When we arrived here in 1956 after a three-year stint in the Naval Supply Corps I wasn’t exactly downy cheeked, but I was wet behind the ears in the view of some old timers and good old boys who were running the town.
At that time, Chino wasn’t like Claremont, where great value was placed on college degrees, and when you were introduced at a group function your alma mater was appended to your name.
In Chino, the only college graduates respected were teachers, ministers, doctors and attorneys. For all others, the important attribute was whether you graduated from Chino High. Or if you had gone to USC, that was acceptable. Almost everybody rooted for the Trojans whether they attended the university or not.
So along comes this young guy, from northern California, and a Stanford grad to boot, throwing his editorial opinions around, sometimes stepping on toes, which often were imbedded in cement.
Nobody asked what advanced education I had, and I didn’t volunteer, except that it appeared in the story about our purchase of the newspaper.
Now that I’ve outlived most of the old guard, and the remaining ones have kind of gotten used to me, I don’t mind writing about the 55th reunion of the Harvard Business School class of 1953, held last week in Boston.
I found a couple of welcome exceptions to keeping quiet about degrees, both of the min the Rotary Club. I had been taken in a sits youngest member ever because it wanted to claim the local publisher. My predecessor had been a member of the Lions Club, breaking the tradition that the Champion publisher always joined Rotary.
One of my fellow Rotarians was Walter(Jack) Sprott, a senior resident of Los Serranos who still played golf in his eighties and was an active salesman when he died at age 91. He had been an All-American tackle at Stanford in the 1906 earthquake class, 45 years before I graduated from there with a journalism degree.
Then there was L. J. Scritsmier, who always showed up at our Wednesday meetings in overalls. He was a pig farmer, and rather successful, I found out. His farm had been in the northern Chino Hills, then moved to east of Chino. He revealed to me that he had attended Harvard Business School, which must have been about the time my father did in the twenties. I felt comfortable with these two gentlemen, and was sorry when they passed on while my ears were still drying out. “Scrits,” I was happy to note, was like me in that not all HBS graduates had ended up as captains of industry and finance.
The reunion reassured me on this point. I had a nice chat with classmate Marv Grossman, after I found out that he had been running a car wash in the San Fernando Valley for the last 40 years—quite successfully I might add.
Don Jordon, who I failed to recognize until I heard his wonderful Mississippi voice, who was one of the earliest franchise holders of Wendy’s International. Now he’s trying to get a small college for black women in Memphis back on its feet.
So I felt pretty good about “only” operating a successful independent weekly news-paper in a community which had 10,000people when I started out, and now has more than 150,000.
All the classes with 5-year reunions were under the same tents erected on the business school campus, on the Boston side of the Charles River, across from the Harvard Yard in Cambridge.
Who should I run into between sessions but Kurt Kenworth, former Chino ladder manufacturer and active chamber of commerce member, a member of the class of 1958. From my class I was approached by Dave Scott, a financial and operational consultant from Dover, New Hampshire, who had just started up a weekly newspaper because he disliked the closed shop politics of local government and the lack of ambition on the part of his local daily to do any-thing about it.
We had quite a chat, and I had to admire his vigor for getting so involved at an age of close to 80. I found that many of my colleagues had become involved in philanthropic endeavors, using once again the good training we had gotten in at the Biz School.
Copyright 2008 - Champion Newspapers - Published June 7, 2008
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