Making time to say our goodbyes when we have the chance

Just a little over 41 years ago, on a cold and rainy day, a letter arrived in my Narragansett, R.I. post office box. The return address shouted in bright colors, “The News-Times.” I was excited about whether this daily newspaper in Danbury would hire me as I opened the envelope.

At 24 years old, I really wanted to leave a little Ocean State weekly where I had worked for the last nine months and wanted join the staff of a daily paper. That had been my desire after choosing to major in journalism at Southern Connecticut State University.

I immediately called The News-Times and asked, as directed, for Suburban Editor Mike Hartnett. A nice enough fellow, he set up an interview. I drove to Danbury and talked about my love for journalism, all my college experiences in it, and even took a little test to show my skills.

Mike then asked when I could start. “Two weeks. I’ll be here.” Great, he replied. A week later, cold feet froze that decision.

Rhode Island had drawn me back home after a series of fires burned down our family house four times in the three previous years, including the last one just a few months after graduating from college. However, that’s another story, real as it is.

A need to escape elsewhere came as soon as I got home. I was fearful, though, of striking out on my own for many complicated reasons related to the fires. But I tried.

I worried that another fire would happen. I couldn’t go. I called Mike and pulled out. Gracious, he accepted my weak and subtly-side-stepping reason that I just wanted to remain in Rhode Island.

Regrets mounted in me for backing out. Embarrassed, I soon called Mike. I told him honestly that I changed my mind. “Come back to Danbury and let’s talk,” he said. I went with a fair amount of pride in check.

“You know, you are the only person I ever hired twice. I want a commitment you’ll come,” he said. “Yes,” I replied and showed up within the month. I remained at the paper for nearly five years. Unknowingly to both of us, we charted a course that would change my life.

He first put me in a small town and taught me the ropes of covering them. He had done the same. When I became city hall reporter, he helped me find courage to challenge public officials — the kind I’d later become, ironically. He taught me about writing, interviewing and meeting deadlines. He helped me understand investigative reporting.

Mistakes happened, though. Invariably they do with young reporters. Misspelling names, unintentional errors in fact, fuzzy angles and beginnings of stories that were just boring to him and would have been to readers, too.

“Mike, I’m really sorry,” I’d say when a problem arose. He’d reply nicely to learn from it. This was such a change from the crusty, hard-edged editors I worked for during past internships. Born in Britain, Mike had genteel manners, a warm laugh, a wry sense of humor with much subtlety to it, and no desire to beat on the hired help.

More importantly, he also cared about his staff, mostly 20-somethings just starting out in the news business. He also showed us the people we covered were more than characters in a story, but real people with real problems and real feelings.

He loved his family that put up with him working a late-night shift with us newbies for many years, which included him having young kids and them starting to grow up.

One memorable example of this editor was his nightly ritual of saying goodbye to the staff when the paper went to press. “Kiss, kiss,” he’d shout out in the white-walled, windowless reconverted supermarket that was our newsroom.

“Good night, nightside,” he’d say next to waves from a few busy reporters at our dark brown and very long wooden table. It was our collective desk holding our typewriters. The digital age hadn’t arrived yet.

He’d don his blue and white fisherman’s hat and windbreaker and head out the door. The next day he’d return, refreshed and with a sense of humor always surfacing in his daily “nite notes” of reminders.

One once said, “All, no nuns killed in car crashes today and Armageddon is still a few days away, but your stories for the Summertimes special supplement are due tomorrow. Need them now! Kiss, kiss —

Mike.”

For me, this supportive attitude and hands-on mentoring also helped cultivate my interest in public policy. So profound it was, I applied in 1984 to Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government for my master’s degree.

Admission came without the typical graduate record exams. I had to show proof through more than 40 stories — those Mike assigned or edited — that I understood basic workings of government and public policy. It helped to bypass one of the two years of required study so that I could afford the $60,000 price tag.

Wow! That chance of getting hired twice in Danbury paid off, I believed, yet still not understanding in my youthful way the larger gifts of stability along with knowledge, insight and passion of journalism he infused in me and the rest of us.

After I earning my degree at Harvard, Mike and his wife, Mary Jo, would put me up in their Brewster, N.Y., home while I looked for jobs in New York City. They fed me franks and beans, often standard fare in the household.

A news and journalism junkie like me, he also was an usher in my wedding. A few years later he helped me cope when my wife wanted a divorce and moved back to Hyannis, Mass., with my 2-year-old child.

In ways clear only years later, he also jump-started the process for me to recover from the four fires that took everything I owned each time. In his mentoring and friendship also came a sense of stability.

For my part, I helped him on some weekends clear land where he was building a house. However, he gave far more to our relationship than I could or did.

My career next took me to the Connecticut Post, then to Connecticut state government for 33 years and now back to covering those same small Rhode Island towns around Narragansett.

He went on to other papers, trade publications, freelance writing and screenwriting. Mike and Mary Jo moved to Virginia 11 years ago. We lost touch. A stark contrast, thinking back now, to our conversations every day long ago.

He remained, though, alive in my mind for the friendship, teacher of lessons minor and significant, and someone who shone a light when I needed it.

On Oct. 11, I read a Facebook post expressing sympathy to his son, Christopher. There was a photo of Mike. He looked larger than life. “Oh, God,” thought, and felt a deep, choked-up kind of foreboding feeling. He had died a few days before.

We never said goodbye. I never got to tell him how influential and important he was in my life. There’s a hole and lots of guilt. It’s a familiar kind of story to many.

For whatever the reason, that acknowledgment gets on a to-do list. More important things have our attention. But are they? There was no “nite note” that came as a reminder on this one.

Kiss, kiss, Mike, old buddy. I’ll see you shortly after my final deadline. We have lots of catching up to do.