About Our Authors And Contributors

Tom Andrzejewski began his 25-year career at The Plain Dealer answering the call of “Boy!” — the term back then for copy aides — while attending Cuyahoga Community College then Cleveland State University. Over the years, he covered several major beats as a reporter and, for more than a decade, wrote about neighborhoods and the joys and travails of Clevelanders in his City Life column and a regular op-ed column. He received numerous national, state and local awards, ranging from the Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association to the Good Neighbor Award of the Association of Neighborhood Councils. In 2004, he was inducted into the Press Club of Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame.

For nearly all his years at the PD, Tom was an officer and executive board member of Local 1 of the Newspaper Guild and a delegate to the Cleveland AFL-CIO Federation of Labor.

Tom’s Plain Dealer career was interrupted by service in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division field artillery, where he served as a cannoneer then a public information specialist. He was awarded the Bronze Star Medal, Air Medal and Army Commendation Medal.

He left the newspaper in 1988 to start a public relations practice, The Oppidan Group Inc. Occasionally working in politics, Tom orchestrated issues and media in the successful underdog mayoral campaign of then State Sen. Michael R. White in 1989. He also directed publicity, paid media and community outreach for the campaign to build Gateway and played roles in several other city, county and statewide campaigns. Since leaving the PD, Tom has served as board president and a board member of Community Re-Entry and as a board member of the Center for Community Solutions, among other civic activities.

Tom is married to former PD reporter and editor Leslie Kay. They have one son, David.

Roldo Bartimole, known simply to local journalists as “Roldo,” has forged his own career in journalism. He worked for a series of newspapers in Connecticut, then in Cleveland at The Plain Dealer and the Cleveland bureau of The Wall Street Journal, before founding his newsletter, Point of View, in 1968. He published Point of View for 32 years. Roldo was the subject of a Cleveland Scene profile by reporter Sam Allard in April 2018. (See: https://tinyurl.com/CLESceneRoldo).

Margaret Bernstein is the Director of Advocacy and Community Initiatives at WKYC Channel 3. In 2017, she received the top award for promoting Diversity & Inclusion from TEGNA, WKYC’s parent company. A devoted champion of literacy, Margaret earned a 2016 Emmy for her #WeReadHere campaign at WKYC, which encourages parents to read every day with their children. She serves on the national board for Little Free Library.

A Los Angeles native, she earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Southern California. She worked as a reporter, editor and columnist at The Plain Dealer from 1989 to 2013.

Well known for her passion about mentoring, Margaret was named National Big Sister of the Year in 2000 for her work with two Cleveland girls, Cora and Ernestine, through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America.

She is also the writer of The Bond, a memoir on fatherlessness by the famed Three Doctors. That experience led her to write her most recent book, a storybook titled “All In A Dad’s Day,” which is designed to tighten the bond between fathers and their young children.

Margaret is married to Shaker Heights Chief Prosecutor C. Randolph Keller, and is the mother of two children, Randy and Alexandria.

Carrie Buchanan arrived in Cleveland from Canada in 2006 after a career in newspapers, primarily at the Ottawa Citizen, the major daily in Canada’s capital. Born and raised in Montreal, Buchanan attended Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia, returning after graduation to Montreal where, despite a double-major in biology and psychology and no background in politics or writing, she decided to take up journalism. Turned out she had a “nose for news,” as one public official put it after she broke a steady stream of stories, often from events that took place entirely in French, for the weekly North Shore News in Montreal’s West Island suburbs.

In 1978, she gave it up and moved to Ottawa with a new baby, in support of her husband George’s high-tech career. Within a year, she was a regular stringer for the Ottawa Journal, that city’s morning daily, where she was known for breaking page one stories despite her sleepy suburban beat. She had just been asked to come on full-time when the Journal suddenly folded in August 1980, leaving Buchanan without a journalism job for eight long years. “I felt like they cut my arm off,” she often told friends of that time in the wilderness.

In 1984, she enrolled at Carleton University’s School of Journalism, where she earned her master’s and, even before graduating, a new job at the surviving daily newspaper, the Ottawa Citizen. Twelve happy years ensued, covering suburbs at first, then four years at Ottawa City Hall, then a Quebec-based beat where she covered politics during the second referendum on Quebec separation, when the province voted 49.7 percent in favor of seceding from Canada; native affairs during a major standoff in Oka, Quebec, between Mohawk Indians and the Canadian Armed Forces; and many other stories that called upon her skills in French, politics and environmental science. (Yes, she did finally get to use that biology major!)

