I have received eighteen awards which include recognition for investigative reporting, education reporting, editorial writing, sports columns, serious columns, humor columns, spot news reporting, spot news photography, business reporting, and feature writing. Twice I was named Columnist of the Year by the NHPA.
Tears and Ice Cream
One of the things I did well as a newspaper reporter was write columns. I wrote outdoor columns, humorous columns, and serious columns and won press association awards for my conversational style. Twice the NH Press Association named me Columnist of the Year in the weekly newspaper category.
One of the columns I’m particularly proud of was one that didn’t win any award. It was a rather bluesy piece about a guy named Mark Russell, a one-legged man who moved into Jaffrey and adopted it as his hometown. Mark was a downtown regular who enjoyed the breakfast and gossip at the Rusty Bucket Restaurant. He managed to get around pretty well on crutches, sometimes one, sometimes two. Local character would be a good description.
Eventually, Mark lost his other leg to the vascular disease that took his first. The V.A. did the cutting and Mark took to a wheelchair with a bible in a backpack strapped to the back. The loss of his legs didn’t slow him up much. He lived in a third floor apartment and walked up the outside stairs backwards on his hands and butt; used a pulley with a concrete block counterweight to raise his wheelchair to the landing.
The last time I saw Mark he bummed a smoke, and we talked a bit. He’d been missing for a while, so I asked him where he’d been. He told me they put him in the state hospital. “How’d that go?” I asked. “They told me I was crazy and let me go,” he said.
A couple days later Mark was gone. He died a rather lonely death. I wrote a column about him. At that point in time columns ran on the sports pages or op-ed (opposite editorial). My editor really liked this one. It ran page one, top of the fold, right under the banner.
A day later my wife told me a friend of hers was mad at me. “What did I do now?” I asked.
She told me her friend went grocery shopping and picked up the paper at the supermarket. When she got home that column headline “IF WE’D KNOWN IT WAS GOODBYE” caught her eye. With her bags of groceries on the counter she read that column—and cried—stared out the window a while—and read it again.
Meanwhile, her ice cream melted.
I think that’s a good touchstone for a writer. If you can do that—make a reader cry and melt her ice cream, then you can say you’ve done your job.