My mind wanders as much as my dog when we’re walking the Skyline Drive trails.
And early Wednesday evening, it wandered away from my step-after-step march on winding paths through darkening pines back to the brighter landscape of the Rapid City YMCA the day before, where I learned of the passing of a journalism icon, by way of Tom Fritz.
“Are you finished?” I said to Fritz, a local lawyer and hungry news consumer who was frozen mid-step on a treadmill, ear buds in and eyes focused on the small TV screen between the handgrips. “Or did you stop to think.”
He pulled a plug out of his left ear and said: “Cokie Roberts died.”
I took a step back. It was a physical step that represented the emotional one I felt.
This was big news to Fritz, and to me. Roberts was a woman of extraordinary skill and accomplishments in the news business, best known for her reporting and commentary on ABC News and National Public Radio and public TV. When I think of NPR and women who broke the glass ceiling in the world of Washington, D.C. news, I think of Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg and Linda Wertheimer — three contemporaries in age and accomplishments.
Fortunately, two of them are still with us, doing their jobs as always.
Roberts did hers as well as any broadcast journalist I have know or read or watched or heard. She was an author, too, somehow managing to write a half dozen or so books while gracefully handling her Emmy winning broadcast career and, oh, by the way, raising a couple of kids with her husband of 53 years, Steven, who is also a journalist.
“She was 75,” Fritz finally said, bringing me back to the now. “It’s sad.”
Indeed, sad. Also a little unsettling to an almost-68-year-old guy like me and to Fritz, who’s a couple of years older. It was another reminder of our own mortality, yet another call to age-related introspection.
And staring at the little TV screen without the benefit of earplugs, I was deflated by the news, as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews offered the story of a life well lived, while one picture or another of Roberts was shown. Finally Fritz and I changed the subject for a short chat about South Dakota politics and I went back to the other side of the gym to resume my casual encounter with the Nautilus machines.
And closer to home, the loss is even more profound
There I also thought more about Cokie Roberts and, through one of those intersections of meaningful memories, about the loss of other women journalists I have known much more personally. Their faces emerged in recollection as I pushed and pulled and squeezed one machine after another — Peg Sagen, Andrea Cook, Denise Ross, Jomay Steen, Maricarrol Kueter.
So many to have known and lost. So many to remember.
They were all treasured newspaper colleagues and, in the case of Sagen and Kueter, also editors who offered cool heads and steady hands in a high-anxiety business that demanded both. All of them taught me something that mattered and opened my eyes to things I might not otherwise have noticed, not just in journalism but in life.
Every one of them fought health problems, courageously. For four of the five, it was cancer, which also took Cokie Roberts, 17 years after she was first diagnosed. And for one, Jomay, it was the heart, that tender heart, which gave up so suddenly and conclusively while she was midway through a joyful day with family back home in Faith.
All were too young — either younger than I or, with Peg and Andrea, just a year or two older. And there on the treadmill, I did what I’ve done before: I went through them in order, considering some of the things about that I admired most.
With Peg, it was her extraordinary capacity for kindness and understanding toward her staff, especially those facing unusual challenges in their lives. Most editors don’t relish personal-life rebuilding projects in their employees. Peg loved them, and wanted to be involved.
She believed in offering second chances, or third, and also offered support that went far beyond any manager’s obligation. So a newsroom led by Peg Sagen was not just a place to grow professionally. It was a place to thrive personally.
The tremors left from her passing were long felt
Peg was 57 when she died in August of 2006. The aftershock of her passing could be felt in the Rapid City Journal newsroom for years.
Then there was Andrea, who died — like Peg, of ovarian cancer — in April of 2016. I thought Peg was unusually heroic in the way she faced her cancer while continuing her work supporting her staff. And I saw the same determined pattern in Andrea.
A rancher with her husband “out in the wilds” near Philip, Andrea handled 90-mile commutes through all types of weather like most of us handle a six-block drive to work. She brought ranch-country grit and common sense to the newsroom, to the newspaper and to its community of readers. She also offered informed updates on weather, road conditions, short cuts and the best and worst stretches of highway for cell-phone service, all of which were valued by reporters traveling western South Dakota.
