A passing
One of the few newsroom people I liked died early this morning. (The other, like most talented folk, has moved on to better things.) She was one of my living links to mid-century, covering society parties and galas since 1961. I like to think we understood each other. She wasn’t warm and sweet; like me she defended her turf. I bent over backwards to try to help her; the change to making pages with computers was hard for her but she tried hard. (Used to work with another society lady from the same era who never made that change; I did all her pagemaking.) I don’t think she would have survived the end of newspapers and the change over to videos on the Web that’s happening now (I love it). Most thought she was a spinster but she told me she was a widow; her husband died of Lou Gehrig’s disease a long time ago.

I’ve had other living links, at the paper the depression killed a few years ago: the old owner I’d talk to on his walks around town; the paper had been a Catholic family business. We still got Good Friday off, carried over from that time. He used to write editorials in the ’60s about Vietnam and the Red menace, and still picked up his free copy of his old paper. At the same paper, at the other end of the spectrum, was the reporter who started in ’63 and quit the Unitarians for not being liberal enough. But she came from a time when even the liberals were ladies and gentlemen and we got on famously.

The Web killed newspapers but my videos are in part for these people. Keeping it going.