By 2000, weary of constant staff cuts and declining quality at her beloved Citizen and jealous of her husband and two children, all of whom were in university at the time, she took a buyout to return to Carleton and complete a doctorate while teaching journalism part-time. In 2006, she moved to Cleveland in support of her husband’s new career as Unitarian Universalist minister, then landed her dream job at John Carroll University, where she is now a tenured professor in the Tim Russert Department of Communication and Theatre Arts.

Gary Clark is a career journalist; he worked as a reporter and editor at four newspapers over 34 years.

He and his wife, Caryn, have two kids: Jessica is a college administrator and Brian is an engineer. They no longer fight like they did as kids.

Gary’s oldest brother, Brian, was killed in Vietnam in 1966. His second-youngest brother, Rory, died in 2015. Duff still lives in Cleveland Heights and Kevin is a patient at an adult foster care home.

Gary has written thousands of pieces, but never one about himself, as he half-jokingly says is “evidenced by the essay he wrote for this collection.” His piece, “Dig deep…,” is his first-ever account of the inner workings of The Plain Dealer during his time there.

He also still loves rock ‘n’ roll and remains a huge fan of Bob Dylan. He agrees with Dylan’s lyric:

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

George E. Condon (1916-2011), originally from Fall River, Mass., began his career at The Plain Dealer in 1943 as a general assignment reporter. He became the paper’s first television and radio critic in 1948. After 14 years on that beat he moved to the editorial page, where he wrote a daily column until his retirement in 1985.

Besides covering the city for The Plain Dealer, George wrote nine books, among them “Cleveland: The Best Kept Secret,” a portrait in essays in 1967; “Laughter from the Rafters,” a collection of columns in 1968; “Stars in the Water: the History of the Erie Canal,” in 1974; and “Yesterday’s Cleveland,” a photographic history, in 1976.

He wrote seven days a week as a television critic and then five days a week as a general columnist. Taken as a whole, his columns provided a picture of Cleveland in both its high and low periods.

George’s parents immigrated from Ireland. His father was a foreman at a textile mill in Fall River. After they moved to Cleveland, his mother was a maid at the Clevelander hotel downtown. George attended St. Patrick Catholic School and West Technical High School. After graduating, he majored in journalism at Ohio State University. It was there he met his future bride, Marjorie Philona Smith. They married in 1942 and moved to Cleveland the following year, when George joined The Plain Dealer.

The couple had seven children in 15 years. George outlived two of them. His wife, Marjorie Condon, a teacher in the Cleveland public school system for 20 years, died in March of 2001.

George won numerous awards during his career. He was given the Ohioana Award for history, the Women’s City Club of Cleveland Award for Literature, the Burke Award for Literature as well as the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Distinguished Service He is also in the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame.

In his acceptance speech for the Ohioana Award, Condon wrote, “What I oppose is the hushed, carpeted fearful approach to history and those who made history. There is the air of the funeral parlor in most of our history books, and perhaps the sound of some rinky-tink piano is what we need to break the sad spell and bring history to its feet again. Only in life is there any hope for history.”

You can read George’s book, “Cleveland: the Best Kept Secret,” online at https://tinyurl.com/CLEBestKeptSecret.

Susan Condon Love is the daughter of George E. Condon. She knew from grade-school on that she wanted to be a journalist – and to travel throughout the United States pursuing that career. After graduating from The Ohio State University with a journalism degree, Susan started her career at a daily in Escondido, California, called the Times-Advocate.

After three years learning the ropes, Love was hired at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as a features writer and food editor. Las Vegas at the time was booming and Susan was able to hone her feature-writing skills covering Las Vegas shows and the quirky people. Her favorite stories were the newly minted millionaire entrepreneur who invented the ubiquitous “dice” clock with dice as the numbers, and the man devoted to using his pilot skills to fly ill children to needed medical treatments out-of-state.

