T. Perry Wesley

1981

T. Perry Wesley, editor emeritus of the Spencer (Ind.) Evening World and a native of Kentucky, has spent most of his 50 years as a journalist in Indiana.

As editor and publisher of the Evening World and later as editor for a total of 33 years, he dedicated his efforts to the betterment of the newspaper and the community which it served.

Shortly after becoming owner of the Evening World, he decided the little newspaper could not compete for national and international news with the big city papers that circulated in Spencer and Owen County. So he left the news of the outside world to those newspapers which had more space and resources and dedicated the Evening World to reporting news at home as completely as possible.

He also kept others informed about events in Owen County as a correspondent for the big city newspapers.

Always busy as a newsman, Wesley found time to serve the community and state in many ways. He was a member of the Indiana Democratic Party’s platform committee five times and secretary of the Bloomington Hospital Board of Directors and a member of the governor’s commission for the study and revision of state mental health laws.

His long career, certainly not yet finished, was capped recently by the publication of his autobiography, Datelines and By-Lines. Its preface tells much about the character of the man. In it he recalls the poverty of his youth and that of his neighbors in Casey County, Kentucky: “So far as I can recall, no one in Casey County was on welfare…we were poor…we knew it and we lived with it. No one ever told us the world owed us a living, so we didn’t know it.”