Gentle colleague earned respect and admiration
Sometimes words get in the way and we end up not telling someone exactly how we feel about them, which is kind of how it was in all the years Wayne Woodlief was a colleague here at the Herald.
We ribbed and teased each other so mercilessly that our friendship began to resemble a comedy routine, especially after this column left its longtime home in sports and moved onto Wayne’s turf, which was politics.
That offered a mother lode of conversational ammunition, since he regarded this writer as something to the right of Attila the Hun while he was seen here as slightly to the left of whatever passes for normal these days.
But you don’t poke fun at someone you don’t like, and Wayne was more than liked here. Indeed, he was admired, so much so that there was no better feeling than knowing you had earned his approval.
A newspaper newsroom can be a chaotic setting with people hollering and phones ringing and everyone’s eye on the clock knowing deadline is approaching. In the midst of it all, there Wayne would be, wearing bedroom slippers, sucking on a pipe, moving about as if he was in no rush, talking in that laid-back manner that evoked echoes of the Virginia boy he used to be.
Oh, we were strange bedfellows for sure.
But when word came that he died Saturday morning it wasn’t those differences that rushed to mind here; it was the mutual respect that transcended those differences, reaffirming we don’t have to agree on everything to regard one another with affection and esteem.
Coming as it did on a weekend marked by lethal hatred in his native Virginia where white nationalists were exposed as the savages they are, and on a weekend where much of the world remains riddled with anxiety over the impulses of North Korean madman Kim Jong Un, and where domestic politics have become so intractably polarized, Wayne’s passing seemed like a voice in the wilderness, reminding us there’s a better way to resolve our differences. There has to be.
In retirement he’d occasionally drop a note or leave a voice mail message, offering a jabbing review of something written here just to show he hadn’t lost his fastball, but always concluding with a warm suggestion we meet for a cup of coffee.
Then those communications ended as Alzheimer’s moved into the driver’s seat, leaving only memories of this dear friend it had in its clutches.
Well, Wayne, buddy, you’re the same in those memories as you were in the newsroom, a soft-spoken giant who represented the very best of what this business is all about.
Goodbye, good friend, and God bless.