Griffiths reflects on farm upbringing, newsroom 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. Things 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—before he 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 twoyear stint and using the GI Bill to earn a Master’s from 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 result in rubbing elbows with famous luminaries like Mother Teresa and the Dalai Lama.

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