For as long as I could remember the Cleveland Plain Dealer has been a part of my life. The words on the newsprint mean more to me than just ink on paper. I guess you can say my love affair with the Plain Dealer started when I was around 6-years-old. That is the earliest memory I have of my grandfather reading the Plain Dealer in the morning sitting at his dining room table. It was a well-known rule in our family that no one touched the Plain Dealer before my grandfather had a chance to read it. Yes, even the comics.

And, by read it, I mean he looked at every word on every page of every section. When he had to get up from the table, he would just use an ink pen to mark his place. It took him hours to read one paper.

One day I asked him why he read that newspaper everyday. He simply told me it was what smart people did to stay smart and informed about the world around them. He was a news junkie – the first one I had ever known.

I believe he is the reason why I am a modern-day news junkie. I write for a smaller paper to the west of the Plain Dealer and many times we overlap on story coverage, but I still read the Plain Dealer because it is a part of who I am. I guess you can say I owe my career to my grandfather, Odis Gordon, and Connie Schultz.

I was about a year or so into my time in college and Connie wrote “Losing Lisa”, a 26-part series that chronicled the last year of a young, dying mother’s life. It ran in November 1998 and I recall vividly racing to get the paper every day so I could read that day’s installment. I often did it over a slice at Rascal House or a sandwich at Panini’s. I attended Cleveland State, a stone’s throw from the Plain Dealer. 

“Losing Lisa” was the most riveting piece of journalism I had ever read. It made me laugh and cry each day as well as pulled emotions from me I didn’t think I had. Shortly after the last story ran I wrote Connie an e-mail telling her how much I enjoyed the series, how I wanted to be a journalist and how her words spoke to the very essence of what I thought great feature writing should be – thought-provoking and captivating.

A few days later, Connie and I had lunch at the Plain Dealer and we talked about why I wanted to be a writer. I can’t quite remember what she said to me, but I remember how I felt sitting with her inside the cafeteria of the mighty Plain Dealer. It reminded me of how I felt at home there when years earlier I would hop a bus downtown to attend a Saturday morning journalism workshop Plain Dealer staffers put on for high school kids. During the time of the workshop, I faced a personal dilemma and the writers that volunteered to work with the students encouraged me to write about it. It was the most cathartic way for me to deal with something that was so painful and difficult for me.

So, here I am more than 10 years later and wondering where I would be without the Plain Dealer. I stand behind a pledge to save the Plain Dealer because in so many ways the Plain Dealer saved me. It gave a lost little girl some direction and a career path to follow. 

Cleveland is a better place because of the Plain Dealer, because of the work of all of the writers, photographers, copy editors and editors. If we lose the Plain Dealer, it would be as if we have lost our voice because the Plain Dealer speaks the words Cleveland needs to say and hear. I can freely tell the world I was raped when I was 16 and I am a survivor because Joanna Connors removed the stigma associated with the crime by sharing her own story. I thank God everyday for my health because a young mother like Lisa Hearey died so young, with so much love in her heart for her family and she so graciously allowed her story to be shared with the world. When I go to work each morning, I know it’s because I am living my purpose and that purpose was revealed through the Plain Dealer. I truly believe the Plain Dealer has more stories to tell, more people to save and more lives to change. Simply put – losing the Plain Dealer is not an option.