Reminiscing…
By Bern Zovistoski
As 1990 rolled around, I was concluding 25 years at The Times-Union and in the mood for a change. While the administrative role I’d held was important, it just wasn’t much fun.
Lo and behold, I learned that the military newspapers operated by the U.S. Department of Defense in the Pacific and European theaters were being reorganized and would be hiring civilian editors with substantially more authority than the editors had before.
That change was part of the solution to repeated claims that the military was asserting “undue influence” on the newsrooms, in effect stifling news coverage.
The Pacific Stars and Stripes, headquartered in Tokyo, had advertised it was searching for an editor. I applied and was informed that I was one of two finalists for the job – and we were invited to spend a week at the newspaper to meet the staff and be checked out by the publisher, a Marine colonel.
Ultimately, the call came: a journalist with experience in the Pacific theater won the job.
Meanwhile, European Stars and Stripes also began a search for an editor and I learned the civilian staff overseeing both hiring efforts was anxious to get my application for the European job, based in Darmstadt, Germany, south of Frankfurt.
Given a choice, I’d have chosen the European position and as it turned out, I got it.
The publisher at European Stars and Stripes was an Air Force colonel named Gene Townsend. From a stack of candidates that he later told me was about 140 people, he selected me as editor. He said he received high marks about me from Joe Lyons, who was the publisher of The Times-Union at the time.
Call me lucky because that was the best job I ever had as a journalist.
I was given a three-year contract with an option for a second three-year term, which Townsend approved in my second year on the job. Interestingly, about that time, with troop drawdowns throughout Europe, plans were well underway to move the Stars and Stripes headquarters for both theaters to Washington, leaving only a few reporters in the field.
As in the Pacific case, I was invited to go to Germany for another meet-and-greet with staff and Townsend.
Then my wife Paulette and I had to prepare for the big move. We owned a 22-acre farm south of Schuylerville where we had raised horses and a couple beef cattle and agreed to put the place on the market. Paulette would stay behind to prepare for the move, which was no small thing.
We would be separated for about a month. Of course I called her every day we were apart, racking up a telephone bill of several thousand dollars at the hotel where I stayed. Stripes picked up that tab, thankfully.
When news of my appointment surfaced, I was overwhelmed by the response.
I got a note from an editor with The Washington Post who told me how much he appreciated my showing him the ropes when he began working at The Star-Ledger. I was moved but to this day I cannot remember him or what I did that caused him to message me.
Another message of congratulations came from Father John Krysko, who was the pastor at All Saints Roman Catholic Church, the “Polish church” that I attended as I was growing up in Granville. The Mass was said in Latin and Polish but even as kids we got the gist of things.