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Colleagues' Unique Voices Will Be Missed

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By STEVE OTTO

sotto@tampatrib.com

Published: November 16, 2008

It was a miserable week in the newsroom. Friends and colleagues who a week ago were writing stories or columns and fighting deadlines were packing boxes with the few personal items that give the rows of cubicles some sense that real people work there.

It was a miserable experience, even if you knew that what happened here is happening across the country, not just in newsrooms but across the board in restaurants, car dealerships and businesses of all kinds.

But this was different. Here it is not just jobs and families that are being affected. It is the future of the printed word and changing nature of journalism.

Here were too many losses, but I have to talk about two longtime colleagues, Phil Morgan and Dan Ruth, who both lost jobs last week. Together they have given more than 70 years to our newspaper.

Dan liked to argue that his profession was a craft and that he was not really a professional anything. He was, as I enjoyed telling him, half-right as usual. Column writing is a craft and he is the consummate wordsmith.

But what he did was so much more than just assemble words. His words were also the product of experience and of a curiosity and passion born from those experiences. They were independent ideas, ground out several times a week and not tied to rules or control from management.

Dan understood what legendary sports columnist Red Smith meant when he said, "Writing is easy; you just open a vein and bleed."

Over The Edge

Oh, there were moments when he walked over the edge. I've done the same thing. And the next morning there might be some odd news story about growing strawberries in Plant City where the column should have been printed.

But by and large Mother Trib has been an open page for the expression and the freedom to write on any topic with any point of view. You might not have agreed with many of his views, but Dan was never afraid of any repercussions, whether it was from the armed-to-the-teeth gun crowd, the abundant crop of bonehead politicians or the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Hack politicians can stand being criticized, but they hate being laughed at. Dan's own brand of sarcasm could help draw the worst of them out from under the rocks.

Maybe He's Right

Phil Morgan is a treasure. A full-blown hypochondriac, convinced that the world is coming to an end, he has that common touch with people and events that no journalism school can teach.

I would catch him, with notepad, on his way out of the building and he inevitably said, with possibly a touch of sarcasm, he was rushing to a late-breaking feature story.

It didn't matter what the subject, when you saw his byline you knew you were going on a trip into someone's world and it would be worth coming along. It could be as mundane as going to amateur acting class, working in an ice cream parlor or going to a high school reunion.

Phil would take you there and throw in an unexpected twist or two. It could easily be a description of a lonely life in an assisted-living center that would tear at you as you read his insightful details.

These are difficult times for everyone and we'll move on down here at the Type and Gripe factory, but it was truly an awful week and those are only two of the voices that all of us will miss and be the lesser for not reading.

Keyword: Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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