Deserving of honor

Let me tell you about Walt.
I first met the guy back in 1978; that’s 34 years ago this spring for those of you keeping score.
We’d talked on the phone before we met, but those conversations were only prompted by problems.
Walt was the chief of communications for the Indianapolis bureau of The Associated Press.
As such, he was the guy we called when something went wrong with getting our AP report.
In those days, the report — known as the slow wire in our case — came over a telephone line at a speed of about 55-60 words a minute. Slow was the right word for it.
And if something went wrong and we needed to have a story retransmitted, it was a headache not just for us but also for every other newspaper on the slow wire in Indiana.
Walt could be a gruff traffic cop when it came to granting requests for retransmission, so you didn’t want to call him often.
We finally met face to face that spring at a meeting of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors. Connie and I attended a meeting at Clifty Falls State Park not knowing anyone and came back home with some great new friends, including Walt Tabak and his firecracker of a wife, Dot.
And a firecracker she was. Dot was little, but she knew how to make herself heard. She was very much a blue-collar woman, working at an electronics factory, but I never witnessed a social situation in which she was intimidated.
In the early 1980s, when I found myself serving as president of the Indiana Associated Press Managing Editors, Indianapolis Mayor Richard Hudnut was the featured speaker at a luncheon.
Mayor Hudnut, always a politician, turned to Dot over lunch and asked her how she thought he was doing as mayor. Was her trash picked up on time? Did city snowplows do a good job clearing her street?
It was the last thing he was able to say before the lunch was over. Dot had a laundry list of failures of Indianapolis city services, starting with the fact that the city forced her subdivision to pay for its own snow removal. I’ve never seen a politician regret asking a question so much in my life. He was happy when the plates were cleared and he could finally deliver his speech and get away from this tough little lady with such strong opinions.
Walt retired something like 20 years ago, and he lost Dot too soon after that.
But he hasn’t been forgotten by his friends in the news business.
Walt, after all, was the guy who shepherded a couple of generations of us from the era of the typewriter to the computer, from the slow wire to satellite dishes and beyond. He was the one essential person during a time of often chaotic transformation.
On Saturday, that essential role will finally get the recognition it deserves.
Sparked by retired AP bureau chiefs Andy Lippman and Paul Stevens, both of whom I had the pleasure of working closely with when they were stationed in Indianapolis, several of us pressed the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame to give Walt Tabak his due.
He couldn’t be a candidate for induction to the Hall of Fame because he never actually worked as a journalist, though he was on the technical end of the news business.
So a new category was created.
The first-ever distinguished service award of the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame will be presented to Walter Tabak during ceremonies at Indiana University in Bloomington. It will be a great day for Walt and his family. The only thing that could make it better is if Dot could have been there.
My guess is she’ll be there in spirit.[[In-content Ad]]