Thanks for these fine words from Plain Dealer columnist Ted Diadiun
In the summer of 1967, David Glenn Molyneaux walked off the picturesque campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and into a far different aesthetic: the smoke-filled cacophony of the newsroom of The Plain Dealer in Cleveland. He was assigned to the newspaper’s busy police beat on Payne Avenue, housed in a tiny, noisy room so shabby that David’s father wondered aloud why his son had bothered to go to college.
Fifty years and thousands of bylines later from all over the world, Molyneaux was inducted into the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame during a ceremony of the Press Club of Cleveland on Thursday (Nov. 2, 2017). #PressClubCleve
Molyneaux had majored in business economics, and he was also an editor of the campus newspaper, The Miami Student — a combination that would serve him well. In Cleveland, after two years in the Army (1968-70), he quickly began climbing the career ladder.
He graduated from the police beat and late-night rewrite bank to more high-profile reporting assignments, and then rose to day city editor, to city editor, to associate editor and chief editorial writer, to editor of the editorial pages, and, for the last 24 of his 40 years at the newspaper, to editor and chief travel writer of the city’s first and only stand-alone Sunday travel section.
As a reporter, David covered the criminal courts including trials that followed the May 4th, 1970 shootings at Kent State University; the building of the Justice Center, which won him an investigative award for stories influencing a change in the original design (including such indulgences as expensive bathroom layouts so judges would not have to listen to each other flush their toilets); and Cleveland City Hall, with all its tough neighborhood and racial politics stories. He also wrote occasional economics analyses about impacts on daily life from business and government actions and inactions.
As city editor, he oversaw the investigative series that led to Cleveland’s financial default in 1978 during the tumultuous years of Mayor Dennis Kucinich, who was a former colleague at The Plain Dealer. He served as editorial page editor during the election and early part of President Ronald Reagan’s first term. As travel editor he covered the invasion of Grenada (1983), the fall of the Berlin Wall and Iron Curtain (1989), and the opening of travel to South Africa. His stories on South Africa won him a Lowell Thomas Award for international reporting in 1995.
David ultimately became and remains president of the Society of American Travel Writers (SATW) Foundation, which oversees the annual Lowell Thomas journalism competition #LowellThomasAwards. He is a longtime member of SATW #satw. Since retiring from The Plain Dealer, he has continued his travel news reports for online and print clients, including a monthly gig writing about cruise trends for the Miami Herald.
David blogs regularly about his travels around the world (TravelMavenBlog.com) and edits a website dedicated to travel journalism (TheTravelMavens.com). His first byline in The Plain Dealer was in 1967. Fifty years later, in 2017, the bylines continued as a freelance writer, including an article on his experiences during the reopening of American travel to Cuba.
David lives in Shaker Square in Cleveland with his wife, Fran Golden, who is a prominent national and international travel writer. His two children, Miles and Rebecca, and five grandchildren, live in the Cleveland area.
He is a native of Oberlin, Ohio, where his father and his grandmother were born and where his great-grandfather, Miles J. Watson, started a hardware store in 1887. Watson Hardware remained in the family until the 1990s and still is going strong under different ownership but the same name. In high school, David attended Mercersburg Academy (1963), Mercersburg, Pa., on a working scholarship.
In the early part of the 20th century, David’s grandmother, Helen, attended Oberlin High School and Oberlin College with her childhood sweetheart, Roelif Loveland. A Marine in one war, combat reporter in another, poet, sportswriter, and editor at The Plain Dealer, Loveland was inducted into the first class of the Cleveland Journalism Hall of Fame in 1981.
Loveland had retired in 1965, two years before Molyneaux arrived at The Plain Dealer, when his grandmother told him that he had a long way to go to measure up to her old boyfriend.
