2 employees mark 4 decades at Eagle
Two people are marking four decades of continuous employment at the Butler Eagle.
Dave Heastings, city editor, and Glenda Protch Stitt, in the advertising department/administrative assistant, started working at the newspaper in March and April in 1973, respectively.
Both have experienced many changes since then.
Heastings, 62, of West Deer Township was a reporter for 15 years, covering Butler and South Butler County school districts, Butler city government, Butler County commissioners, public housing issues, and criminal and civil courts.
Since 1988 he has been city editor with responsibilities of assigning reporters stories and editing their stories.
He also wrote a weekly column for several years in the 1990s.
He was part of the early computerization of the newspaper industry when the Butler Eagle installed one of the first newsroom computer systems in the nation.
Heastings also has seen the changes with color photography, enhanced printing quality, and the use of the Internet in news gathering.
He is married to former Eagle reporter Sally R. Miller, who is a family law attorney in Pittsburgh.
Stitt, 59, has had about a half-dozen jobs at the Eagle.She began in dispatch, taking advertising materials to businesses. She also learned how to operate the newspaper's telephone switchboard, which at that time used cords to plug into the telephone board.Stitt became a classified ad taker when they were written down by hand, something which has been done by computers for a number of years.Next she worked with mail subscriptions and accounts receivable.For 15 years she has handled legal advertising and now lays out the advertising on the pages of the numerous publications that the Eagle prints.She has been the secretary for Vernon L. Wise Jr., who is chairman of the Eagle Printing Co., for a number of years.Stitt lives in Franklin Township with her husband, Don, who she met at the Eagle. He was a journeyman printer in the composing department, and they met on her third day at work.They have two children, a son, Paul Stitt of Butler, and a daughter, Jodi Beltrami, her husband, Michael and son, Brayden, of Portersville.
