The small town scribe: Griffiths reflects on farm upbringing, news career in memoir

As someone who grew up in an era known for small, diversified family farming operations and financially thriving print media outlets, Parkersburg native Lawn Griffiths can be forgiven for waxing a bit nostalgic these days. The times have changed.
           
“One of the things I’m happy with is that I got to work in newspapers before they all went electronic and all went digital,” he said. “At the Courier, we were hot metal… man, that smell of ink was one of the first things that drew me to journalism.” 
           
In his memoir, Batting Rocks Over the Barn: An Iowa Farm Boy’s Odyssey, Griffiths explores his upbringing in rural Grundy County (a true newspaper guy, he doesn’t fail to mention that his late father Paul ran frequent ads in The Grundy Register), his humble journalistic origins with the Eclipse and a career that led to a long stint at the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier—working his way up to farm editor and state editor—beforehe moved on to the Phoenix area and retired at a paper in Mesa.
           
Griffiths, who received his degree from Iowa State University after graduating high school in 1964, was eventually drafted out of the Peace Corps and into the Army, completing a two-year stint and using the GI Bill to earn a Master’s from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. In 1972, he settled in about 20 miles from where he grew up, and that first job in Waterloo set him on a course that would lead him to rub elbows with famous luminaries like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.
           
Amidst all of the current turmoil and a certain ongoing investigation into untoward behaviors at the highest levels of government, it’s hard to ignore the fact that Griffiths came onto the scene during the same year that the Watergate scandal broke.
           
“We followed that closely, and it was kind of the inspiration for our era,” he said.
           
One of the memories that will always stick with Griffiths is a Jesup woman who was held hostage by the government of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran during the last year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and the young newsman developed a strong bond with her family that resulted in a series of intimately crafted, richly reported stories and a chance to meet the Iowan when she returned home. 
 
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