CORRY, PA. -- They hung black crepe wreaths on the doors of the old Corry Journal building last week. A great man had died.
George Raymond Sample, reporter, editor, publisher and finally the owner of this small-town daily newspaper for the past 61 years, was no more. A small crowd gathered in front of the building. A force of nature had passed, blustery and barrel-chested.
Always quick with a joke, he laughed a lot for being such a serious man. You might say he was a complex individual.
There was a time when, if he'd wanted to, George could have been publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, one of America's great newspapers. The Canadian press baron Conrad Black -- Baron Black of Crossharbour -- offered him the job after he bought the newspaper in the late 1980s. George, who was then Black's American Publishing Co. vice chairman, thought about it for a while before declining the offer.
He was 64 or 65 at the time, retirement age for most men, and running the Sun-Times for a year or two would have been a fitting cap to what was even then a long and distinguished career.
But George wasn't like most men. And he wasn't about to retire. He didn't need the money, and while he moved easily in places like Chicago, New York, Toronto and Tel Aviv, his heart belonged to this tiny hamlet, nestled in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains of northwestern Pennsylvania.
He died on Wednesday, while the eulogies for Tim Russert dragged into their fifth day. There was a certain bit of irony in that, because while George actually was a journalist, Russert played one on TV.
But I've broken a rule here, because George didn't like the word "journalist." He said he thought it was effeminate, but really he just didn't like any word if there was a better, more descriptive word that could be used instead.
If you asked George what he was, he'd tell you he was a newspaperman.
George Sample was born in 1924 in a town even tinier than Corry called Curwensville, down in Clearfield County. He had a hardscrabble Depression-era childhood, marred by periodic slowdowns at the town tannery, where his father worked.
George remembered a summer's day when he was a little boy and an armed and uniformed sheriff's deputy evicted his family from his home. His father was away looking for work, and his mother sat crying at the kitchen table while the big deputy loomed over her. George never really had much use for cops after that, although of course he later counted many in his wide circle of friends.
He was in high school, working nights as a watchman, when he penned a patriotic essay that won a contest Parade magazine was sponsoring. They published his piece and gave him a $1,000 prize and, just like that, his horizons began to broaden.
It was the first of many prizes his writing would earn him. He put himself through Penn State mostly working as a waiter in the dining hall and as a boxing referee at night. He played lacrosse and studied, but mostly he wrote. He wrote until he got so good at it that it came almost as easily as speech to him. Sure and simple and true.
In 1947, he heard that a newspaper job opened up in Corry, and he hitchhiked up from Happy Valley. The rest, as they say, is history.
He was a friend of Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, and had interesting stories to tell about people like David Brinkley and Muhammad Ali. In 1982 he helped a young assistant district attorney and Vietnam War hero from Erie get elected to the United States Congress. Tom Ridge later went on to become one of the most popular governors in Pennsylvania history and served under President George W. Bush as the nation's first secretary of Homeland Security.
One of George's great friends for many years was another Pennsylvania politician, R. Budd Dwyer. They met while George was covering local politics and Dwyer was running for the state House seat from nearby Cambridge Springs.
Dwyer proved adept, was later elected to the state Senate, and was finally named state treasurer by then-governor Richard Thornburgh. A scandal ensued, and Dwyer stood accused of agreeing to accept a $300,000 bribe in return for the awarding of a lucrative contract. Throughout the lengthy investigation and trial that followed, he vehemently maintained his innocence.
On the night of Jan. 21, 1987, Dwyer called George at his home. He said he would be holding an important news conference in Harrisburg the next day, and told George he ought to be there.
"Budd, I've got a paper to put out," George told him. A standard line.
It happened just after we'd put the afternoon edition to bed the next day. The bell on the ancient teletype machine began ringing and wouldn't stop. I went back to see what it was.
The paper's sports editor, R.L. McCray, had a grim look on his face as he handed me one of the photos the Associated Press had sent along with the story. George's old friend Dwyer had gotten up in front of the lights, cameras and assembled reporters, pulled a .357 out of a manila envelope and shot himself in the mouth.
I handed McCray the picture back and tore the story off the machine. Then I walked to the far end of the newsroom and gave it to George.
"Tell them to hold the front page," he said, and he got up and went into his private office and shut the door.
About a half hour later he emerged with three or four sheets of typescript in his hand.
"Copy-edit it. Run it on Page 1," he said, dropping it on my desk on his way out.
It was one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. Pure poetry, stripped of sentiment and banged out under deadline about as fast as it could be typed, minutes after learning a friend of 20 years had just murdered himself in the most horrific way imaginable.
It told the story of a simple schoolteacher who'd risen to power, gotten in over his head and was finally driven to madness. It could have been a novel, but George did it in under a thousand words.
It was an act of pure will.
I'd always been able to write, and still believe it's something people are born with or not. I'd made money at it off and on throughout my 20s, but I was nearly 30 and washing dishes in a restaurant up in Erie when I met George, who'd put an ad in the Help Wanted section of the Erie paper that said, simply, "Writer wanted."
For the next seven and a half years, I sat a couple of desks away from him in the Journal newsroom, covering cops and courts and city hall, learning that writing isn't something you do because you hear the call of some muse or even something you do because you can't do anything else.
I learned that writing is a profession, a business, something you do every day whether you feel like it or not. Especially when you don't feel like it. And there are ethics about it and lines you can cross or not, because the writing gave you the power to help people or hurt them. Sometimes it even gave you the power to destroy them.
And there was a responsibility that came with that, something not taught in journalism schools or even written down anywhere, but more real than that, carried around in the heads of guys who think of themselves as newspapermen.
And George Sample taught that to me and he taught it to a lot others as well, not by telling it but by living it, being it, every minute of every day.
They hung black crepe wreaths on the doors of the old Corry Journal building last week. A great man had died.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 24 2008 |