Another of the people who worked for four decades at the Journal-Tribune and who I came to admire and respect as I was growing up died this past weekend. Gene Harbold passed away last Saturday morning at Memorial Gables only hours before he was to be released to go home. He was 85. He joins other longtime J-T employees, including Don Streng and Shade Watkins, who went before him.
Gene worked for 42 years, from 1952 to 1994, for my grandfather and my mother and father, and with me. He could do almost anything in what we called the “backend,” where the daily newspaper was put together and printed.
For the most part, he was in charge of assembling each page using lead type, headlines and advertising material, and inserting and locking them in a metal chase the size of a newspaper page. When all pages were completed, they were lifted onto the printing press for the final product.
This process was not easy, but Gene handled it with no problem.
He was no ordinary person. In 1972, when the Journal-Tribune switched from the hot lead method to what was called offset, he made the transition with ease. In the new process, he not only helped with page makeup, but also did the camera work, shooting all of the page negatives and then transferring them to a thin metal plate for the press. It was a substantial change from the old way.
But that wasn’t all Gene did. He liked sports, and for several years, he was sports editor, putting together the sports pages in addition to his other duties.
His favorite sport, and that of his whole family, was baseball. His two brothers played in the minor leagues and Gene would have, but was drafted by Uncle Sam around the time of the Korean War and spent two years in the Army. Brother Pete played for a farm team of the old Washington Senators, and brother George for a farm team of the former Philadelphia Athletics.
After his stint in the Army had been completed, Gene finished his military service for seven years with the Ohio National Guard. It was certainly fitting that he died on Veterans Day.
When I was a youngster, I watched Gene play catcher for the Devine Shell fast pitch softball team. Some of his teammates included his brother George, Don Streng, Bill Coder, Shine Grimes, Dean Scheiderer and sponsor Jim Devine. For a couple of summers, I was the batboy at home games. Boy, were those guys good!
Gene was as loyal an employee as anyone who has worked at the Journal-Tribune. Some said that he took his job too seriously, but today as I look back, I would want everyone to be like Gene. He and the others were more than fellow workers … much, much more.