If you're looking for at least a brief respite from politics, check out the Dispatch business page today for reporter Tracy Turner's sweet feature on the newest flavor at Velvet Ice Cream -- pink power.
The angle is the elevation of three Dager daughters (Luconda, Andre and Joanne) to top jobs at the Utica-based ice cream company. As the newspaper explains, this is "the first generation of all-female leaders for Velvet, which was started in 1914 by Joseph Dager, the women's great grandfather."
Read it at:
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2009/09/25/smooth.html?sid=101
But what made this personal for Hummingbird and me -- aside from all the ice cream cones we've enjoyed at Velvet's Ye Olde Mill over the years -- is the story about how the Dager clan values girl power in their business. This, for example, is Turner's lead:
"The pink child's desk in the office of the new president of Velvet Ice Cream Co. serves a significant purpose: to help groom the family-owned business's next generation of leaders.
"That's the way Dad did it," said Luconda Dager, whose 5-year-old daughter is the latest to use the desk. "He exposed us all to the business at an early age."
Lately, I've been reading former reporter Bob Greene's memoir, Late Edition: A Love Story, which fondly recalls his rookie days as a copy boy and later reporter for the former Columbus Citizen-Journal in the early 1960s. The C-J, as Greene recalls it, was a wonderful place to work for a young would-be boy journalist but not so great for the women on staff who were sidelined from the best newsroom jobs while exposed to continued harassment.
I signed on as a rookie reporter at the Dispatch in 1965, only a year after Greene started downstairs at the C-J, but my memories are quite different. While the "women's page" ghetto also existed at the Dispatch (and all other newspapers at the time), I remember working the news side with several very talented female reporters while living in terror of a veteran woman copy editor who wasn't about to give clueless upstarts like myself any slack.
Now there weren't any little pink desks in that Dispatch newsroom but by the late '60s my daughter, Diane, was old enough to start occasionally accompanying me down to the newspaper on those evenings when I had a late story to write or edit. What she enjoyed was pounding away on the typewriter and sometimes sharing a pizza with the crusty old night city editor.
And even better, there were also those nights when she tagged along when I went over to the Statehouse Press Room.
Years later, at Ohio State, Diane decided to dump her engineering major and, even at the loss of her engineering scholarship, switch to journalism. After graduation, she went on to star at a number of newspapers, including the Akron Beacon-Journal and Atlanta Constitution, before reluctantly leaving the newsroom a few years ago as the print recession took hold.
To this day, she misses the creativity of a writing job and the collegiality of the newsroom environment. But in her case, it wasn't a little pink desk which won her heart. I suspect it was the wastebaskets in the Statehouse Press Room.
For in those days - and maybe still today - one of the games bored Statehouse reporters played while waiting for committee hearings to start or press conferences to begin was what we called "trash-can basketball."
It wasn't much: a small ball, a trash-can, the set up for a perfect set shot arcing across the crowded "court" of desks, typewriters and dial-up telephones.
For Diane, I don't think it was the game she remembered so much as the mood of the place; the idea that there was a job where grown ups, while waiting to do something important, could take time out just to act silly and have fun. Greene writes as well that this discovery - that newspapering was not only important but fun - captured his imagination at the C-J.
Despite the buy-outs, the bankruptcies, the lay-offs, the fear that print journalism is a dying industry, is anybody still having fun working in the newsrooms of America?
If you take your daughter (or son) to work, where ever you work, does he or she come away with the idea that this is a job one can love? Even if it's not at a newspaper or in an ice-cream factory?
-- David Lore
