Remembering a good friend

Chances are you never met Jack Powers. Your life would have been enriched if you had.

I first met Jack more than 25 years ago at a meeting of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors.

It was my first meeting with the group, and I was a little nervous about rubbing elbows with folks from big city newsrooms.

Jack swept that aside instantly, grabbing me by the shoulder and pulling me into a conversation about the news business that would go on for years.

To Jack Powers, it made absolutely no difference that I was editor of The Commercial Review in an out-of-the-way place called Portland and he was managing editor of The South Bend Tribune.

News was news. Newspapers were newspapers. As far as Jack was concerned, we were peers. And there was plenty to talk about.

He and his wife Barbara made Connie and me feel instantly at home. Though they were a generation older, putting the last of their ten kids through college while our twins were still infants, it didn’t matter.

For the next couple of years, Indiana’s APME group became a bigger part of our lives, bringing us into contact with friends from Evansville to Merrillville and dozens of places in between. I even found myself president of the organization for a couple of years.

But Jack Powers — with his personality, his integrity, and his vitality — was always at the core. More than once, the chance to visit with Jack was the real motivation for attending a state meeting.

Born in Brooklyn, he was a paratrooper in the Korean War and went to Notre Dame on the G.I. Bill. He emerged from the university and soon became a driving force on the Tribune staff.

Hard as it is to believe in this era of diversity, the Tribune newsroom in the early 1950s looked nothing like the ethnic, religious, and racial mix that is South Bend. It was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Then Jack Powers rolled in with his Irish Catholicism and brought the paper into a new era.

He ended up being managing editor of the Tribune for 27 years, a remarkable ride in this business, having had the good fortune to work for the Schurz family all that time.

We last spoke at length in 1990, when he’d given up the reins of the paper and had begun teaching journalism at Notre Dame. I was teaching journalism as an adjunct prof at Earlham, so again we had plenty to talk about.

Sorry to say, we lost touch after that. He moved into retirement; I found myself being pulled in other directions.

But the loss was real when I learned he died last week.

I was fortunate enough to know Jack Powers and call him my friend.

And my life was enriched immeasurably.[[In-content Ad]]