Dad is the youngest of four children, and maybe that has something to do with it. He and his siblings grew up on a farm in Coffeyville, a small town in southeast Kansas. The siblings were (and are) quite successful in their own right, so Dad certainly had plenty of reason to work hard to get noticed.

He was entrepreneurial from the beginning. Family legend has it that as a little tyke, he got his relatives to make little trinkets, which he sold — generally to those same relatives — at "Eddie’s Trinket Shop" by the side of the road. On his sixth birthday, according to a column written at the time by his great-uncle, he took six pennies to Sunday School to put in the birthday box. He was given a cupcake for his birthday — which he promptly sold for seven cents.

The other legacy of his upbringing was journalism. His father, R.M. Seaton, was the publisher of the Coffeyville Journal. Fay N. Seaton, my dad’s grandfather, published The Manhattan Mercury, which is where Dad and I now both work. And the brother of the great-uncle who wrote the column about the birthday box was Ned Beck, the longtime editor of the Chicago Tribune — and one of the founders of ASNE. Newspapering and public affairs were family conversation staples.

Dad did well enough in high school — both in class and as a competitive swimmer — to get into Harvard, where he majored in government and swam for the varsity. He got plenty of experience there that broadened his horizons — his roommate was from New York City. Dad joined the Fly Club, one of Harvard’s answers to fraternities, where he hung around the likes of William Weld, the former governor of Massachusetts.

And he cultivated an interest in Spain, writing a senior honors thesis at Harvard about the regime of Gen. Francisco Franco. Actually, Dad’s interest had started young, when his father took the family to Spain for a vacation because it was cheap.

At that point, his life took a couple of crucial turns:

• In Spain studying for his thesis, he met another American woman there for the summer. They were told they could speak no English for the summer — and Dad’s Spanish wasn’t all that great — so she thought he was a little slow. He persisted. That woman is Karen Seaton, my mother. (Thank God for persistence.)
• Secondly, near the time of his graduation in 1965, Dad was interviewed for the Rhodes Scholarship. For some reason, he didn’t prepare well, and he lost out. I think that still bugs him a little. Anyway, on his next opportunity — for the Fulbright Scholarship — he wouldn’t let the same thing happen. He found out who would be doing the interview, and he read everything the man had written, and everything written about him. He got the scholarship. I think that lesson has stuck with him — he certainly has told it to me more than once.

After a year at journalism school at the University of Missouri and a stint at The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Ky., as a general assignment reporter, Dad came back to Manhattan to join the family business.

It was 1969. Dad was all of 26, and he was running the Mercury as editor-in-chief. He almost immediately built a new building, dealt with labor problems and bought a new offset press. The paper grew in circulation and won awards as the best paper in Kansas every year from 1970 to 1976.

He helped expand the family business, buying other papers, as well as radio stations. He now helps oversee the nine other Seaton-owned dailies and broadcast stations, all of them relatively small operations in the Midwest and High Plains.

He grew increasingly involved in the community, serving as everything from the chairman of the local and state chambers of commerce to the head of a local charity to help flood victims (in 1993) and underprivileged youth. For the latter effort, he was named Manhattan’s citizen of the year in 1994.

But it’s for his work on national and international causes that he’s probably best known. In 1972, Dad got started in the Inter American Press Association, largely an organization of Latin American publishers dedicated to defending press freedoms.

And as he tends to do, he got involved and worked at it. He read the background. He volunteered to do things. And he went on IAPA missions to stand up for newspapers that were fighting dictators’ censorship — or the imprisonment of their reporters. He helped win the release of Jacobo Timerman by meeting with the military dictators in a celebrated case in Argentina in 1977. He shuttled back and forth from Kansas to Nicaragua in the 1980s, when La Prensa in Managua was fighting with the Sandinistas.

Even in more placid countries, he kept his nose to the grindstone. I can remember vacation trips for our family at sunny beach resorts in Central America, where my brother and I would body surf and play tennis. Dad never got a whiff of a tan — he was churning away inside the hotel conference room.

"I knew he was always a leader who could be counted on to serve on any effort we needed," said William Williamson, the IAPA’s former executive director. "I thought he was a great example: Here was a person from the Midwest with no financial ties to Latin America, but who was concerned about principles."

Dad said when he was sworn in as IAPA president in 1989, "If Colombians or Panamanians or Nicaraguans or Salvadorans are willing to go to jail or die for the principles of democracy, the rule of law and press freedom, the least we other journalists can do is support them."

He has also worked on related domestic issues. Dad helped lead a push for an amendment in 1987 to this country’s McCarthy-era law that forbade people from entering the U.S. because of their political beliefs. That law had kept out people like novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ex-Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau and author Pablo Neruda.

He has remained active in those efforts. He and James McClatchy of McClatchy Newspapers in 1994 spearheaded efforts to persuade governments to sign a declaration of free speech and free press principles. The Declaration of Chapultepec, as the document became known, was signed by President Clinton and the heads of state of 16 other countries in the hemisphere.

He was knighted in the Dominican Republic for his work of that sort. He also won the 1993 Maria Moors Cabot Prize from Columbia University, which honors journalists "for a body of work that contributes to the improvement of inter-American understanding."

When he got home from the trip to the Dominican Republic to receive his knighthood, incidentally, Mom promptly informed him that he could still take out the garbage. He does. He also shovels the sidewalk.

Not that Dad is a complete grind.

He cuts loose on Friday and Saturday nights, drinking wine, cooking French food and philosophizing deep into the night. He’ll fire up a cigar on summer vacation. He yells at the refs once in awhile at basketball and football games at Kansas State, the university in our town.

He has a mean crosscourt backhand, and he is a darn good bass fisherman.

He’s also a helluva dad, if I can get a bit more personal. He and Mom drove me to my baseball games and tennis tournaments in podunk towns across Kansas in my teens. Dad sent me postcards when I was a lonesome college freshman. Heck, he even hired me.

But even on that score, let me get back to my original point: He works like hell. When my wife and I had our son, Dad recommended a few books about parenting. He had already read them.

Ned Seaton, the son of Edward Seaton, is news editor of The Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury.