Yes It’s True: It’s Gambee’s fault for ‘discovering’ moi

“Wherever the newspapers are filled with good news, the jails are filled with good people.” — Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan

A message to all those who don’t like me or my screeds — put the blame on Jon Gambee. If it wasn’t for him, I might have never become a community journalist.

It all began 50 years ago last month. I was a substitute teacher by day and a security guard by night, having graduated a little more than a year before with a “worthless” degree in history from Grand Valley. I was sleeping at the Fruitridge home of WLAV disc jockey Ed Buchanan when Gambee burst into the room one morning and threw a copy of the Wayland Globe in my direction.

On the back page of this weekly publication was a preview for the Wayland High School football team, for which my brother, Gib, was the starting quarterback. Of course, it was written by Mr. Gambee, a Vietnam veteran who meanwhile was trying to restart his education at GVSC.

Apparently, the Great Gambino had paid a visit to Editor-Publisher Irvin P. Helmey and asked why he published a weekly column by Charlie Frost. He told Irv he could write better than that Bozo.

Irv then told him to send him a story about the start of the Wayland High School football season and discuss prospects for the team. A week later he wrote about the Wildcat golf and cross-country teams. And when the season started, Gambee personally attended the athletic events to report on what happened.

He did the entire fall season, but his only compensation was a pair of tickets to a Michigan State football game (Irv was an alum). He was accompanied by a female date who asked him, “What’s a first down?”

Sometime in November Gambee’s dad came across a help wanted ad for a sports writer in a small daily newspaper in Dowagiac. Declaring he learned he was good enough to write for Irv with no compensation, he told me he wanted to find out just how skilled he was.

I rode with him to visit the Dowagiac Daily News, sitting in the car and reading for a couple of hours when he arrived at his car and announced that he had been hired and his first assignment was to cover the Chieftains’ basketball game at Three Rivers the following Saturday night. Again, I accompanied him. We both were treated to a 35-point performance by the great Edgar Wilson.

Gambee told Irv not to worry about his departure, telling him I would take over in writing the sports stories. Every Sunday night, I slipped my copy under the Globe’s front door.

Not long afterward, Irv insisted on meeting me. The following fall, he offered me “a chance to make a little pin money,” being paid a modest stipend for each story.

In late November 1972, faced with the departure of a staff member, he asked me, “How would you like to learn the weekly newspaper business.”

I was being hired full-time as sports editor, staff writer and a little bit of everything, such as sweeping the floors and watering the plants.

After three and a half years and covering city council and school board meetings on a regular basis, I was told by the Great Gambino, now public relations flak for Kalamazoo Valley Community College, I should spread my wings. He actually typed up a resume and used ye olde “confetti method” to send them to small dailies around the state.

First I got a call from the Albion Evening Recorder and then one from the Alma newspaper, both college towns with small dailies.

I took the Albion job and Irv and his wife sweetened the pot by taking me off pasting up ads and offered to match Albion’s salary offer. I told both very truthfully that I wanted to see just what I could do in the journalism field. By the fall of 1976, I was writing stories using a computer, a game-changer.

So this was another instance of Jon Gambee, himself a 1965 Wayland High School grad, foisting this curmudgeon on the public with a career in community journalism that now is approaching 50 years. I don’t know whether I should thank him or curse him.