My mom may have been the Journal-Tribune’s greatest source.
She recently retired from the Union County Prosecutor’s Office, having worked there for 37 years.
Through those years, Karen Williamson worked from five different buildings, but for only two prosecutors. Beginning in 1979, she worked for Larry Schneider for 22 years and later for Dave Phillips for 15 years. She was given the Administrative Assistant of the Year award from the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association in 2015.
The strange thing is that I have to look back at my mom’s career as a legal secretary/administrative assistant in two phases – when I was a kid and when I was a reporter.
The first prosecutor’s office my mom worked out of was in an old house on London Avenue, between the hospital and Kmart (the current county services building). Occasionally, I would have to go with her when she went into the office to catch up on work over the weekend.
I remember that it seemed like she had a world of technology on her desk. Her typewriter was like nothing I had ever seen, with a small metallic ball covered letters. It was sleek, fast and loud.
She also had a tape player and that thing had foot pedals to rewind and fast forward the recording. So she spent the day transcribing tapes and I messed around the Star Wars figures in another room. My mom explained that a great deal of her time in those days was spent on transcription for expected things like interviews with witnesses and undercover recordings. She also explained that there was some extra work because Schneider would audio record everything filed to the court, such as motions, answers to defense motions and indictments. He was kind enough to verbalize the location of commas and periods, she recalled.
I went to that office frequently enough that my mom never really had to worry about me. I pretty much kept to myself unless I got hungry, but my comfortableness with the venue led to a pretty shocking discovery one weekend. I don’t know what I was doing, but I turned the corner into an office and was standing in front of a mannequin adorned in gray mechanic’s coveralls filled with bullet holes, each one ringed with blood stains. In March of 1981 a gas station attendant at the Omega Oil Company on Delaware Avenue (west of the current McDonalds) was gunned down during a robbery and I, at 9-years-old, was staring at his clothes, made ready for trial.
While that is my most vivid memory of that office, my mother’s is quite different. She recalled that skunks got under the house one point and made for a stinky few days, until one morning something was different. She said the odor throughout the office was so strong that it burned everyone’s eyes and they were not able to work that day.
Some of the staff dropped in to let then-sheriff Harry Wolfe know that the prosecutor’s office would be closed for the day, but apparently the big, fluffy winter coats being worn by the prosecutor’s staff must have absorbed a large quantity of the skunk odor.
“Sheriff Wolfe jumped up the minute we walked in, ordered us out of the office and started spraying some nasty smelling perfume at us after he escorted us out of the office,” she recalled.
Eventually, the office moved to a house on West Sixth Street around the time I hit middle school, which at the time was in the pair of buildings just down the street. I would visit her at work often. I might have stopped in more had her office not been on the second floor and I was portly.
My memories of those years are few, but I remember being old enough to help out with one mundane part of her job. She would bring home binders containing the Ohio Revised Code and stacks of updated pages. The directions would spell out which pages in which volumes to remove and provide new pages to be inserted. It wasn’t complicated work and apparently perfectly suited to kill time for a middle school student in the days before the internet.
The office then moved into the basement of the current Union County Office Building on Sixth Street. This was during the time that the Union County Justice Center was being built alongside the courthouse. The stay in the basement was short but it did provide a couple of colorful memories.
One incident she recalled involved a drainage issue in the building’s foundation flooding the basement, ruining many items and forcing the carpet to be removed. What was not removed was the carpet glue. My mother recalled that staff members would be walking along the exposed concrete floor, hit a dollop of glue, and take the next step sans shoe. Work on the foundation culminated when a backhoe crashed through the wall in my mom’s office and knocked out the power to the building.
My fondest memory of her years in that office was the Phantom Bomber. There was easy public access to all parts of the building in those days and someone off the street apparently liked the accommodations of the prosecutor’s bathroom. Now mind you, a person would have to venture to the basement of the building and open a door clearly marked “Union County Prosecutor” to find this throne.
Because of the layout of the office, none of the staff had direct line of site to the bathroom door, so the Bomber was never seen coming or going. They only knew he had been there by his calling card, a clogged toilet. I like to think that he moved on and is still bombing public toilets to this day.
During these years I was working at the Journal-Tribune, but was covering cops and courts so I would drop by her office routinely.
Once the prosecutor’s office moved into the Union County Justice Center our face-to-face interaction pretty much stopped. I could probably count the number of times I was in that office on one hand.
There are a few reasons for this. The biggest reason was that my job changed, from beat reporter to managing editor. This meant that my days were spent sitting in my office rather than going out and collecting information. Mac Cordell took over the court beat and with it, inherited my mother.
Also, the nature of news gathering changed. You didn’t need to visit her office to look over court cases anymore as documents could be faxed, or later emailed. The third factor that impacted that office drop-ins was the layers of security added at the courthouse campus.
You had to pass through metal detectors and locked doors to get to her. Gone were the days of open doors and quick, quiet visits.
She waited out the coronavirus work-from-home order earlier this year and moved into her fifth office in the new prosecutor’s building on West Fifth Street. Along with her new office she had some new computer programs to learn as well. She opted to retire just a few months after the move.
I have a unique perspective on my mom’s job, because for most of the last 30 years her job and mine at the newspaper have been closely linked.
In many ways, the Journal-Tribune readers are the beneficiaries.
I think some newspapers rely heavily on cops, but here our relationship with the prosecutor’s office is what really drives our crime coverage. My mom was a big part of that. While we maintain an exceptionally solid relationship with the prosecutor’s office, it’s hard to beat a family connection.
She’s no doubt missed in county circles, as a source of knowledge from nearly four decades working with the law. But J-T readers will also miss her, though they won’t realize it.
She often helped flesh out the small details that give a story life. When last minute cases appeared on the court schedule she would give us a heads up. And sometimes, it takes a nagging mother to get a prosecutor to return a reporter’s call.
Our crime coverage will most certainly take a small step back without her on the other end of the phone.
-Chad Williamson is the managing editor at the Journal-Tribune.