Looking for more adventures, Susan took the leap from Las Vegas to Savannah, Georgia, as the assistant feature editor at the Savannah News-Press. Reeling a little from the culture shock, Susan soon embraced the history and gentleness of the sleepy Southern town that was on the brink of becoming a tourist destination. It was in Savannah that Susan met her husband, then-sports-writer Brian Love. They married at the magnificent Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah and came home from their honeymoon to a letter saying one of them had to find a new job because of the paper’s nepotism policy.

The journalism adventure continued as Susan was hired as the entertainment editor at The Capital newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, while Brian snagged a job on the sports copy desk of The Washington Times. Soon, Savannah called again – Susan received an offer for the features editor position at the News-Press – and they moved back to Savannah. Brian decided at that point to become a teacher.

After several happy years in Savannah (and the birth of their daughter Kelly Anne), Susan decided to pursue her dream of working at The Plain Dealer and return to her home town. Hired for the features copy desk, she also worked on the design/layout desk. Soon after coming back from maternity leave with her son Brian George, Susan was named assistant homes editor and, mere months later, homes editor.

The homes beat turned out to be a dream job. Happy with the duties of a Sunday Homes section and a Saturday Real Estate section, Susan soon pitched the idea of combining the homes news into a home and garden section called Inside&Out. The section was a huge success for more than a decade. Susan was both the editor, writer and main columnist (“Full House”) for the section.

Susan left The Plain Dealer in 2011 but returned to her first love, journalism, in 2016 when she assumed the duties of managing editor for three suburban weeklies on the West Side – The Press, the North Ridgeville Press and West Life. She is thoroughly enjoying community journalism and would urge every single journalist to get a subscription to keep grass-roots journalism healthy.

She currently lives in West Park with her husband, still a teacher, and her two college-going children.

Dick Feagler (1938-2018) is a Cleveland journalism legend. He worked at the Cleveland Press as a reporter and then columnist. After the Press closed, he wrote columns for the Willoughby News-Herald, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram. He did commentary, and then was an anchor, at local television stations before joining The Plain Dealer in 1993, returning to his first love as a columnist until retiring in 2009. He continued his “Feagler & Friends” show on WVIZ (PBS) until 2013. Dick, who died on July 1, was the subject of a recent piece by Ideastream’s David C. Barnett and Annie Wu. (See https://tinyurl.com/IdeastreamFeagler).

Janet Beighle French worked as the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s home economics/food editor from 1963 through 1986.

Her work covered a variety of food-related topics, including the advent of supermarkets, which led to the decline of locally produced food, the development of more modern appliances and quick meal preparation techniques correlated to the movement of women from the domestic to the professional realm, and the increasing interest in ethnic cuisine as the U.S. moved toward a more multicultural society.

Janet reported on government regulation and food standardization, health research, poverty and nutrition, and the emergence of the natural foods market. She also acted as a food stylist, arranging food and props, for most of the photographs in the collection.

Dave Davis teaches at Youngstown State University (hence the bow tie), where he is the first-ever Journalism Fellow, a sort of journalist in residence. He worked for 24 years at The Plain Dealer, mostly as a reporter, before leaving the newspaper in July, 2013, with about 50 colleagues.

Before that, he reported for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and The Charleston (W.Va.) Gazette, where he began his journalism career under the crusading publisher W.E. “Ned” Chilton III, who was known for his practice of “sustained outrage.”

At The PD, Dave wrote extensively about the nation’s widening racial health divide, aviation safety, inequities in the nation’s transplant system, among others. He has been honored with an Investigative Reporters & Editors Inc. Medal, a Polk Award, and the Heywood Broun Award, among others. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Dave received a bachelor’s degree in English from The Colorado College and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He is an author and co-editor of this book. He is married to co-editor Joan Mazzolini.

Jack Hagan worked as a reporter and editor at The Plain Dealer for nearly 30 years. He covered a variety of beats including the courts, suburban communities, the environment and as a general assignment reporter. He also spent a short time as an assistant Metro editor where he supervised a team of reporters. After leaving the newspaper in 2005, he worked as the student media coordinator at Cuyahoga Community College for nine years. Jack is retired and lives in Lakewood, Ohio. He attended Youngstown State University and is a graduate of Cleveland State University.

Leslie Kay is a former Plain Dealer reporter and editor who joined the the Plain Dealer after earning a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Penn State. She held numerous positions at the newspaper, including suburbs reporter, beat reporter covering courts, general assignment reporter, assistant state editor and finally assistant metro editor, and won national, state and local journalism awards, including the Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association.