Denise was just 48, a colleague and friend who was young enough to be my daughter, when she died in July of 2018. She was as smart and intuitive and persistent as any reporter I have known, and every big as inclined toward new-school innovation as I was toward the comforts of old-school ways.
Denise also courageously carried the burdens metastatic cancer, giving her friends and colleagues and, especially, her two boys and the rest of her family, the gift of more time — years more — than the mournful medical odds might have indicated.
Jomay was 61 when she died this July 10th. I worked with her both at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls and the Journal here in Rapid City. A ranch girl who grew up to be both teacher and journalist, she was also a Cheyenne River tribal member. So she brought a multi-cultural perspective and essential connections to the indigenous community — particularly to young Native American students interested in journalism themselves.
Maricarrol was 63 when she died a month after Jomay and years after receiving a challenging prognosis on her cancer. Before that, she was my editor for 10 years at the Argus and was as good at managing the chaos of the newsroom as any editor I have known. She took her leadership skills beyond the Argus, however, to push for more openness in government, more access for reporters and, through her role as a Pulitzer judge, more excellence in our business.
Proving excellence lives so close to home
All five of these women were Cokie Roberts up close and personal in my own life. All five came to mind, quite naturally, along with the news of Roberts’ death.
In the Catholic Mass, we say petition prayers for specific people and things, among them those who have died. Through my life, I have pictured people I knew and cared about, often family members of the previous generation, or generations, during those prayers. But now there are so many faces from my own generation, my own group of peers.
Relatives. Friends. Colleagues.
So many to pray over. So many to grieve, to remember with gratitude.
I thought about those faces, those losses, during the remainder of my YMCA workout. I thought about Cokie Roberts, too, and how she will now be added — in a less-personal way — to what poet Stanley Kunitz called the “feast of losses” that must be reconciled by those who live on.
That’s a gift, that living on and that difficult process of reconciliation, and one not to be undervalued. But it comes with a responsibility, too, an implied command to live fully and meaningfully each one of the days denied to those we knew and cared about and lost too soon.
The thought of which quickened my pace at the Nautilus machines and inspired me to reach out and hug my wife -- perhaps a little longer than normal -- when she joined me after her workout over on another treadmill.
Was she perfect? No, just exceptional
During the drive home from the Y, I forgot for a while about Roberts and her passing. But later, on Twitter, I saw a video clip of a conservative commentator calling Roberts out for an alleged case of “fake news.” Beyond the horrid timing of the criticism by Michelle Malkin, it left the impression that Roberts had intentionally produced a story that was not true. Which is not true at all.
In the rush of TV news production, however, she did stand in front of a fake background -- a projected picture of the U.S. Capitol -- to give a news report because she didn't have time to go across town and stand in front of the real thing. That was in January of 1994. Roberts and her news producer got reprimands from ABC news executives. And Roberts later said it was "a stupid thing to have done."
That's what it was: stupid. It wasn’t diabolical. It wasn't catastrophic. It wasn't career defining. It wasn't a manipulation of facts or creation of them in a story. It was a silly, phony thing done in the haste of TV news production, then apologized for. A 25-year-old stupid thing, brought up just hours after her death, as if it somehow re-framed the picture of excellence Roberts created throughout her long career.
It didn’t change who Cokie Robert was or what she accomplished or how she should be remembered. But cheap shots define the world we live in, especially the social media part of it and the talking-head carnival. Some of us don’t have the decency to refrain from personal attacks even on the day of someone’s death.
Which disturbed but didn’t surprise me. Few things surprise me anymore when it comes to bad manners in public settings and mean-spirited exchanges.
The distraction took time away from what really mattered, which was pausing in life to really consider how much the news business in this nation lost with the passing of Cokie Roberts. I found time for that a night later afoot with the dog on the Skyline trails, as Rosie sniffed her way through the thickets and stopped to graze happily on bluegrass and brome.
I stopped, too, from time to time, to touch the leadplant and coneflowers and purple asters. And in doing that, I also reached into memory to consider those other women lost, women who mattered, women who deserve to be remembered with love and respect during the gift of the days to come.
Days they were themselves denied.
