Southeast Missourian's Sullivan retiring after 45-year journalism career

He has a borderline obsessive hatred of squirrels. He's also the rare lover of the much maligned fruitcake. He grew up in the Ozarks "over yonder," and once a year he tells anyone who'll listen to play golf downtown for a good cause.

These are the types of things that Joe Sullivan has written about in his slice-of-life column, "River City Journal," for years.

While the column itself will continue, Sullivan will retire from the Southeast Missourian on Thursday, ending a 45-year-career in which he worked in big cities like New York and Dallas and smaller Missouri towns with names like Nevada and Liberty.

The last 16 years of his career -- the longest stretch he and his wife Marge stayed anywhere -- he has worked for the Southeast Missourian as editor and most recently as editorial-page editor.

"Joe has been the rock of the Southeast Missourian newsroom for 16 years," said publisher Jon Rust. "Knowledgeable, smart, witty -- dry, very dry -- he has been a joy to work with and a calm, steady leader."

For the past two years, Sullivan's focus has been on managing the Opinion page and working with other Rust Communications newspapers throughout the Midwest, Rust said.

"Thankfully, he won't be going far, and we'll still be able to enjoy his musings in the newspaper each Friday," Rust said.

For his part, Sullivan said retiring was a decision he made two years ago, knowing that 65 was around the corner.

"I just knew that when I turned 65, I would have 45 years in this business and I knew things were changing and there were others who could do it better than I could," Sullivan said.

But in 1965, when the young man from the small farm near Piedmont, Mo., stumbled into the profession, he seemed a custom fit.

Sullivan thought he was going to be an English teacher. But when he got out of college, there were no teaching jobs. He had worked at the student newspaper and wrote a weekly column there, and a professor told him he held promise.

So he applied at a newspaper in Liberty, Mo., and was hired after he wrote a caption -- or cutline -- for a photograph in which all the words were spelled correctly.

"I didn't even know what a cutline was," Sullivan said. "But he told me, 'You spelled every word right. You're hired.'"

Sullivan went from Liberty to the Kansas City Star, where he spent a summer internship writing obituaries before he became a general assignment reporter. But it was the relentless fact checking the Star required of its obit writers that made a lifelong impression on Sullivan.

Sullivan especially remembers calling the despondent family members to read the obits to them to check for accuracy, as was the Star's policy.

"I can't think of a better learning experience about the need to get the facts right," he said.

'Nice career trajectory'

It was there that Sullivan met one of his mentors, Tom Eblen, who was assistant city editor. Eblen and Sullivan struck up a friendship that has lasted. Eblen, whose own newspaper career has spanned 51 years, was inducted into the Kansas Newspaper Hall of Fame this year.

"When he wrote obituaries, Joe proved to be quick and accurate," Eblen said. "Those are virtues we pride ourselves in. But I knew he showed promise and he would go on to do a lot of other things. I thought he had a very nice career trajectory."

After he worked at the Star for a couple years, Sullivan took a job for the Wall Street Journal, working in their Dallas bureau and later in New York, where he was a copy editor. It was there that he made a friend, Ted Stanton, who soon hired him as managing editor of a daily newspaper in Idaho.

But as Sullivan and his wife started having children, they wanted to move back to Missouri to be near their parents so their children could know their grandparents.

He worked in papers in Nevada, Independence, Maryville and Topeka, Kan., as editor of the Capital Journal. He worked for Stauffer Communications and other places in newsrooms and, in some cases, as publisher.

In 1994, he took a job in Cape Girardeau as editor of the Southeast Missourian. He had met Gary Rust and had been impressed. He remembers at one publishers meeting Rust said "exactly what I had wanted to say."

He worked with many reporters during his time here, several who have gone on to larger markets.

Chris Stanfield, for example, is the senior interactive producer for NASCAR.com, which is owned by Turner Sports. He has also worked as photo editor in St. Louis, Columbia, Mo., Milwaukee and Atlanta.

Stanfield said he learned a lot from Sullivan.

"He let me make mistakes," Stanfield said. "That was a good thing. Joe always saw the importance of the staff being a team, a team working toward the same goals. Not to say he didn't have an opinion; he did. He never had a problem expressing it, and I always thought he was fair. In this day and age, what else can you ask for?"

But it's this day and age that doesn't have Sullivan lamenting leaving journalism.

"It's the people that make any job bearable," he said. "But it's changing. The younger generation gets their news from so many ways, and newspapers are working hard to get information using some of these methods."

At this stage in life, Sullivan said, he's not up on social media like Facebook and Twitter.

"Someday I may learn how to get my news on my phone, but right now I'm just not interested," he said. "I'd rather just read my newspaper."

smoyers@semissourian.com

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