Stephen Michaelides writes. People who know Michaelides and have read his stuff say he’s pretty good at it. He has been writing most of his life ever since he was in the first grade when, having mastered cursive, he wrote and wrote and wrote: writing for the sheer joy of writing. It was a newfound pleasure awaiting later and better times when, upon discovering how quirky people were, Michaelides thought that the quirkiness of people might be a good thing to write about.
He spent four rather unexceptional years as an undergraduate
at Grinnell College (Grinnell, Iowa) where he majored in English Lit, wrote a
lot, dabbled in extracurricular activities, and graduated by the skin of his
teeth. In his spare time, when he wasn’t playing bridge at the student union or
drinking 3.2 beer with buddies at a local bar that never carded underclassmen,
he continued to write: fiction, non-fiction, you name it—even poetry; and in
1957, the year he graduated, one of his poems won an award. He cannot recall
the name of the award or the poet who selected his poem best of the bunch or
what the poem was about. What he does remember is that he was pleased with the
recognition: his name appeared with other honorees on the graduation program.
He sold the poem to a local magazine for five dollars.
The Army drafted him in 1958. He spent the next two
years—still the writer—helping field officers edit infantry and tank strategy
lesson plans for junior officers assigned to Command & Staff, Fort Knox,
Kentucky.
In 1961, one year after he was honorably discharged, he
submitted samples of his writing (a prerequisite of enrollment) to the Writers’ Workshop of
the University of Iowa. The Workshop thought the
samples good enough to accept Michaelides into its distinguished program where he
spent a year writing and every once in a while talking about it with Philip
Roth, one of three writers-in-residence at the Workshop. Roth didn’t care too
much for Michaelides’ prose although he did think some of his pieces “showed
promise” and told him to “keep at it.”
In 1962, he joined Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio, as
associate dean of the college and instructor in the English Department where he taught freshman and sophomore
composition and literature and an elective course in creative writing.
He never stopped writing for the three years he was with the school. Matter of
fact, he was working on a short story the year he left.
In 1966, he went to work at Penton Media, Cleveland,
publishers of business magazines, as an assistant editor of one of the
company’s metalworking magazines. That he knew nothing about metalworking
didn’t seem to matter to the editor-in-chief or the publisher. Michaelides was a
writer and that’s what they were looking for.
One year later, the short story he was working on, “Calling
a Canary, Polly,” was published in the February 1967 Glamour magazine. Its
editor, Kathleen Casey Johnson, told Stephen it was only the second piece of
fiction the magazine had ever published. The first was by Richard Burton.
In 1971 Penton acquired Chicago-based Restaurant Hospitality magazine and moved it to Cleveland. Tom
Dempsey, the president of Penton, who, unlike Roth, saw much more than
“promise” in the prose of Michaelides, named him editor, a position he held
until 1998. Throughout those years—27 of them—Michaelides wrote a monthly
column. From the 320 he wrote (give or take a few), he selected 85 that
appear in “Foodservice in America: Timeless Essays and Afterthoughts.”
In 1998, Michaelides left Penton to pursue other business
interests as a freelance writer, speaker, and foodservice consultant. Since
then, his articles have appeared in Food Arts, the Ritz-Carlton magazine, Food Management, Hotel Food & Beverage Executive, Lodging Hospitality, Restaurant Hospitality, and
Nation’s Restaurant News.
Stephen’s work has not gone unnoticed. In 1996, the
Educational Foundation of the National Restaurant Association inducted Michaelides into its College of Diplomates (sic),
the association’s highest honor. That same year, the Pennsylvania State
University appointed him a Conti Distinguished Professor, named after Penn
State grad and restaurant entrepreneur, Walter Conti, who established the chair
to recognize individuals who support and advance the cause of hospitality
education. A 26-page cover story in the May 1989 Restaurant Hospitality about
restaurants in what was then the USSR was recognized by the American Society of Business Press Editors
as one of the best feature articles to appear in the business press that year.
One year later, Penton honored Michaelides with its first-ever Editor-of-the-Year
award. In 2003, the American Business Media presented him with its Crain Award for lifetime achievement as an
editor of a business publication.
Michaelides has served on the advisory boards of UNLV’s
College of Hotel Administration, Sullivan University’s Center for Hospitality Studies, and Kendall College’s Culinary Arts School.
A novel, “Condoms,” that has nothing to do with the foodservice industry but
a lot to do with quirky people, will be published sometime this year
or next or the year after that.
