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I.
I walked into the newsroom of the Centre Daily Times when I was 17 years old. I had no real idea what the hell I was doing there—I had very little sense at that point of what a reporter actually did on a day-to-day basis—but I had a high-school journalism teacher who was a persistent advocate on my behalf, and the CDT was a small and perpetually understaffed paper, and I was willing to work as an intern for free, and eventually they shrugged their shoulders and gave in.
I wanted to work in sports, but I presume the sports department had no real desire to employ a random teenager, so I wound up working for the Metro section. Much of what I did involved rewriting press releases, often calling up a source or two to punch up the information and giving it at least a veneer of journalistic integrity. Eventually, they trusted me enough to cover small events, and I landed a few bylines, and this felt like a big deal at the time because this was, after all, the Centre Daily Times, the paper I’d been reading since I was old enough to read the paper.
One thing that’s become readily apparent to those of us who grew up in the direct sweet spot of Generation X is that we actually were the middle children of history. Not necessarily in the perverse satirical way that Fight Club framed it, but in the literal sense that we came of age at a moment when everything was on the precipice of change. We were the last generation to grow up without cell phones; we were the last generation to be teenagers without the Internet; and we were the last generation who grew up reading the newspaper. Every day, the CDT landed in our driveway, and every evening, our family would read the newspaper at dinner, dividing the paper’s thin sections between ourselves.
That may seem like an anti-social way of bonding as a family—my partner, when I told her about it, found it incredibly strange—but for me, it was a form of connection. And it reinforced the importance of the newspaper itself. This was where you took in information and processed that information. This was where you learned to form your opinions, and therefore form yourself.
Was the Centre Daily Times a first-rate newspaper? I can’t say that, and I can’t say it’s the primary reason I wanted to become a writer. But it did contribute to that yearning, because the Centre Daily Times, for all its obvious flaws, opened up new worlds to me. In the same newspaper, I could read
and Bloom County; I could read George Will (or at least attempt to read George Will) and Ellen Goodman side by side. I could explore things I wouldn’t have otherwise understood, and it was all there in a single packaged entity, including the sports page.II.
Years before I walked into the newsroom at the Centre Daily Times and essentially demanded a job, a man named Ron Bracken did the same thing. He wound up staying there for his entire career, moving up to become a columnist and the centerpiece of the sports section. When you work for a small paper the size of the CDT, you wind up doing a little bit of everything, and Bracken was that guy: One day, he was writing about high-school wrestling and the next day he was writing about Penn State football.
Bracken was the quintessential local columnist, a guy who had institutional knowledge of pretty much everything in Centre County. His writing was quietly eloquent. He was not a demonstrative guy; he did not command attention. He bore witness as Penn State football grew from a provincial program into a national phenomenon, and he grew into the job himself over the course of decades. When Penn State coach Joe Paterno came down on him for something he wrote in the early 1990s, he refused to back down. “(Paterno) tried the intimidation bully factor that he does every once in a while where he just tries to, you know, put his foot right on your throat,” Bracken said. “And he found out it didn’t work even though, you know, it’s just a small local newspaper.”
Bracken once wrote that Paterno could be “cranky, tyrannical, dictatorial, blunt, scathing, charming, beguiling, entertaining and witty, all in the course of 30 minutes.” Their relationship became increasingly adversarial over the years. Bracken retired in 2008, bore witness to the rise and fall of Paterno’s empire, and then retreated back into covering high-school sports. I only spoke to him once, I believe, for some sort of story I was working in when I was college. But when I read that Bracken had died this week at the age of 81, I came to realize how his consistently inquisitive presence came to matter to me in those years when I was trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. He was our sports columnist; his was a voice you could trust, because it was not afraid to speak truth to power.
Everything is more diffuse now, of course; those essential voices are now spread across dozens of publications in dozens of places. The Centre Daily Times is still there, but it feels more and more like an outlier to the conversation than the centerpiece, largely through no fault of its own. I don’t want to say all this change is bad, because it’s not, but I just don’t know what to tell young journalists now. I don’t know where they go to find these things. I don’t know where they go to find themselves.
This newsletter is a continual work in progress. Thoughts? Ideas for future editions? Got a question or historical inquiry you’d like me to chase down? Contact me directly, or leave a comment below or in the chat. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please subscribe and/or share it with others.
The CDT was the paper where I started my professional career, shortly after graduating from Penn State in 1982. I worked for two years from the tiny State College bureau across the street from Borough Hall; the newsroom and all its other departments lived out in Dale Summit. Ron was one of a few sports writers at the paper, and one I read regularly. I can't say I knew him, or him me. But I thought he did a solid job of covering Penn State sports, especially football. Not a homer, like so many hometown sports writers, he was probably as cranky as he described Paterno. But his reporting mattered -- at least as much as the guys doing it at bigger papers in Philly and Pittsburgh for a little more money. Thanks for taking the time to write about him in such a fitting way.
I am so happy to know that you knew Dennis. He was one of a kind. I will be going to State College later this month to attend an event, and I believe some of his colleagues from the CDT and Mirror will be there as well. Looking forward to hearing all the old stories.