The final deadline
This column has been some 30 years in the making, 30 years of trying to find and write stories compelling enough for a reader to stick with them for a few minutes.
Because what is a column, a newspaper, a television show, a book, a game, a chainsaw juggler, whatever, competing for but your time.
No readers, no show. So, I appreciate the time you’ve made for me.
“You’re the first thing I read on Sunday!” I’ve heard more than once. Flattering, indeed. And, oh, by the way, no pressure for the next week. Writing a column is a privilege, but it is also day labor.
Bridgeport, though, is the gift that keeps on giving in terms of stories and characters. Saints and sinners, hardworking people, thugs, grifters, big- hearted lugs, “reputed” people, politicians — honest and otherwise — stereotype- busting high school kids headed to the Ivy League, and on, and on.
You never know what’s going to reach a reader. Because each is unique.
When my father died many years ago, I wrote a column. ( Remember: nothing bad happens in a columnist’s life: it’s just more material.) Dozens of readers reached out. My yellow Lab, Otis, died a few years later. I wrote a column. Readers sent plants and flowers to our house, dozens of copies of “Over the Rainbow Bridge,” sympathy cards and hundreds of emails.
Hands down, though, to this day, people approach me, start chuckling, and mention the column I wrote through the eyes of a young Julia Daly, my daughter, commenting on a disastrous trip to and back from the Jersey Shore.
“Mom said she could just jump off this bridge and Dad said, ‘ Who’s stopping you?’”
I’ve had a lot of wonderful notes. I was never inclined to use them in columns. But I’ll use one here. It came from Larry Locke, then a Westport- based filmmaker. I worked with him on his 2008 documentary “The Accidental Mayor,” an up- close look at the operatic arc of former Mayor John M. Fabrizi’s tenure in City Hall.
The note came after I wrote a column in 2009 about the soulshriveling aftermath of a fire in a unit at the P. T. Barnum public housing project. The fire killed a 22- year- old mother and her three children. I went there early the next morning. That grim morning, the stench of charred wood hung in the air. I talked to the people there.
Locke wrote: “Your column was just great. It just went to the heart of what you do, which is to be the voice of the voiceless. And the heart of that is their helplessness. The dual nature of helplessness is anger at being in that state, and fear at being there as well. Just perfect.”
If I came close to that in some of the work I did, I’m proud of it.
Two old newspaper guys helped me get off the ground. John P. “Reggie” Kelly was the Bridgeport City Hall reporter, He was a Camel cigarette chainsmoking reporter and raconteur. He took me under his wing.
The other was a copy editor named Don Fletcher. His nickname among the young reporters was “The Chicken Skinner.” One day I sat beside him as he wielded a red pencil over a story I had written on my Royal typewriter. He scratched something out. I wanted to learn, so I asked him why he had made that change.
He turned to me. “Well,” he said, slowly, “did you think this was just going into the paper in all its pristine glory?” I suddenly appreciated the accuracy of the nickname. He taught me a lot.
Some of my columns, yellowed and brittle as they may be by now, survive on refrigerators around the area. I was always aware that some of the regular people I wrote about would probably never again be in the spotlight, however small that spotlight was. That made for an obligation to be careful — spell the name right, for starters.
I owe thanks to many people, not least among them Steve Winters, who preceded me as editor of the Opinion page and for many years used a deft hand in editing and putting eye- catching headlines on my columns.
Hugh Bailey, now the Opinion page editor, has applied the same patience and skill in making my work better than it was before they touched it. And thanks to the few friends I would pester each week with a plaintive, “Any column ideas?”
But the most important editor in my life is the lovely Mrs. Daly, the former Sharon Tierney, who for the last several years has been the first to read the column before it was whisked off to the newspaper.
No “Chicken Skinner,” she. Just as perceptive, for sure, direct in her suggestions, but considerate of the ever- fragile writer she’s tolerated for 48 years.
I cleaned out my Hearst email box the other day, deleting the few that remained. An icon I’d never seen before popped up in the empty space. It was a hot air balloon ( Interesting choice, I thought) hovering over a message: “All done for the day. Enjoy your empty inbox.”
Well, I won’t enjoy the empty inbox, but I am done for the day.