After leaving the PD in 1990, Leslie joined the Oppidan Group Inc. public relations firm, where she provided editorial, crisis management, media and community relations and media training services. She has also worked on numerous freelance editing and writing projects and was editor of and chief contributor to the 1992 edition of “A Citizen’s Guide to Cleveland.”

Leslie is married to Tom Andrzejewski, a former PD reporter, columnist and editor. They have one son, David.

Joan Mazzolini worked for nearly 19 years at The Plain Dealer, where she won numerous national awards. While at the paper she covered different beats including the business of medicine and hospitals, was on the investigative team, and covered the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections, when the voting machines failed. She previously worked at the now closed Birmingham (Al) Post-Herald, where she wrote a series of stories on private country clubs that ultimately forced the PGA to change its policy of holding tournaments at segregated clubs. (See https://tinyurl.com/SIMazzolini).

Joan was honored with an Investigative Reporters and Editors Inc. Medal for her work on discrimination at golf clubs. For other stories, she has received the Heywood Broun Award, a Polk Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, among other honors.

She received a bachelor’s degree in business administration from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Joan is an author and co-editor of this book. She is married to co-editor Dave Davis.

Robert “Bob” McAuley is part of a three newspaper family.

His father, Regis, was sports writer and the sports editor of the Cleveland News. Regis McAuley went on to the Cleveland Press, where he was baseball beat writer and executive sports editor.

Bob McAuley is a 43-year veteran of The Plain Dealer, working in circulation sales and as a newsroom copy boy, and a reporter covering cops, news, and investigations. He spent the last 25 years of his PD career as an executive in the newsroom, starting with city editor in 1981 and ending in 2006 when he was Washington and medical editor.

He is currently Chair of the Board at Rose-Mary Center, a Catholic Charities nonprofit that cares for children and adults with developmental disabilities in group homes in Cuyahoga County. (See: http://www.rose-marycenter.com).

Michael O’Malley is an award-winning journalist who began his career in 1979 at the Lorain Journal in Lorain, Ohio, where (as a rookie) he received a first-place statewide Associated Press award for reporting on asbestos hazards in industrial work places.

After two years at the Journal, Mike moved to Youngstown to write for the Youngstown Vindicator. In 1984, he joined United Press International, working in Cleveland and then in Albany, New York, where he covered the New York statehouse and the Gov. Mario Cuomo administration.

In 1990, Mike was hired by The Plain Dealer where he worked for 23 years covering various beats, writing on politics, crime, urban issues and slice-of-life features. Many of his stories focused on social justice issues, earning him the first ever award for “Social Justice Reporting” given by Greater Cleveland Community Shares, a nonprofit group that supports social justice causes.

Mike has received a number of awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Press Club of Cleveland. Mike left The Plain Dealer in 2013 in a mass layoff. His last assignment at the paper was religion writer.

Today, Mike is director of media relations for Cleveland City Council. He is a graduate of St. Edward High School in Lakewood and Cleveland State University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English.

Michael D. Roberts is a longtime Cleveland journalist and member of the Cleveland Press Club Hall of Fame. He worked as a reporter for The Plain Dealer, then as an editor, before leaving in 1973 and to become editor of Cleveland Magazine, a position he held for 17 years. In one capacity or another, he has worked with many of Cleveland’s best – and most colorful – journalists, including Joe Eszterhas, Brent Larkin, Terry Sheridan, Jim Parker, Jim Neff, John Tidyman, Evelyn Theiss and Dick Feagler, the “best journalist of his time,” he says. “He had a sense of the city like nobody else.”

Mike also has written many important stories.

He learned the craft of journalism at The Plain Dealer in the 1960s, covering civil rights violence, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the agony of the Middle East, and the shootings at Kent State. His upcoming book, “Hot Type, Cold Beer and Bad News,” is about those times and how they “tormented the soul of  a newspaper.” It is scheduled to be published later this year by Gray & Company. (See https://www.grayco.com).

