George E. Condon

(Literature)
1975 CLEVELAND ARTS PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

George Condon began his journalistic career at a time when writing a five-day-a-week opinion column for a newspaper was, if not common practice, at least far from rare. Yet even as his peers faded from the scene, Condon continued to produce his own daily musings and meditations. More important, he never lost the touch: his last columns in 1985 reflected the same wit, wisdom and amiable prose style as did his earliest efforts in 1962.

Characteristically, Condon’s good humor pervaded his work right up to the start of a new era in local journalisman era that would no longer feature his quotidian assessments of events of the day. With a byline as familiar to most Clevelanders as their own signature, it was Condon who chronicled the ups and downs of a city going through its most troubled and tumultuous years, and who helped the old town whistle past the graveyard of its bleakest times.

Although born in Massachusetts, Condon grew up in the Irish neighborhoods of Cleveland’s near West Side, and he spent his entire working career in the city that at various times he lectured, lampooned, lambasted and even loved. He joined the Plain Dealer in 1943 as a general assignment reporter, but he soon invented what he called the “highway beat,” hectoring Ohio gubernatorial candidate Frank Lausche into supporting construction of the state’s first major thoroughfare, the Ohio Turnpike.

As a reward for his efforts, he was named the newspaper’s radio-TV editor in 1948a time when there was but one television station in Cleveland. But he was given his own general-opinion column on the Op-Ed page in 1962, and for the next two decades he managed to do what few writers before or since have achieved: He earned the attention and respect of hundreds of thousands of habitual readers, and he did it five days a week, rain or shine. During those difficult years in the city, the only constants of a Cleveland morning were a cup of coffee and Condon’s column, a tasty concoction of news, opinions, impressions, insights, memoir, satire, pedantry and no small amount of whimsy. Even during the darkest hours of the 1960s and 1970when racial unrest, recession, population flight and even municipal default cast a pall over the city and its long-suffering residentsCondon kept a light burning for all those who believed that better times might lie ahead.

During his newspaper career George Condon won honors from the Press Club of Cleveland in four separate categories: public service, headline writing, humor and general column excellence. He received the Distinguished Service Award of the Society of Professional Journalists in 1980, and in 1990 he was inducted into the Press Club’s Journalism Hall of Fame.

Of the seven books he has authored, five are about Clevelandits history, its struggles, its failures, its triumphs. Few people have known the town better, from its founding in the 18th century to its renaissance in the 20th. Even fewer have been able to paint in words such engaging, enlightening and entertaining views of a community and its citizens, past and present. And no one will ever again do it with quite so tender a touch.

—Mark Gotllieb