The County Line
Hamilton County won’t be quite the same without Don Jellison, the dean of local sportswriters, who died last weekend.
For more than half a century Don covered sports in our county like the proverbial blanket. If you wanted local sports, you read Jelly’s sports.
He brought newspaper readers results of every sports contest at every county high school. That was not an easy job, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Although Don turned 80 this year, he never quite retired. In fact he, along with son Jeff, launched the publication you are reading here when he was in his 70s.
I’m going to miss Don, and I’m not the only one, not by a long shot. I’ll miss his sports stories like so many others will, but I’ll miss him on a more personal level as well. We worked together off-and-on since 1964.
Don was already sports editor of the Noblesville Daily Ledger when I got a job on the newspaper staff right out of college. Although I enjoy high schools sports, I didn’t do sports at the Ledger. But, on a small staff we had a lot of contact with one another. We tried to help each other if one of us got wind of a story the other might want to pursue. We would good naturedly spar over politics and sports. Since Don was a Noblesville grad and a Democrat, and I was a Carmel grad and a Republican, we sometimes saw things a little differently, but always with good humor.
In more recent times when Don and Jeff started the Reporter, I was asked to write a general interest column. We call it the County Line in honor of our Ledger mentor Jim Neal who wrote a column by that name for many years.
As most readers know, Don hasn’t been able to keep up his writing during most of the past year. He wanted to get back to it, and I encouraged that when visiting with him at Harbour Manor over these past months. But, each time he began recovering from a bout of pneumonia, he suffered another setback.
Now, with Don having left the scene, another chapter in Hamilton County history closes. There will never be another Don Jellison, and county sports coverage will never be quite the same.