Louis B. Seltzer (1897-1980) was the 38-year editor and the force behind The Press from 1928 until his retirement in 1966. “They called him ‘Mr. Cleveland.’ Dick Feagler, who worked for Seltzer, said in “Stop the presses.” “We didn’t. They did. They, the mayors, the governor, the President. To us, he was Louie. He did not strut the office in regal splendor. He popped in and threw a string of firecrackers on the floor of the city room. He hit reporters in the belly.” Seltzer wrote about his years at The Press in his autobiography, “The Years Were Good: The Autobiography of Louis B. Seltzer.” (See the e-book edition at https://tinyurl.com/CSULouisSeltzer).

Mary Anne Sharkey is a veteran journalist who works as a communications and public affairs consultant in Cleveland and Columbus. She began her newspaper career at The (Dayton) Journal Herald while attending the University of Dayton, where she graduated with a degree in English. After working in the combined Dayton Daily News and The Journal Herald Statehouse Bureau, she joined The Plain Dealer’s Statehouse Bureau. She was the first woman president of the Ohio Legislative Correspondents Association, was promoted to statehouse bureau chief and became editorial director in Cleveland. Mary Anne also was the politics editor and assistant managing editor at the PD.

Her post-newspaper career included working on campaigns for Governor, Mayor of Cleveland, Ohio Supreme Court, Congress, and statewide and local campaigns including two successful ones for Cleveland Metropolitan Schools and the statewide casino issue. She has also worked for Governor Bob Taft, Mayor Frank Jackson, Cleveland City Council, Cuyahoga County Council, JobsOhio, JACK Ohio casino, Cleveland State University, Ohio Board of Regents, Cuyahoga County Community College, and the Cuyahoga County Land Bank.

Mary Anne was a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, a board member of the International Women’s Media Foundation, and inducted into the Cleveland Press Club Hall of Fame. She continues to do commentary work, most recently for Public TV and WKYC-TV. She has written stories for People Magazine, George Magazine, Cleveland Magazine, and Ohio Magazine. She co-edited “Ohio Politics,” published by Kent State University Press.

Terence Sheridan is a former newspaper reporter, private investigator and freelance writer. He presently lives in Belgrade, Serbia, where he grows flowers and ties trout flies.

Harlan Spector worked for 23 years at The Plain Dealer, as an assistant metro editor and a reporter. He covered health and medicine, higher education and county issues. His reporting brought about changes at the The Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services Board of Cuyahoga County, the county Department of Children and Family Services, the Ohio Department of Health and other agencies. Today, Harlan teaches journalism at Cleveland State University and continues to write about health and medicine and other topics.

Kaye Spector is a recovering newspaper reporter. She began her 30-year news career as an editorial assistant at the former Columbus Citizen-Journal while a journalism student at The Ohio State University. Kaye worked for several newspapers in Northeast Ohio, including the Sun Newspapers, the Medina Gazette and the Elyria Chronicle-Telegram, before coming to The Plain Dealer in 2000.

At the Plain Dealer, Kaye most recently covered health and medicine. Her other beats included local news, disability issues, suburban life and nightside general assignment. Kaye also was an assistant metro editor for several years, managing teams of reporters covering suburban news and police and courts.

She earned her master’s degree in journalism in 2012, and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists, serving on the Cleveland chapter’s board and as chapter president. Kaye now works in marketing for a Cleveland-based hospital system. She and her husband, Harlan, also a longtime PD journalist, live in Shaker Heights with their son.

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Scott Stephens has been a journalist and communications professional for more than 40 years. He has worked at newspapers and publications in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio, including 18 years at The Plain Dealer.

In 2009, he won the National Headliner Award for education reporting. In 2010, the Education Writers Association awarded him second-place in national beat reporting. He has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

He is currently executive director of communications and public relations for the Shaker Heights City School District in Ohio. Previously, he worked at the Chicago Public Schools as executive director for strategic communications. He came to Chicago after serving on the public affairs staff of the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C.

While at The Plain Dealer, he served six years on the International Executive Council of The Newspaper Guild/Communications Workers of America, the largest media union in North America. He and his wife, photographer Christine “Chris” Stephens, have three adult sons and two grandsons.

Gail Stuehr is a journalist and public relations practitioner with specialties in media relations, publications, science, technology, medicine and education. She attended the University of Michigan School of Journalism and Kent State University, where she was a member and president of Theta Sigma Phi, a national honorary fraternity for women in journalism. After graduation and marriage, she joined the Cleveland professional chapter of TSP, later Association for Women in Communications, Inc., and served in several positions, including as president in 1975 and 1976.

