going through his bosses' offices and desks to look at co-workers' personnel files — before any of the sex charges came to light. The fact that he eventually became SE was criminal itself, given everything management at that paper knew about him. And trust me, they knew almost all of it. The school district hiring him repeatedly? No different. Officials at both places were complicit to some extent in what he did. The hope is all three of them pay dearly in the civil suit.

 

The shittiest sounding jobs can get posted here, and someone will say, "a young guy could do a lot worse than this job."

I guess this is the lot worse job folks were referring to.

 

The sad thing is that this used to be damn good paper for its size. Staff of six full-timers in the 1980s. Solid leadership.

 

With a new SE, consider it a great opportunity.

 

The current SE is good people.

 

Did Don ever quote himself?

 

Not that I'm aware of, but there were certainly instances in which other people covered his games and quoted him.

 

How did he last so long? Especially in a time of layoffs? He could have just been let go for economic reasons?

Given the time he spent outside the office coaching, etc. he could not have been that productive.

 

Question for the ages. My guess? Combination of mismanagement locally and corporate being in Alabama.