“Even as a paper boy, you were working for the Dayton Daily News,” Peckolt said. “When you work for somebody, if you mess up, you put a poor image on them, not just yourself.”
When Peckolt was stationed in Germany in 1955, his grandmother insisted on continuing his newspaper reading habits even overseas and would send him the paper every day.
“It was something from home besides the “Stars and Stripes” (Armed Forces newspaper). In Germany in 1955, it was still tore up quite a bit. It was nice to have a paper from home. It kept you in touch with home. You’d have some guys say ‘Hey let me read it too, because I miss home too.’ It was something different than what the government was putting out. … You read and you keep in contact with where you’re from. You’d read and say ‘Oh I know him or I know her!’ … I’d get done with it, they’d (fellow soldiers) take it and you’d see it scattered all over the barracks when they were done reading.”
After serving in the Army, Peckolt worked at NCR and then for 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic on Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Many of the fire safety articles Peckolt authored even made it to publication in the Dayton Daily News.
“We’d say, hey let’s save lives through education,” Peckolt said. “It’s better than going in there and have to drag them out. … It was a good job.”
To finish the 120th year of the Dayton Daily News this month we are featuring stories of some of our lifelong subscribers. Read them all at DaytonDailyNews.com
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