‘Unflappable’ longtime Tri-City Herald printing operations manager dies

Leroy Modine, longtime printing operations manager of the Tri-City Herald, died Sept. 5 after his cancer finally claimed him.

Modine, 79, was jokingly called “Modine the Magician” by his fellow managers at the daily paper, because his wizardry with the Herald’s Mann Roland press allowed it to perform complex printing operations it was never designed for.

Throughout the newspaper and in pressrooms across the Northwest, he was a problem solver respected and admired for his skills and resourcefulness.

Jack Briggs, one of five Herald publishers that Leroy worked for, described Modine as “the type of employee every boss would cherish.”

“He was unflappable in a job where a press breakdown or a paper tear was not uncommon at a time of night when everything that everyone had produced that day was on the line — and thousands of Tri-Citians were waiting for their newspaper,” Briggs added.

“He supervised a team of workers who had the noisiest, dirtiest job at the Herald, working at a time when the rest of us slept. And he did it with a competency — and a smile. He will be missed.”

When Modine retired in 2008, then Executive Editor Ken Robertson wrote of him: “If a press was created to waltz, he’s a wizard who can teach it both the polka and the tango. And give him a few moments to scratch his head and think, and he might be able to add the foxtrot to its repertoire.”

During his time at the Herald, Modine helped lead it through an array of technological advances, including when the Herald became the Northwest’s first newspaper to adopt platesetters that allowed the newsroom to send digital plate images to a piece of equipment that transformed them into a printing plate in minutes instead of the hours it once took.

As a result, the Herald had the latest deadlines of any paper on the West Coast, allowing it to present the same morning news as radio and TV stations were reporting each morning.

Early years

Modine was born in 1943 in Idaho Falls. His father was a railroader who transferred to old Wallula, a community now underneath the McNary Dam reservoir.

The family later moved to Walla Walla, where Modine graduated from Walla Walla High School and started his career in newspapering, first as a paper carrier, then in the Walla Walla paper’s production department.

He always seemed to have a second job in addition to his work in the printing departments at newspapers in Walla Walla, Pendleton, Yakima, Olympia and the Tri-Cities. In Olympia, he helped launch the Northwest edition of USA Today, which had extremely demanding color printing requirements for the day.

His sons, Kurt and Tim, recall their dad regularly ran a small commercial printing operation from their home and occasionally printed books. At one point, he produced an all-advertising paper called “Buy-a-Line.”

Along the way, he raised two sons, married his second wife Iris, and helped parent her four children.

He also was a private pilot who co-owned two different airplanes and when he was working in Yakima, he also operated a small auto body business that focused on smaller auto repair jobs.

He is survived by son Kurt and his wife Vickie of Kennewick, son Tim and his wife Cheryl of McKenna, Wash., three grandchildren and several great-grandchildren. Iris, his wife of 38 years, died two years ago.

Graveside services are planned Sept. 17 at the cemetery in Pilot Rock, Ore., where he will be buried next to her.