Newspaperman retires

WAUPACA –Robert “Bob” Cloud has retired from the Waupaca County Post as editor. He arrived in Waupaca on July 1, 1998 when newspapers were laid out with wax strips and photos were developed in a dark room.
He was born in Toledo, Ohio and moved around as a child as his father was a political campaign manager. He went to four different high schools in three states: Alaska, Ohio and Indiana. He studied history and philosophy at St. Louis University and he said this course of study helped his critical thinking later as an editor.
After college he worked for VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) in South Bend, Ind. Cloud worked on redistricting the city so the black population could have more voice, along with writing for a community newspaper.
After that stop, he changed gears and got a job as a national sales manager for Exhibitech, a firm that made displays for trade shows and museums. At the time he said he looked like a “ZZ Top groupie.” Cloud got a haircut and traveled the country recruiting dealers and training their sales staff. This meant he had to drive. Cloud was 30 years old and didn’t know how. He never had to learn as he lived in the city and walked, rode a bike or took a bus.
His first car was a lemon Ford Fairmont. “It broke down so much that my coworkers would look for me on the side of the road,” said Cloud. Later he drove a leased Toyota. He’s driven a Toyota Corolla ever since.

At Exhibitech he worked with Dave Allen, an oil painter and good friend. He left his career to pursue painting fulltime. “Whenever you do something like that, you take a risk. He kind of talked me into it. He knew I wanted to be a journalist. And so I did,” said Cloud.
He bounced around three small papers in to gain experience. “I would learn what I could learn and move on,” he said.
One editor was a mentor that taught him to write tight. Cloud had a penchant for writing long, elaborate, sophisticated sentences. “She broke that habit. I took pride in the fact on how my sentences were. John Milton is known for writing the longest sentence ever and I wanted to beat that. I stopped writing that way and learned to write short sentences and make my language flow more naturally like someone was speaking. It made sense,” said Cloud.
He became editor at the Berrien County Record in Michigan. He worked long hours and when they closed out a paper on Tuesday night; he and his colleagues would celebrate at a local pub.

Move to Waupaca

There was a lot of camaraderie but the paper was financially shaky. After Cloud got screwed out of a big bonus after a 75-hour work week during Christmas, he noticed an advertisement in Editor & Publisher magazine for an editor position in Waupaca.
He got the job and his salary doubled. Cloud arrived in Waupaca when the Waupaca County Post was owned by Scott Turner. “He drove me around Waupaca and I saw the King veteran’s home, the hospital, the high school, one of the parks. I stayed at a hotel and walked up and down the street and thought this was a nice downtown,” recalled Cloud.
There were three changes of ownership during his editorship. Turner sold the newspaper to Journal Communications in 2008 and later they sold it to the current owner, Multi-Media Channels (MMC).
“There was a lot of consolidation. When I first moved here, besides Waupaca, Weyauwega-Fremont had its own paper, Iola-Scandinavia, Manawa, Clintonville, New London had their own papers,” said Cloud.
He’s seen the technological changes in publishing. At a neighborhood newspaper in his early days, he described a long strip of paper with holes in it, like a punch card contraption, that was used in the printing process. Before digital photography, black-and-white photos were done in the dark room and color photos were processed at Walgreens.
The Internet changed how news was delivered. “When we first went on online with Journal [Communications], we were told IT would post all this stuff. They did not train us on it. We would send them the copy and nothing would get done. We had a picture of a guy ice fishing holding up a fish. That picture remained online on the homepage for over a year. Imagine what that fish smelled like after so long. Later when MMC took over, they trained us and the website really took off,” said Cloud.

Covering the community
Cloud liked to cover the crime beat. He covered embezzlement at the veteran’s home and in the Park and Recreation Department. “One of the most interesting murders when I first moved here was an old man fixing a lock on his door. His neighbor comes over and says he’s doing it all wrong and he kills him and drags the body into the garage. The son shows up looking for his father and the guy who killed him said, ‘Oh, I think he’s in the garage.’ He gets arrested. When he gets busted, he thinks he’s in trouble for not separating his recyclables and trash. He’s sent to an insane asylum. He really was insane. That was the first time I understood the plea of insanity. Sometimes it’s real, they really are insane,” said Cloud.
He also covered the Pick N’ Save robbery. “It was very well organized. Two kids—late teens or early twenties—they came in there with guns and threatened the clerks. It was late. They had somebody listening to the police scanner at the Waupaca Hotel. You had another person throwing a rock at the window of First National Bank to get the alarm to go off to distract the police,” said Cloud.
Cloud covered local politics: the good the bad and the ugly. He said the Town of Dayton was very contentious for a while and the meetings were extremely stressful. He covered the controversy surrounding removing the Little Hope dam and many other civic boards that did not get along.

“At one point, the Weyauwega-Fremont school board was totally divided. The school board members were suing each other. It divided the community. I covered a school board meeting. They fought about everything. Every single thing was a fight. They went into a closed session and came out still fighting. Things are much better now,” said Cloud.
“I think Waupaca has had well functioning government. I think Mayor Brian Smith—there is a reason why he gets reelected—he makes things happen. He’s a good mayor. And look at how much has happened in Waupaca that is positive—redeveloping downtown and a vibrant community. Its part of the reason that I moved here,” said Cloud.
He has high regards for the Waupaca arts community. Cloud was a longtime friend of Jack Rhodes. They both are cinema aficionados.
Cloud retired for health reasons and will move to Michigan to be closer to family. At press time of this issue, the Wisconsin Newspaper Association (WNA) sent a notice that Cloud won a first-place award in the 2024 WNA Foundation Better Newspaper Contest.