The territory ahead of the rest
Looking up at what is now a mostly bare bookshelf, in what for a few more hours is still nominally my office, the most prominent feature is a photo of Mary Margaret Byrne.
She was one of my predecessors in the post of editorial page editor, which I have been privileged to hold at this historic Columbus institution. She held it, in fact, when I first came here some 33 (Thirty-three? Seriously?) years ago as a copy editor in the Enquirer newsroom.
She was one of my most important mentors, as were Carroll Lisby and — most important of them all — Billy Winn, who remains a mentor and friend as I move on into whatever chapter of my life and career I write next.
Mary Margaret was for years the editorial conscience of the newspaper and, to a large extent, of the community. The anecdote has been related in these pages before, but once when an editorial board argument was dragging on over what side we should take in some local debate, Mary Margaret ended it: “We’re supposed to speak for people who can’t speak for themselves.”
Next subject.
To whatever extent we have helped to provide a voice for those who needed one, we have succeeded in what Mary Margaret believed to be our core mission. “Speaking truth to power” is a familiar definition of public courage, political or otherwise, and it’s an apt one. Speaking truth on behalf of power is not necessarily inappropriate – when that power is a force for good. When we lose sight of the distinction, we fail. Utterly and abjectly.
I want to believe that, in the more than 25 years my role here has been almost exclusively in the opinion realm, we have approached that mission responsibly. But that judgment is not ours to make.
There’s no way to be comprehensive about a 33-year Ledger-Enquirer hitch in a 40-year career; it would be not just impossible for me but excruciatingly boring for you. (That’s assuming you’re still with me so far.) This can’t be an anthology.
And it definitely can’t pay tribute to all the people who have touched my life and career in that time. There are just too many – so many that I would surely leave out some of the dearest and most important. I’m strolling happily into healthy retirement with no regrets; I definitely don’t need to self-inflict that one on my way out the door.
Consider it, instead, a kind of scattershot stream-of-consciousness collection of random observations and memories. And forget chronology: For the moment I’ve become, like Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, unstuck in time.
I vividly remember a freezing January morning in 1986 when copy desk chief Chuck Crouch called me at home on what was supposed to be an off day. I hadn’t been watching TV, and didn’t know the space shuttle Challenger had exploded after liftoff. That was the first day in my L-E career we put out an Extra edition, and it was all hands on deck.
(A darkly comic footnote: Our talented, efficient copy desk had been putting together first-rate papers every day. But somehow the gravity — no grim joke intended — of the Challenger tragedy convinced some of the execs and senior editors that they needed to come off the sidelines and onto the field and play newspaper. There were more errors and typos in the next day’s pages than the regular staff had committed in a month.)
Fifteen years later, Larry Gierer came into my office and told me a passenger jet had just crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought, as most other Americans probably did, that it was a horrific accident.
It was horrific. It was no accident. And in ways that go far beyond the physical threat of terror, the nation has never recovered.
There are so many things I’ll miss about this gig, and so many I won’t. There are probably more of the latter, but that doesn’t tip the scales that way: The good has far outweighed the bad, even if the mostly petty and trivial bad has the purely numerical edge.
I’ll miss the privilege of meeting and talking with some of the nationally distinguished public servants who have visited us over the years – Sam Nunn, Johnny Isakson, Bob Riley, Zell Miller, Max Cleland would be on the shortest of short lists.
I won’t miss the politicians, and their flacks, who somehow think other people’s time is at their disposal. (I understand Bill Clinton was one of the worst on that score, but I don’t play in that league.) Either God or American politics owes me extra years for the hours of my life I’ve wasted at a conference table waiting for a pol who was supposed to meet with us at 2, only to have one of his “people” call at 2:23 to say they’re “running a little late.”
No $#!+, Sherlock. I learned to tell time when I was five.
One of the above dignitaries, once she finally arrived, walked into the building talking on her cell, which she continued to do up the elevator, into the conference room and into her chair, where she sat, still talking, while we waited for her to finish. Done now? You have 10 minutes.
I won’t miss the ones who surely had the visit to Columbus on their calendars for at least a month, but called or emailed me the morning they got here, wanting to meet with the editorial board. Yeah … lemme not get back to you on that.
(I am not making this up: A spokesperson for a gubernatorial candidate emailed me this morning – my last day here – wanting to meet for coffee. Today. Maybe I should have said yes, and just not shown up.)
I won’t miss the anonymous poisonous voices, most of them voices of smug, ignorant, craven bigotry, that fill the cybersphere, not excluding, sad to say, our little part of it.
I will very much miss the regular interaction with sincere, committed, civically involved people who understand the difference between dissent, a foundational necessity of a free society, and disloyalty; between honest critical skepticism and sheer stupid meanness.
Most of all, I’ll miss those times when it has really seemed we made a difference, whether it was keeping the city from all but clear-cutting Lakebottom, or calling the state’s attention — repeatedly — to the fact that the Georgia border is not I-285 where the Chattahoochee River is concerned.
And I will be forever proud of, and grateful for, a courageous stand my colleagues on this editorial board took in November 2016, all too aware of the practical consequences, when we endorsed a deeply flawed presidential candidate over one so utterly unfit for public office that he continues to pose a perpetual threat to the most time-honored American institutions and values.
One of my favorite former editors, Mike Burbach, says a good opinion writer needs to have a foundation of optimism, however jaundiced his or her perspectives of the moment might be. Because if you don’t believe people are persuadable, then what’s the point?
I haven’t forgotten that, and I don’t plan to forget it going forward. This isn’t the end of the trip; I’m just changing trains. I haven’t yet decided which one or which way, but when I do I’ll get the word out. Now, like Huck Finn, I figure it’s time for me to light out for the territory ahead of the rest.
To all those who have put up with me all these years, I am humbled and grateful. It’s been a helluva ride.
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This story was originally published February 3, 2018 at 10:00 PM with the headline "The territory ahead of the rest."