As I totter through the early stages of senior citizenship and retirement, the significance of good friendships steadily gains weight and respect.
So now I have lost another good friend, James T. Lawless IV.
I don’t think that I have ever known anybody else who was a IVth – or fourth. Indeed, I have no recollection of having even known a third.
Here’s what Jim had to say about being a IVth: “Yeah, I’m James Lawless the fourth. Every succeeding one of us made less money than the preceding one.”
I didn’t often call him Jim. In the busy and cramped newsroom of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland where we worked side by side, most people simply referred to him as Lawless. There was no disrespect intended. On the contrary, addressing him thusly gave one the opportunity to utter once again the best name ever for a reporter.
That old newsroom in the 1980s and 1990s was a lot of things, including what it wasn’t or couldn’t be. It was architecturally bereft, a solidly built block of a structure on the eastern fringes of downtown Cleveland. There were no windows in the newsroom.
The Plain Dealer was a financially healthy concern then. Lawless and I – two substantially sized men – sat in close confines at gray, metal Eisenhower era desks that were jammed tightly together by the dozens on either side of the horseshoe-shaped city desk.
There were pneumatic tubes and the ceiling featured exposed pipes. The floor was covered by something that does not deserve the respect of being called a carpet. It was a threadbare, stained and faded beige fabric. It’s seams, which had surrendered years earlier to age and wear, were held together by long strips of silver duct tape.
Smoking was still permitted then and the air circulation in the newsroom – where several hundred toiled – was lacking.
“When you show up to work in the morning you can still smell yesterday’s farts,” one reporter is said to have observed.
Despite all of that, many male editors and reporters – myself included - wore a jacket and tie to work.
I don’t think I ever saw Lawless wear a tie. Lawless didn’t need no stinkin’ necktie. His more casual attire reinforced the unfettered, free-wheeling nature of the man at his work.
We had to share a single computer, which was a sluggish Model T compared to the smart phone that we now carry in our pockets.
There was no internet or, if there was, it was not known to us in that newsroom at the time. When deadline came late in the afternoon, Lawless and I would sometimes physically compete to have access to what was quaintly known as a “video display terminal,”, or in newsroom parlance, a “vidit.”
We sat on small, worn, wheeled office chairs and sometimes as we simultaneously swung toward the vidit, we would crash into each other – grown men trying to push the other out of the way. That place could do things like that to a person.
It was a 1950s newsroom bursting with a significantly sized staff and it was struggling to adapt to a burgeoning computer era.
Lawless and I and our colleagues at the two desks behind us worked hard and produced loads of copy on a variety of topics depending upon the beats we were assigned. Lawless had the utilities beat, back when metropolitan newspapers could or would pay attention to such things.
He was a bulldog who concentrated much of his time upon the electric utility, now known as FirstEnergy Corp. He had sources inside the nearby Perry Nuclear Power Plant who would let him know whenever there was a screw loose there. He worked his beat aggressively and took his work seriously. He was as honest and ethical as he was hard-charging as a newsman, and I eternally salute him for it.
Lawless could be a tad flippant. Sometimes he would answer his phone – there was no caller ID then – by saying “Plain Dealer, Ohio’s largest but not necessarily best newspaper.”
Lawless could appear crusty and a bit intimidating, but that belied a deep and sincere curiosity that he had throughout the decades that I knew him. Curiosity is perhaps the best quality a reporter can have. Lawless was a good listener and a good conversationalist. Sometimes, during breaks or early in the day, as we consumed at our desks the industrial-grade coffee from the Plain Dealer cafeteria, we would talk. We would talk about any number of things – news of the day, family, baseball, editors.
He deeply loved his two daughters and his wife Cecily – who is as well-read as he was. Whenever he heard a good joke or a nugget of news he thought particularly interesting, he would immediately call her. He didn’t offer any opening pleasantries, as he was eager to share with her a quip or some other item he had just heard.
“So Cec, two guys and a dog walk into a bar….”
He had extraordinary respect for the written word. He was also regularly aghast by the novels that I had not read.
“How in God’s name did you ever graduate from college without having read that book?” he would ask, his mouth agape and his face wearing a tortured look of deep incredulity. His horror was not feigned.
After a while, annoyed by this frequent observation from my desk mate, I would simply answer that recurring question the same way:
“I don’t know why I never read that book, Jim,” I would answer. “I guess I am just a dumbass. Okay?”
Lawless was forever loyal to his hometown of Toledo, which is arguably a large suburb of Detroit. He had grown up a Detroit Tigers fan, and we often spoke of baseball.
He told a delightful story that as a youth cutting through neighbors’ back yards on a summer afternoon he did not miss a pitch of a Tigers game – as everyone had the game on radios outdoors.
Detroit radio station WJR had – and probably still has – a large signal. Even though Lawless lived in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid, he would listen to WJR as he drove to work.
“Did you hear that story on WJR this morning?” he would ask me.
“Lawless, see, you and I, we live in Cleveland. I don’t listen to a Detroit radio station and neither does anyone else in the newsroom as far as I know.”
Undeterred, he continued to occasionally ask me the same question.
Later in life, he made bread, wrote poetry, listened to jazz and delighted in the exploits and developments of his grandchildren. He loved talking about his grandchildren, who amused hm and made him proud.
By Steve Luttner and posted on Facebook:
Sometimes, after we both retired, we would not talk for months. Occasionally we would gather with others at Muldoon’s Saloon on E. 185th Streets for beer and a sandwich. As soon as I saw him or reached him on the phone, our conversation picked up so naturally, so pleasantly, so rewardingly - without a hint of awkwardness. Ever. I loved talking with Lawless.
He was a deeply dedicated union man who strongly supported the Newspaper Guild. I once walked a picket line with Lawless somewhere in Michigan as a couple carloads of us once drove up there to support a strike.
As a young man, Lawless once worked in an automobile bumper factory in or near Toledo. Bumpers at that time were the large, sometimes garish, chrome bookends to a car. The bumpers would be dipped into some solution and then hoisted, one by one, with hooks overhead. One day a bumper became unfastened and hurtled to the shop floor below, narrowly missing a fellow worker. Lawless called for the foreman.
“I grabbed him and put his ass up against a wall and told him to fix it before someone got killed,” he said. It didn’t happen again, at least as long as Lawless worked there.
When we worked together, people still used cash to buy things. Sometimes, a day or two before payday, my wallet would get a bit light. I’d ask Lawless if I could borrow $10 and he would readily give me $20.
“Pay me when you can,” he said without hesitation. Of course I always did.
Today my mind is flush with good recollections while my heart is heavy. Wherever he is, I would be honored to once again sit at a desk next to James T. Lawless IV. I know that I would like it. There are so many more good conversations to be had. RIP my good friend.
