TPA honors H. V. O’Brien with Frank Mayborn Award

DENTON – The Texas Press Association honored veteran newspaper publisher and book author H.V. O’Brien with the Frank W. Mayborn Award for Outstanding Community Leadership.
TPS President Jim Bardwell presented the award June 12 at the concluding luncheon of the TPA Convention and Trade Show in Denton.
O’Brien, editor and publisher of Eastland County Today, noted that he and his wife, Gaynell, have been associated with the newspapers in Eastland County since 1962. 
O’Brien also pointed out that his career hasn’t been “a one-man circus,” praising his wife and partner, who kept their home and was also the family’s “bookkeeper, bill payer, billing clerk and checkbook balancer” as well as “wife, mother to children, and total encourager to the Old Man who was ... on the sidewalks by day, hustling ads and picking up story ideas” and spending evenings at city, school and other meetings.” 
Mrs. O’Brien was unable to attend the award ceremonies but she and their son Vance would have the opportunity to see the event by video.
The Mayborn Award is presented annually to a publisher or newspaper executive who has displayed outstanding and exemplary leadership to the community. The award includes a $3,000 journalism scholarship to help a student at a college of the recipient’s choice. O’Brien chose the school where his two granddaughters are students, Texas Tech University in Lubbock.
Joining O’Brien at the awards luncheon were his daughter and son-in-law, Jon and Amy O’Brien Glenn, and four grandchildren, Laura Leigh Freeman, Leigha Noel Freeman, Levi Freeman and Luke Freeman.
O’Brien, who has spent the bulk of his career in Eastland, was born in the nearby community of Carbon.
In an interview published in the Texas Press Messenger in 2016, O’Brien said that one of his high school teachers helped him get a job sweeping floors at the Cisco Press, and he was taken under the wing of publisher J.W. Sitton.
“He recognized that I needed a trade, so he sat me down at the Linotype, and after many squirts and many jaunts I finally mastered that,” O’Brien recalled.
Two years later he moved to Abilene, where he worked nights setting type at the Reporter-News and attended Hardin-Simmons University during the day. After graduation he was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he earned a top-secret security clearance and handled coded messages for the White House Army Signal Agency.
After his military service, O’Brien returned to Texas and the Reporter-News. He met and married Gaynell, and in 1961 his old boss and mentor, Sitton, hired him to run the Eastland newspaper, which Sitton had just acquired.
In 1968, Sitton sold O’Brien the newspapers in Eastland, Cisco and Ranger.
In the years to follow, O’Brien acquired newspapers in Rising Star, Baird and Gorman.
He also served in numerous community leadership roles, ranging from Chamber of Commerce president to school board member to mayor.
In 2013 he consolidated all his county newspapers into one, Eastland County Today. Combining the titles proved to be a sound economic decision, he said, and “We are putting out a super community newspaper.”
The Glenns help out at the newspaper and the family’s farm, with Amy serving as the newspaper’s general manager and Jon supervising the newspaper’s plant.
In a column about his experiences at the TPA Convention published in the June 17 edition of Eastland County Today, O’Brien confessed that in his haste in getting on the road to Denton following Eastland’s Chamber of Commerce banquet Friday night, June 11, he forgot to pack the new suit, shirt and tie his daughter had gotten for him to wear to the awards ceremony.
“To my last breath I will be trying to make amends for having been so addled in the quick departure - forgot the top flight-apparel and got away with the Old Rip Suit seen for many years,” he wrote.