After a decade of freelancing, for Cleveland Magazine, The Plain Dealer and the Southeast Sun, among others, she joined Case Western Reserve University in 1979, covering science and technology before beginning an 16-year career as director of public relations at the CWRU School of Medicine. She also served as communication coordinator of Cleveland-Heights – University Heights City Schools and marketing manager of United Way Services. Currently, she is a reporter with the Lake County Tribune.

Gail is a member of the Press Club of Cleveland and past member of Society of Professional Journalists.

Evelyn Theiss has been a journalist and writer for more than two decades. She spent 23 years as a reporter at The Plain Dealer, where her beats included being the politics writer, covering the national conventions and the presidential race of 1996; reporting on the Cleveland city schools and Mayor Michael R. White and being a feature writer. She also was the fashion editor from 2000 to 2005 and was covering the New York fashion shows on 9/11. She filed her first story from Manhattan within a few hours of the planes hitting the Twin Towers. In her last three years at the PD, Evelyn was a medical reporter.

She is now a writer and senior communications strategist at University Hospitals.

While at The Plain Dealer, she was the first reporter in 40 years to get an interview with Ron Haeberle, the reclusive photographer who exposed Vietnam’s My Lai massacre with his photos. This spring, Evelyn wrote a news feature for FOTO, the new Getty/Life Images website, on the 50th anniversary of the My Lai massacre and Haeberle, whose photos changed history. New information she discovered this year about that infamous day in 1968 made the story even more poignant. (See https://tinyurl.com/FOTOmylai).

For the last 10 years, she has been a correspondent for the national magazine Organic Spa, writing features on health and wellness, and travel. She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Kent State University and, last December, her master’s degree in urban studies from the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University.

Stuart Warner has developed a national reputation as an editor and teacher of literary journalism. He has lectured on writing at Harvard, Duke, Columbia, The Poynter Institute, the National Writers Conference and many other venues.  He taught full-time at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

He has written, edited or supervised three Pulitzer Prize-winning projects and edited three other Pulitzer finalists. He was the lead writer of the 20,000-word narrative, “The Goodyear War,” which was the centerpiece of the Akron Beacon Journal’s 1987 Pulitzer-winning effort. He edited and supervised the Beacon Journal’s 1994 Pulitzer Gold Medal winning project, “A Question of Color.”  At the Plain Dealer,  he edited Connie Schultz’s columns that won the 2005 Pulitzer for commentary and he edited Schultz’s 25,000-word series “Burden of Innocence,” which won the Robert F. Kennedy Award for social justice reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer in feature writing. He also edited the columns of Regina Brett, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2008 and 2009.

Overall, he has edited stories that won more than 70 national awards and regional awards, including a 2018 Polk Award for revealing that Motel 6 was handing over its guest lists to ICE in Phoenix. He has four times been named best columnist or essayist in Ohio by the Press Club of Cleveland.

Warner’s 49-year career has included stops at the Lexington Herald-Leader, Rocky Mountain News, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Plain Dealer, AOL News, Huffington Post and the Arizona Republic.  He is currently is editor in chief of Phoenix New Times. He was inducted into the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame in 2012.

William “Bill” Wynne is an award-winning photographer and photojournalist. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Bill was a student at West Technical High School, studying horticulture and photography. After graduating, he served as an aerial photographer, lab technician, and camera operator as part of the photo reconnaissance squadron of the U.S. Air Force during World War II, which included stints in the Southwest Pacific and the Far East.

Bill also worked as a photographer for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

He worked as a photographer for The Plain Dealer for about 31 years, capturing moving images of political and social significance, as well as nature and ordinary moments in daily life. A social justice advocate, he won numerous awards for his work, including the National Conference of Christians and Jews Brotherhood Prize. Bill also was part of the Plain Dealer investigative team that exposed the deplorable conditions and abuses at Lima State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in the 1970s, inspiring then Governor John Gilligan to open an investigation into abuses of patients at the institution. Nearly 30 employees ended up going to prison, and Bill and his partners received the Heywood Broun Award for their work, among other honors.

Bill married Margaret Roberts Wynne in 1946, raising nine children and sharing over 57 years together until her death in 2004. He recently celebrated his 96th birthday.