PEORIA -- Journalist Bill Conver died on Jan. 31 at age 92. He was a columnist, copy editor, assistant editor and more at the Peoria Journal Star for years until his retirement in 1982. He also was a founder of the Peoria Newspaper Guild, the union of reporters and circulation district managers at the PJS.
Here are colorful memories of Conver from retired Illinois Central College journalism professor Mike Foster:
Bill Conver was my first, and one of my best, teachers of news and feature reporting and writing and editing.
We first met in June 1964 when I, freshly graduated from Spalding as he had been 30 years earlier, came to the nightside newsroom as the ’64 PJS scholarship winner. He showed me to the copy boy’s chair and described that routine to me, wasting no words.
There I sat with Willard Johnson, the wire editor, to my left on the desk. Dan Shea was usually in the slot; Bob Liter was on the rim: great teachers, each of them.
When I returned after freshman year at Marquette, I began wiping the desk with copy paper and filling the paste-pots.
“What are you doing?” asked Bill. “You’re a reporter now.”
And so I was, dropped into the deep end of the pool, as it were, sink or swim.
With the help of Bill and city editor John R.C. Armstrong, I swam.
During vacation summers and Christmas breaks, I returned to the newsroom until 1969, when I moved to Milwaukee to get my MA in English.
After I joined the English faculty at ICC and advised the student newspaper there, Bill and the lessons he taught me informed my J-teaching from 1973 to 2005.
Outwardly gruff, Bill was generous and genial in truth. He evoked Porkypine, a favorite character from Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. “Rowrbazzle” indeed.
I still miss that ‘Sixties smell of hot lead type and fresh ink, of tobacco smoke and high anxiety. But Bill and the lessons he taught me that I passed onto others are always with me.
Rest in peace, Bill.
-- Mike Foster, Metamora, IL
Comments