KEITH C. BURRIS REMEMBERS LONGTIME PUBLISHER ELIZABETH ELLIS
Seekers look for teachers. They sit at the feet of those who can teach them something about how to live. My Uncle Tom, at whose feet I sat for a time (actually we sat in deck chairs on a high-rise balcony drinking gin), was an old test and fighter pilot with an eye for character and detail. He called me “little grasshopper” when I was in college.
But I want to tell you about another person who taught me, and did so for 21 years, never once in didactic fashion.
Her name was Elizabeth Ellis, and she was my boss, mentor, friend, life coach and master teacher for all those years, at the Journal Inquirer newspaper, in Manchester, Connecticut.
Betty died last week at the age of 92.
The first thing she taught me was to be independent — to steer my own path and not to be intimidated. I never saw or heard her worry about “what people might say” or think.
She had a worldview. I would call it Roosevelt liberalism, but this worldview was as practical and subject to empirical testing as it was principled. She was an intellect, but she did not live in the world of abstraction. She lived in the world of the possible.
An early lesson in her independence and pragmatism was the case of two young, inexperienced cops shooting and killing a man who was high and charged at them, threatening to take them out. He had a knife, but was otherwise unarmed. I wanted to hammer the cops in an editorial. I wanted to say their lives were never at risk and they should have shot the guy in the foot or leg. And, anyway, their superiors should not have sent two green cops on this call. These were not unreasonable positions.
Betty quietly asked me some questions: Had I considered the dilemma from the young cops’ point of view? How long did they have to think? What information did they have? What did I know about the size, distance and disposition of the man who came at the cops? And, most devastatingly, had ever tried to shoot someone in the foot or leg? Had I ever been in a situation remotely similar? Did I know anyone who had?
This was my lesson in empathy, with side tutorials in balance, skepticism and judgment.
I never thought of Betty as a religious person. But she was a deeply sensitive person and a profoundly Jewish person. Hence her innate sense of justice and understanding. I never once saw her get emotional or sentimental, but she walked me through the death of my father, and the long illness and death of my mother, as no one else did — with the blessed assurance of the psalmist. Or maybe just a mom.
She once told me that a newspaper should be a place where a person could go when he has exhausted all other options — the paper should be the recourse of last resort.
The third thing I learned from her was a sense of fun. Yes, she regarded journalism as a high calling. But there is no sense in owning or producing a daily newspaper, she thought, if you don’t have some fun — afflicting the comfortable as well as comforting the afflicted. Every day.
And we did have fun. We laughed a lot and rattled a lot of cages. And we regularly surprised people. And formed no permanent alliances. (We didn’t endorse in political races.)
We took the work seriously but ourselves not so much. We had a feisty little newspaper. At one time, when such things were possible, the JI was the fastestgrowing paper in New England. The paper’s motto was: “We tell it like it is, somebody has to.” Betty set the tone and tenor. She was rightly called, in her JI obit, “the soul” of the paper. She drew the boundaries and let us all roam within. She never stopped being a fan of good journalism or good writing and she was lavish with praise when she thought any one of us reached the top. But occasionally she would intone, always with a wry smile, “Remember, it’s my sandbox.”
She relished being the underdog and she loved a good fight. She adored jazz and theater and she liked cocktails, and sentences, that packed a punch. Her wit was sharp and dry and her composure eclipsed the truth that she was actually tough as nails. But she was also, in every sense of the word — a word in unfortunate retreat these days — a lady.
And when I say tough, I refer not only to things she endured in life — loss, pain, the ruthlessness of age — but a certain mental toughness about the world. She was an old-fashioned progressive, but there was nothing of what we would today call “woke” about her. Not one ounce of preciousness or virtue signaling. And when I think about her I wonder if we have lost all rigor, both in our profession and in our society. What would she think about an entire economy shut down; a whole society sheltering in place, ad infinitum?
Maybe that it is good we are starting to reopen America; good that we are starting to come out. Maybe she would say that risk is part of life and we take a risk every time we leave the house or turn the key in the car. And who wants to live in a society where you can’t shake hands or hug your kid or visit your aging mother or your newborn granddaughter? Life is risk. And either you risk or you live by fear. Elizabeth Ellis took risks. It seemed to me she was never afraid.