LESSONS FROM LACKEY
A career in news shows humor as serious business: a tribute to Pat Lackey
Pat Lackey could say in a few words what it takes most of us all day to say.
That’s how one of Pat’s best friends — Fred Kirsch, himself a gifted writer — put it.
I agree, with a slight twist: Pat Lackey could say with a short joke what it takes more-serious folk all day to say.
Pat, my stepfather, died Easter Sunday. You might know him as the long-ago “Letters from Lackey” or “Bylines” columnist in one of the newspapers where he plied his trade. Readers of a certain age in Iowa and Virginia remember a prolific, slightly off-kilter writer who could describe regional transportation systems one day and his pet rats the next — and make both funny. It was a time when newspapers mattered. The lessons he imparted to fellow journalists were timeless.
So this is less an obituary than a journalistic appreciation. (The traditional obituary — his family, his short-lived musical career, his marathons, his many, many dogs — is elsewhere in the paper.)
Pat was a humor columnist who could still rise to outrage when he saw injustice or rank stupidity in the world. But he did so with a subtle touch.
Early on, he was marketed in The Des Moines Register alongside his good friend and nationally syndicated columnist Donald Kaul. “Back To Back Zaniness,” a promotional ad declared. “If you tried to clone Kaul, what you’d get is Lackey. Both were lousy reporters, who drove editors nuts. Kaul can’t spell, and Lackey can’t count.”
Kaul had a biting, acerbic wit, Lackey a gentler one. And he would gladly mine his own life in service of a joke. In an otherwise serious column about military service, for example, Pat described his own basic training before being shipped off to Vietnam. “I wasn’t prepared to have men I’d never met take turns standing with their noses inches from mine while they discussed my inadequacies and described what my girlfriend was doing with Joey in my absence,” he wrote. “Fortunately, I didn’t have a girlfriend.”
Pat caught the newspaper wave
just right, getting his first reporter’s notebook as a post-Watergate world was turning the once-lowly job of news scribe into a profession that — if you squinted just right — almost looked respectable. It was what Pat wanted: a job that did more than just pay the bills.
“It would be stupid to learn something and not be able to express it to someone else,” he wrote big brother Mike during college. “I’ve chosen writing. I think that I can make some kind of living at writing.”
He did. Pat rode the wave a good 35 years, primarily at The Des Moines Register in Iowa and The Virginian-Pilot. We now realize those were the good years, when two-newspaper towns became one-newspaper towns and the winning paper rolled in the dough like a fat and happy pig in the muck.
Pat retired in 2004, just as the newspaper industry was entering a historic collapse.
During those years, he wrote a few million words to be printed, folded up and thrown on people’s driveways. (At retirement, a Pilot colleague put Pat’s Virginia output alone at 3,000 stories, columns and editorials.) Early in his career,
Pat wrote daily, churning out whatever the towns and cities of Iowa threw his way. Late in his career, he wrote editorials, opining on often-inept Hampton Roads governments. In between, he drove the back roads of Iowa and Virginia to find the slice-of-life stories that make newspapers come alive.
Even in this digital age,
he still had those clips – piles and piles of yellowed newsprint, cut into little columns of text. And my mother — who never met a magazine, empty shoe box or broken coffee cup she wouldn’t keep — had saved them all.
I’ve been reading them while emptying their house. My mother, Mary, died in 2021, and Pat — slowed by Parkinson’s disease — moved into assisted living. The clips show a serious journalist infused with a sense of whimsy. A journalist myself, I admired his dedication to the craft. His punctuation was precise.
He wasted no words.
To pick up a Lackey column was to prepare for the surprise, the gem, the quip.
“I always knew I would grow old if death didn’t get me first.”
“We’re going to do more and more with less and less until we do everything with nothing. That’s our goal.”
“Humans are idiots, with few exceptions, none of whom spring to mind.”
“During my first year in journalism, editors used to complain to me, ‘Why did that paragraph go there?’
I’d explain patiently, ‘It had to go somewhere.’ ”
He wasn’t just a wordsmith, however. Pat also exemplified the qualities that mark the best journalists: He listened. He was genuinely curious about people’s lives. And — as he often said — everything seems interesting if you grew up in Kansas.
The bosses noticed. At The Des Moines Register, his editor would only have to say, “We’ve got a Lackey story,” and others would slate it for Page One. At The Pilot, the top editor sent Pat a thank you for his always-diligent reporting — “especially when you cover weekend events others might tend to slough off.”
He wrote about a business in Iowa named Elite Chicks that sold baby chickens but was often mistaken for a massage parlor.
He chronicled a drive from Norfolk to Washington, stopping in small towns to test the thesis that there’s somebody famous from everywhere. Among his finds: an Emmy-winning actress, a prominent country singer, a peanut baron and a civil rights leader.
He attended a convention of romance novelists. “Nary a neckline plunged,” he observed.
He profiled a Virginia man who started collecting free baseball caps — and hadn’t stopped, some 500 caps later.
His personal columns had begun in 1980, first in the Iowa City Press-Citizen. “Letters from Lackey” were written to … nobody in particular. “Dearest Occupant” they began.
“Yours ‘n truth, Patrick Lackey,” they ended.
He detailed the day he married my mother, which started with the two of them running the Bix 7 road race. He wrote about his surprisingly smart pet rats Spectator, Tyke and Tina — rescues from a medical lab — and about his foxhound Nails, whom he aimed to make the most famous dog in Iowa.
He connected with readers, sharing personal stories without seeming self-absorbed.
“You are my breakfast guest each day your column appears in the Register,” wrote one Iowa reader.
“You light up my life with your humor,” wrote another.
But it wasn’t just for the laughs. “You can say more outrageous things in a humor column than a serious one,” he once told a writer profiling him. “Your point gets across, but at the same time any anger people might feel is laughed away.”
Not all the reader letters were glowing, of course. Some were white hot. Pat was a traditional liberal often writing for conservative audiences. His final column asked for forgiveness — sort of: “If there is anyone I haven’t offended over the years, I apologize for my lack of thoroughness.”
But some readers who were his ideological opposite came to respect him. Others even came to agree with him. And those who didn’t? Well, at least they got a chuckle along the way.
Yours ’n truth.
Chris Adams is an editor at The AARP Bulletin and spent 25 years as a reporter and editor at the McClatchy Washington Bureau, The Wall Street Journal and The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He also teaches journalism at American University in Washington. His mother, Mary AdamsLackey, also wrote for The Virginian-Pilot.