Al Cross on Joe Creason
30th Joe Creason Lecture, April 10, 2007
I never dreamed of giving a tribute to Joe Creason, but this does feel like a dream come true.
This picture of Joe hangs on the wall of my office. It was taken in 1952, when Joe still wore a hat and wrote features from the field. Its caption is “Beatin’ the deadline,” and here he is – sittin’ on a soft-drink case, peckin’ away at his portable typewriter, probably tryin’ to meet the schedule of the bus that would take his copy back to Louisville.
It hangs on my wall for many reasons. Joe was the first newspaper reporter I ever met, and he wrote some of the stories my father liked to tell. Joe’s middle name was Cross, and my Dad was the kind of fellow who liked to claim cousins without the benefit of genealogical research. Me, too.
When I applied for an internship at The Courier-Journal, Joe’s was the friendliest face I saw – just a chance meeting in an elevator, but it’s the moment I treasure most. Joe passed away less than two years later, so I never worked with him, but he remained an inspiration and role model. We both started out in the weekly newspaper business and went to The Courier-Journal, but liked to keep in touch with folks in the far reaches of Kentucky, where we were from.
Joe’s curriculum vita is pretty simple: Graduated UK 1940, became editor of The Tribune-Democrat in Benton, his home town, and quickly went to the Murray Ledger and Times and then to The C-J. When Joe died in 1974, his obituary by our colleague Warren Payne said he “inspired trust in those about whom he wrote” and “let his love for his native state shine through his words.” For a Kentucky journalist, that’s a shining epitaph.
Joe said he liked to tell “little stories,” meaning features, and then he became better known for even smaller stories, the items in the column that he began in 1963. A few of his colleagues saw little value in those little stories, but those smarty-pants at Sixth and Broadway failed to appreciate what we knew out in the far reaches -- that those little stories were like threads, sewing seams that knitted together the diverse parts of this often-fractious state.
Joe ranged the full breadth of the commonwealth, not just from Paducah to Pikeville, but from Madrid Bend to Majestic. Never heard of Majestic? I’ll bet Joe knew someone there. His work, of course, made him well known, and the legendary state editor Jim Ausenbaugh thinks Joe was the best-known person in Kentucky, or close to it.
In those days, for some people in my part of Kentucky, going to Madrid Bend or Majestic was about as difficult as it is today to get to the Middle East, and I think Molly Bingham will speak to you about making an effort to make those connections.
Joe Creason was a great ambassador for the Bingham family’s newspaper, and his work exemplified the paper’s interest in, and commitment to, the people of every single county in Kentucky. In so many ways, not just through their newspaper, the Bingham family has been abeacon to the far reaches of Kentucky. For some of us, Louisville was a faraway place, who can mistake a beacon, no matter how distant?
Those days are gone, never to return, as newspapers concentrate on their home metropolitan areas, struggle with the new age of digital media, and worry about their future. But the last paragraph of the great Kentucky author Jesse Stuart’s tribute to Joe, written in 1967, contains some advice they might consider: “There will never be any danger of a newspaper, however large or small, folding – if it has one goodwill ambassador-reporter like Joe Creason.”