Do Something

By AUSTIN LEWTER, Director, Texas Center for Community Journalism

I was thrilled to honor a friend last week at the TPA Convention and Trade Show in College Station. 

I nominated Dan Eakin for a Golden 50 Award and they let me present the award to him.  

Dan surpassed the 50-year mark years ago. He has logged 68 years in the newspaper business.

Dan began his career at the DeQueen Bee in his hometown of DeQueen, Arkansas when he was still in high school. He was a copy boy and typesetter. 

Dan graduated high school in 1957. He has been an ordained minister about as long as he has been a newspaperman and has devoted his life to working at community newspapers and preaching at small rural churches— predominately in North and East Texas. 

He has pastored more than 30 churches and performed more than 400 weddings and 300 baptisms during his time as a minister. He is currently the pastor at Woodrow Baptist Church in Silsbee.

Dan’s newspaper career is equally as prolific. 

It has included stints in Texarkana, Lufkin, Tyler, Wichita Falls, The Dallas Morning News, Pilot Point, Polk County, Carrolton, Red Oak, Coppell and Canton, to name a few. 

He and I previously worked together at Whitesboro. He turns 85 this month and is currently working full time as the editor of the Silsbee Bee.

Dan was at the Lufkin News when it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1977. He covered the Texas Legislature for the Tyler Morning Telegraph in the 1970s and was dispatched to Washington to cover Jimmy Carter’s inauguration. 

To date, Dan has either photographed or interviewed every Texas governor since John Connally. 

He owned and published East Texas Senior in the 1980s and early 90s — a niche publication that covered a dozen counties in the Piney Woods. 

I have always been amazed by Dan’s stamina and zeal to keep working. He is more than twice my age and there were times I felt like he was working me in the ground, because, in fact, he was.

He once told me his secret and it is some of the best advice anyone has ever given me out our business.

“You just have to do something,” he said. “This is a tough business. The work stacks up. Sometimes you get buried in it, but the only way to get it all done is to do something. Anything, but just do something. It really doesn’t matter where you start. Just do something. Always be doing something.” 

Dan has it figured out. They key to success is to “do something.” 

No matter the task, you have to jump in and get started. Do something. 

The more you do, the more momentum builds, the more you get done. 

Pretty soon, you look up and realize just how productive your day has been. 

The key to longevity is to “do something.”  

It’s the old physics cliché — body at rest, body in motion. The more you do, the more you keep doing. 

At the end of the day, the two words that can save humanity are “do something.” 

The American songwriter Harry Chapin once said, “The credo of my life is very simply, when in doubt, do something. The errors I make are going to be errors of commission, not omission.”Harry Chapin knew how to do something. 

He contributed a great legacy to the American songbook — “Cats in the Cradle,” “Taxi,” “WOLD” to name a few — before his early death at age 38. 

Chapin also worked tirelessly for charity. He donated more than 50% of his ticket sales to his foundation “World Hunger Year.” He raised more than $3 million in the last six years of his life in an effort to end world hunger. 

Harry Chapin did something. Dan Eakin does something. 

I am blessed to have Dan Eakin as a friend. I am proud of his achievement and am humbled to have been the one to present him with the award. 

More than anything his longevity in our business, and the ministry, inspires me to continue to “do something.” 

Always do something.