Reading Eagle Writer Visits PA Women's Press Association

From soup kitchens and Pennsylvania Dutch-dialect plays to dandelion meals, Reading Eagle writer Ron Devlin has covered his share of interesting stories.

Devlin shared his experiences last week with a group of female writers from the Pennsylvania Women's Press Association during a lunch at in Towamencin.

Devlin is a veteran of The Morning Call, where he spent 33 years as a feature writer.

With The Reading Eagle, Devlin settled into a niche of covering super-local news, whereas his old tenure was focused on topical news and crime.

Most of Devlin's work can be found in the "Neighbors" zoned page on Mondays in The Reading Eagle.

In the beginning of the meeting, Devlin shared one of his secrets for finding great stories: The Merchandiser.

In The Merchandiser's community calendar, Devlin spotted an event featuring naturalist "Porcupine Pat" and a "tyke hike" at a conservation district.

"I'd like to know who 'Porcupine Pat' is and how he got to be," said Devlin.

It was a similar trek that led Devlin to write about Berks County Pennsylvania Germans and their ham and dandelion suppers.

"It sounds interesting," he said. "I had asked them, 'Where do you get the dandelion?' and they said 'Oh, the church cemetery.' I wondered if it would be petrified or something. Formaldehyde. Who knows? But it was a decent featured story. People in Kutztown love these stories."

He also remarked about joining the Virginville Grange, where he wrote about their popular soup kitchen.

"Everything going on there, they call me," he said. "I write a lot about the Pennsylvania Dutch. Berks County still has a strong PA German presence there."

So, he wrote about a play recently conducted in Pennsylvania German.

"Nobody under 50 knows the dialect, even the lead didn't know it," he said.

Devlin said he identifies stories with the way you see the world.

"Whatever your personal view is, these stories pop out at you," Devlin said. "They are about people: why they do it and what they do. The focus is on people, and in order to do that, you sort of have to be interested in it."

That is why Devlin does stories like a family jigsaw puzzle night at Longswamp Elementary or delves into the Berks County-based history behind the Lady Liberty dime.

"Sometimes you get readers submitting stories to you. Sometimes you pick up stories on your own. It's a matter of things that interest you as you go along," Devlin said.

PWPA member and freelance writer Kathy Clark said a good feature story has to do with the writer's personality.

"A lot of reporters are just about facts. They don't have curiosity or warmth," Clark said. "You have to be able to create it so other people like it."

Devlin's career in writing began when he had an ambition to be a social studies teacher. In 1965, he sold his high-performance GT to go to Penn State.

After graduation, he joined the anti-war revolution. He found himself at age 30 and unable to find a teaching job.

He tended bar for a while, until a friend told him there was an opening for a reporter at The Morning Call. He got a job typing obituaries and impressed the editor.

"He said, 'Come back tomorrow.' I went back for 33 years," he said.

There was a time when Devlin felt he wasn't recognized nearly as much he he should. He started to do stories he wanted to do, and run with his own ideas for stories.

"When I started to write about people, I could see that the people wrote the story," he said. "It was dignified. There was something meaningful for them."

A discussion fell on younger writers and their approach to journalism. Devlin believed that young reporters are great writers, but they are not given the opportunity to write about what they want.

He added that page designers aid in the downfall of papers by "drawing lines and we fill in the boxes."

"That wasn't that way in the old days. If you had a big story, you got knocked off the front page," Devlin said. "The stories are out there; you just have got to find them."