This column subject was prompted when I read the obituary of my friend Ed Hale in the Jan. 8, 2018 issue of the Enterprise.

Sorry about the cliche, but he really was a newspaperman’s newspaper man, how lucky I was to hook up with Ed when he owned and edited The Lake Placid News with his wife, Barbara, as general manager. She was always at his side.

The immediate feeling when meeting Ed was that you were meeting someone special. He would fold that tall, lanky frame of his into his office chair and with a soft, deep voice and a laid-back demeanor just had you from hello. I don’t have room to list all of his degrees, well maybe his degree in journalism from Columbia and his Ph.D. in political science from the State University of New York at Albany, and he had many careers in the newspaper business.

My 23-year career with the Enterprise had ended in 1974 and later when I met Ed I did a couple of feature stories for the Lake Placid News … and then this happened.

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A sensational series of stories

On April 13, 1977, Ed covered the front page of the LPN and a good piece of the inside pages about the state of the New York state Corrections Department … and those stories changed the entire system for female prison guards.

There was a long feature story on page one by Gary Spencer with this lead sentence: “Female guards are a very new thing at male prisons and their appearance there has provoked a mixed response.”

Richard Nordwind wrote a page one story about Camp Adirondack with this lead: “Prison is no place for dreamers. The grim daily routine of prison life doesn’t allow much time for illusion or false hopes.”

Ed’s editorial that week carried the title; “For Humanity, Dignity and Equal Opportunity” — the lead paragraph – “As the Lake Placid-Saranac Lake area emerges as a criminal-justice center with two prisons at Ray Brook, local citizens must deal with the special problems that accompany such institutions. And the authorities who close the doors upon the prisoners must open them to the community.”

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Jane blew the whistle

Ed gave my story the lead on page one — again, it was happenstance that I knew Jane Weeks when she a narcotics officer at the Ray Brook Narcotics Rehabilitation Center.

Talk about a tough woman … she could have lead a woman’s movement and I guess she pretty much did when she essentially told the State of New York — “you can take this job and shove it.”

Her stand changed the rules immediately for New York state female correction officers … they no longer were assigned the shower watch or required to perform strip searches. Those new rules already existed for federal female correction officers.

This little weekly newspaper paper was driving the state corrections department nuts. I had a few friends in Dannemora, outers not inners, who on any certain day when a notice would be pinned on the bulletin board saying like, ‘don’t talk to reporters’; I would have a copy of that bulletin that same night…and it often seemed to coincide with that week’s publishing deadline.

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(Below is the text continued from the article in today’s image)

“of the members were equally as eager as members of the Department of Corrections Services to prove that women should not be employed in the men’s facilities.

“At the time I resigned, some union people contacted me and wanted some publicity, apparently hoping the press would slant the news in favor of the union while revealing the terrible things the department had done.

“The department was careful to throw responsibility on the prison administration for their policy of equal job assignments. But if one of the females had been raped, the department would have said that good judgment had not been used.

“The union was responsible for my resignation because of the job being pushed to the point of endangering my life to satisfy union members that I was receiving no special treatment.” [The above is an excerpt, the story is longer.]

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Where is Jane today?

It is uncanny the things that happen to me regarding this column. Without going into those trivial happenings, I was in the basement during our flood, and moving a box of stuff found this 1977 Lake Placid News … it was a couple of weeks before that I had read about Ed Hale’s passing.

So I wonder aloud to myself? Jeepers, creepers, I wonder whatever happened to Jane Weeks? After all, 40 years is a long time not to hear from a friend.

As the saying goes, “you can’t make this up” –

About one week later I get a facebook message from Jane Weeks … so help me, I was speechless … and you all know that is an unusual state for me to be in …

Until recently Jane has been living in Central Square, just north of Syracuse. She had put in 29 years with the state serving most of that time as a Safety Security Officer. She retired at age 55 and said: “oh, boy, I have loved retirement. I told she was a determined, strong woman…so here is what happened next:

“I woke one morning in April last year and just like that said I am moving. My friends could not believe it. Drove myself to Tennessee [where she had friends] and bought a house in a couple of days. I went back home, packed up a whole house and put it on the market…the ,loaded my three cats and dog into the car and drove straight through to my new home.

Jane concluded: “I totally love the weather, after Syracuse, this is wonderful!”