Eulogy for a gentleman bibliophile
Cameron Martin was the perfect person to sit like a sentry by the entrance to the former Greenwich Time newsroom on East Elm Street.
He could talk about anything. That’s the kind of life skill you pick up when you read more books than Elizabeth Bennet and Lisa Simpson.
“Cam was one of those rare people who could discuss a classic novel with one person and then turn around and speak with another about why the Red Sox weren’t scoring any runs, and be equally invested in both conversations,” observed Tom Mellana, a former Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate managing editor who worked with Cam as a news reporter starting in the late 1990s. “And he’d convey to each, in his own, quiet humorous way, that he was happy to speak with them. And he was.”
Cam’s death Friday felt like the interruption of a rich conversation. He had warded off early stages of Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma, but it roared back fiercely in recent weeks. He died in his home in the Lordship section of Stratford, where he lived most of his 50 years.
After a decade as a news and features reporter for Greenwich Time, he served as a columnist for NBC New York and later returned to our offices as sports editor for the Norwalk Citizen. His byline also appeared in The New York Times, ESPN, Newsweek, The Atlantic and Barnes & Noble Review. Most recently he was digital editor for the Town of Greenwich’s website.
New York Times reporter Neil Vigdor bonded with Cam in the Greenwich Time newsroom as a fellow Vanderbilt University graduate. Vigdor said Wednesday that Cam was the ideal “front man” to size up newsroom visitors.
“He was deferential, but not in a suckup kind of way,” Vigdor said. “He could kind of schmooze with people but at the same time had a sensibility to see if someone was a crackpot or a gadfly. He had the perfect temperament. He was affable.”
Cam also used those tools to interview strangers in the street like he was conducting pop quizzes about their lives (which didn’t mean they always passed the test). He did this with younger residents in his “Gen-uflections” feature as well as seniors for “Seniority.”
Other journalists might have tackled the assignment with stock questions. Cam conducted them the way Larry David demands his “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-stars perform improv.
“Each was an absolute master class in how to engage people and how to conduct a general interview,” Mellana marveled. “He listened as he interviewed and his responses to what people said made the whole thing. Cam could be funnier with two soft-spoken words than a loudmouth at the bar could be in two hours. But he was never making fun of the people he interviewed. He was having fun with them. Those columns were really a joy to read, and I always considered them the gold standard of that particular craft.”
Those Q-and-As were unfiltered, occasionally exposing Cam’s own lack of knowledge about a subject. When a woman identified herself as hailing from Belize, he incorrectly asked her about Spain, then confessed in print that “my geography’s all off.”
He also acknowledged insults about his regular column (he taped a note to his desk from a reader asking, “didn’t you take English 101?”).
Not that he didn’t weave in generous servings of snark. He identified some sarcasm in capital letters lest he confuse sensitive readers, explaining “forgive me for being so demonstrative, but I don’t want any more letters or calls from humor-challenged readers. One reader took particular umbrage with my Back to School column, in which I said that college-bound students shouldn’t bother to buy silverware, since they can steal it from other students.”
That said, the recurring word I keep hearing from former colleagues to describe Cam is that he was a “gentleman” (though, as a Red Sox loyalist, he reflexively snuck the word “suck” into his columns after “Yankees”). The other constant theme is his love of literature.
Vigdor recalled that it was a ritual for Cam to leave the newsroom for lunch breaks with a novel in hand, which he would read while perched on a bench on Greenwich Avenue or in a park.
Then it was back to the newsroom to write his own prose. During the first few years of his career as a news reporter, he contributed to coverage of front page stories, such as 9/11, the 2001 arrest of Michael Skakel for the 1975 murder of Greenwich teenager Martha Moxley and the state Supreme Court’s ruling that Greenwich had to open its beaches to the general public.
Some journalists are better writers than reporters. Others are just the opposite. Cam could do both. My favorite memory of him as a news reporter was when he helped cover the July 1999 funeral for Lauren Bessette, who was killed in a plane crash that also claimed lives of her sister, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Carolyn’s famous husband, John F. Kennedy, Jr. Reporters from across the nation formed a scrum outside of Christ Church Greenwich. Cam deftly snuck in jabs writing about members of the paparazzi who insisted on maintaining their own anonymity.
The move to features gave him the chance to lean into his craft.
“When I was a little boy, Christmas was a contact sport,” wrote Cam, who was born June 22, 1973, in Bridgeport.
“As someone born with so-called ‘fair’ skin, which is the biggest misnomer ever … August felt like one long sunburn on the road to hell,” he wrote to explain why the eighth month was his least favorite.
Somewhat presciently, there was one topic he artfully dodged.
“I hate writing about politics, so normally I don’t. There’s just no sense in it. After all, you’re either preaching to the choir or inflaming the opposition, so why bother?”
He once cited “The Ginger Man” by J.P. Donleavy as a favorite book and his “desert island book” as “The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present,” a 770-page omnibus.
His literary references leaned toward F. Scott Fitzgerald, essayist Charles Lamb, Joan Didion and Virginia Woolf (though he observed, “I’m of a generation that doesn’t swoon over Hemingway”). Yet he peppered in callouts to “Gilligan’s Island,” “Stripes” and “Caddyshack.” His humorist of choice was Rodney Dangerfield.
Yes, Cam Martin was the perfect person to have at the front door.
John Breunig is editorial page editor. jbreunig@hearstmediact.com; twitter.com/johnbreunig.Calling hours are to be held from 4-8 p.m. Thursday, April 4,at the Cody-White Funeral Home, 107 Broad St., Milford. A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 10 a.m. Friday, April 5, at Our Lady of Peace Church, 651 Stratford Road, Stratford. Donations may be made to the Adenoid Cystic Carcinoma Research Foundation in honor of Cameron Martin at: https:// accrf.org/donate/