“Best job of ’em all: Newspaper columnist,” writes Joe Caraher (’35 Education) in the introduction to East Side, West Side, All Around The Town, a collection of some 1,000 columns he has written for Northwest newspapers over the past half century.
If you’ve bumped into Joe anywhere since he left Washington State College, it’s better than even money your name appears in his book. Caraher seldom forgets a name or a face, never forgets a good story.
Joe graduated with a five-year degree in education. He landed a job as sports editor and general assignment reporter with The Bellingham Evening News shortly afterward. Earning $18 a week, he was in hog heaven. He had a real newspaper job; was playing baseball at $5 a game with the semipro Model Movers; picked up another $7 (“for a little puff in The News”) from the local chiropodist who was promoting weekly wrestling matches in town; bought his first car; and got married November 11, 1935, to Marcella Dunnigan, a black-haired beauty he’d “spotted one Sunday at the 9 o’clock Mass.”
It was too good to last. The Evening News went belly-up after an ill-considered strike, and Joe didn’t get back into the newspaper business until the 1950s—four or five short-term jobs, a six-year hitch as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, and three children later. Old friend Walt Irvine asked Joe to join him as an owner of The Eastside Journal, a weekly newspaper in Kirkland, and that’s where this book—and Caraher’s column-writing—really takes off.
Joe named the column “East Side, Best Side, All Around the Town,” when he introduced it to Journal readers on the east side of Lake Washington. When he moved to Kalispell, Montana, as editor-publisher of The Daily InterLake for the Scripps League Newspapers in 1960, he made it “East Side, West Side,” and kept it that way, when he went on to the top job with The Herald & News in Klamath Falls, Oregon, in 1963. That’s the way it has stayed for 43 years now—and counting. Officially retired, Joe still writes a Sunday column for the H & N.
There are so many great stories in Caraher’s book: laughers and tearjerkers; historical stuff, including lots of World War II yarns with a personal twist; family memories that any reader will relate to his/her own life, and column after column of just wonderfully warm, folksy writing. You’ll know many of the people Joe writes about, and you’ll feel as if you’ve known a lot more after you’ve read about them. Caraher writes with great empathy. “Touch,” they call it in the trade. One of Joe’s prized possessions is a letter from the late, great San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen. The envelope is addressed to “Joe Caraher, A Real Columnist.”
If you’re looking for famous—or at least well-known—names, East Side, West Side, All Around The Town is a mother lode. Joe writes of Col. Ross Greening and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, and Marine Gen. John Kinney, two old WSC classmates, who became genuine heroes in WW II. He has some good stuff on Bill Mauldin (Up Front with Mauldin), the most famous battlefront cartoonist of the war, and Andy Rooney (yes, he of 60 Minutes). Caraher met both of them during his two years in Italy with the 12th Air Force. (You’ll laugh out loud at Joe’s exchange with Rooney on Edward R. Murrow.) And if you are of an age to remember the Timeout for Tiede columns in The Daily Evergreen, Joe’s lines on their author, Tom Tiede ’59, whom he hired on at The Daily InterLake as a cub fresh out of college, are, shall we say, memorable! Tiede went on to win the Ernie Pyle Award as a war correspondent in Vietnam.
Did I tell you Joe does some cartooning in his book? His best effort is from his “Memories of Rome, ’44-’8l.” Two guys are standing in front of a ticket kiosk outside the Colosseum. One guy is wearing a suit and has on a derby; the second guy is attired in a Roman toga, has one of those Laurence Olivier-Julius Caesar haircuts, and is wearing strap sandals. A billboard reads:
LIONS AT HOME
vs. Saints, Oct. I
vs. Tigers, Oct. VIII
vs. Cougars, Oct. XX.
The guy in the derby says to the ticket-seller: “Signorina . . . two on the XX yard line, please!”
Joe adds a postscript: “After first visiting the Colosseum, it was easy to see the Saints didn’t have any homefield advantage.”
For more information, contact the Student Book Corporation, 509-332-2537.
Richard B. Fry is former manager of the WSU News Service and author of The Crimson and the Gray: 100 Years with the WSU Cougars