Column: On page and in life, Canfield always knew right words.
The subject line of the email was “Mrs. Wonderful.”
It was not spam.
“You’re great, know that? I read and appreciate all your writing. No kiddin.’ Wish we could meet for lunch or something. OC” Another one: “Quick Hi.” “Want you to know I follow your writings daily. You are a star. You’re a dear pal, too. Keep punchin’, dear girl. O.”
And another, this time abbreviated: “mrs. won.”
“Good one t’day. I love ya. Come see me again soon. Keep it up. Kanfield.”
Over the years, the emails arrived in my inbox, semi-regularly. Bravo. Mrs. Wonderful. Good stuff. You’re cookin’. Stay wonderful, will ya?
They always made my day – heck, my week. They were from OC. Owen Canfield, retired Hartford Courant sports columnist. He retired for good after 59 years of newspaper writing on March 30, writing a column since 2008 for the Torrington Register, where he started in the business the day after Christmas in 1960.
He was struggling with his health and it was time to stop. I got an email April 5 from him after going to visit him in Torrington, his hometown.
It was simply entitled “You”: “It was grand to have you here. Please come back soon. Love to you, dear girl. OC.”
Owen had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and then was diagnosed with colon cancer in August. I saw him a couple times in Torrington after his diagnosis. The last time, he was tired. He would try to follow the conversation but then he’d close his eyes and drop his chin on his chest, the oxygen line keeping him alive snaking across the room to the oxygen tank. He would come back to me when I made a joke about something and he would laugh, that terrific hearty Owen belly laugh.
Owen died Saturday morning. He was 85. After my mom, who passed away in March at age 78, and my good friend Alan Schwartz of Avon, who died of a stroke a brutal four days after my mom, Owen was perhaps my biggest cheerleader. You know who your cheerleaders in life are — the ones that send you that email that will pick you up, or someone you can call and they’ll just tell you again and again, you’re doing great. Love you. Loved your story. Keep punchin’.
Subject line from an Oct. 2017 email (apparently an abbreviation of Mrs. Wonderful): “won…”
“You’re writing GREAT stuff and so damn MUCH of it!!!”
I met Owen when I came to the Courant in
1989. I loved him immediately. I loved his writing style — he wrote about people as much as he wrote about sports, because, well, people play sports. I loved his aw-shucks folksiness that could shift quickly into self-deprecating sarcasm in the course of a few minutes of a conversation.
He was always a joker. I went to visit him once at the retirement home (“Don’t call it an ‘old folks home,” he told me) where he lived in Torrington, and we went out to lunch.
When we returned, he saw some friends in the hallway and wanted to introduce me.
“This is Lori,” he said with a straight face, putting his arm around me. “We just got married!”
He used to sit at his cubicle in the back corner of the sports department and occasionally burst into song. Or he would close his eyes and nap, the screen of the bulky Atex computer glowing in front of him, the man who started as a sports writer by taking a correspondence course. The summer of 1994 at the tennis tournament in New Haven, I was pregnant with my first-born and I remember both Owen and I sitting upright on the couches in the media room, snoozing.
I remember arguing with him about the merits of women’s basketball and how he didn’t buy it and then he went with UConn to the Final Four in 1995 and met Rebecca Lobo and watched the Huskies win a national championship and he returned from Minneapolis as the one of the biggest women’s basketball fans on the planet.
I loved the stories he wrote about his wife Ethel, who died in 1988. My favorite was the one he wrote for the Courant’s now-defunct Northeast Magazine about he and Ethel and their family of 10 children going to the Goshen Fair, year after year, on a tight budget where Ethel somehow made sure everybody got a balloon and slowly, the kids grew up and left and then there was just he and Ethel going to the fair alone, on a date in their later years and she let him hold her hand like she knew she might not be there the next year. Which she wasn’t. And he went alone to the fair and walked on what he called the “joyless midway” and the food that he used to love tasted terrible. He bought a balloon anyway and was going to bring it to the cemetery but then a small child saw it and wanted it and he gave it away and he felt a little better and that story just made me cry every time I read it.
Not as much as I’m crying now.
In 2012, Owen was in an automobile accident that left him in critical condition. He recovered and the outpouring of support truly left him in awe.
“He touched a lot of lives,” his son Owen Canfield III, a former Associated Press sports writer who followed in his dad’s footsteps and is now an editorial writer at the Oklahoman, said in 2012. “I told him, ‘You reap what you sow.’ The reason you like my dad is he’s a decent guy. It comes through in his writing.”
When I talked to him after the accident, Owen told me this and it’s another thing he said that stuck with me.
“I’m a lucky man,” said the man, then 78 years old, who had shattered his left arm and leg. “It’s been a both very traumatic and a wonderful-at-the-sametime experience. It’s a paradox, I know.
“It reminds you, for the most part, people are darn good. They’re awful good. They’d rather be good than bad.”
He always knew the right words.
He had a good life and was appreciative of that. His children were terrific. Just terrific, he would tell me. Terrific kids. “You know,” he would say, “you’re terrific, too. I love you. You know that, right?”
God bless you, Owen for thinking so. Love you, too.