Gelston still a messenger

Dan was back in town last week.
Dan who?
Dan Gelston.
If you’re still wondering “Dan who?” you either have a short memory or you weren’t living in Jay County circa the year 1999.
Dan Gelston was the sports editor of The Commercial Review prior to Ray Cooney.
More accurately, Dan was the much reviled sports editor of The Commercial Review prior to Ray.
During his brief visit last week, Dan reminded me of some of the details of his hiring.
Apparently, he’d applied for a sports reporting position at a paper I know in Ohio. When I was looking to fill a vacancy, a colleague in Ohio mentioned getting a strong resume from Dan.
He was — like many staffers in the realm of community journalism — just out of college.
Dan had grown up in New York state, but he’d gotten his degree from Kansas, which has an excellent journalism program.
I’m not sure whether it was New York or Kansas that didn’t mix well with Jay County, but whatever it was turned out to be close to toxic.
Dan had the misfortune of taking over the sports job at a time when Jay County High School sports were struggling a bit. Specifically, he started just before an autumn when the football team would have a very, very disappointing record.
On top of that, he started when the JCHS football team had a new coach. And as the team struggled, the coach tended to use his comments to the press  — i.e. Dan — to motivate the team. It didn’t work very well, and in a classic example of “kill the messenger” thinking, Dan took the fall instead of the coach.
By the end of the football season, I was already fielding phone calls from parents concerned about whether Gelston would be too negative in covering the basketball season to come.
I responded by asking if they’d talked to Dan about the issue.
After all, he was just a kid out of college.
The parental response, unanimously, was that they had not.
And at that point, I began to feel more than a bit ashamed of my community.
Here I’d hired this kid, he’d stepped on some toes, and instead of being forthright with him, the local contingent was working on nooses for a lynching party.
It didn’t get any better when basketball season started.
Though the JCHS team was good that year and Dan’s coverage was both straightforward and positive, the die was cast. Folks had decided that he was a bad guy.
He was a city slicker. He was an outsider. He was the other.
And Jay County treated him like crap, if you’ll pardon the expression.
I still remember taking photos at a high school basketball game and listening to taunts and catcalls from the JCHS “cheering section” aimed — by name — at a young sportswriter trying to do his job. And I will always remember that JCHS administrators turned their heads and declined to intervene in the face of what was clearly inappropriate student behavior.
It was not the high school’s finest hour.
But Dan hung on.
In fact, within a remarkably short time he caught the eye of The Associated Press.
A short stint at the Indianapolis bureau, covering the Pacers and the Colts, led to a move to Philadelphia with the AP.
Today, he covers all the Eagles home games, handles about eight or nine motorsports events a year, and never knows what’s coming up next. He’s covered the Final Four and the Olympics so far. In other words, he’s living a sportswriter’s dream.
And as to his memories of Jay County, they’re still remarkably positive given what he went through.
He’s still prepared to be a messenger, even when folks don’t like hearing the message.[[In-content Ad]]