Today I write about a friend, mentor, boss, who passed away last week. He was a mere 61 years of age. I feel a sense of age as I write this, because it's hard for me to believe Tom Patterson is gone.
He was always strong, too strong for such as death. But he somehow contracted a rare lung disease most likely associated with his summer work in coal mines while attending Western Kentucky University.
I met him when he hired me in 1981 at the now defunct Jackson Daily News. I remember one of the first times I designed the front page of the sports section and was in charge of its output, what we called working slot. I had never actually done something like that, having worked on small papers where the person "putting out the paper" was basically by himself. I wasn't used to the way larger newspapers worked. I stunk. The product that day stunk. I remember Tom telling me that he thought he had hired someone better than that. I was.
The fact is that Tom always saw more in me than even I did. Once when I was panicking about my lack of editing skills, he told me that good writers make good editors. I didn't even know he knew I wrote.
Everything I was, any success I ever had, was due to Tom and his incredible ideas, incredible talent. When the Reno Gazette-Journal was interviewing me, one of eight newspapers in an incredible year that wanted me, I called Tom. He had left Jackson for greener pastors in Denver, Colo. I asked him pertinent questions to ask, then the biggie: Should I take this job. He gave me great info, great ideas, and guided me like the mentor he always was.
The last time I talked to him, he was asking me to join him with the national newspaper, The National. He wanted me to move to New York. I was ready to go. He wanted me to run the college football coverage, what I was best at I thought. I called my cousin who lived in Brooklyn and talked about where to live and what the salary they were offering was going to be like with cost of living in the Northeast. Then Tom called back and said they were changing things and he wanted me to run the agate desk (small type with box scores and such). He said it wasn't a bad position, not nearly as bad as it sounded, because they were going to change the way box scores were done.
I thought it over and called him back to say no. It was so hard to do that because I believed in him so.
Years later, a dear friend of both of us called to say Tom was deathly sick. There was a book of recollections of friends being put together, and the friend wanted me to contribute. I had been changed by our God in the years between contact. I wrote a piece about what belief in a loving God means to those who live, and much more so to those who are dying. I never heard whether it made the book or not, and I never heard from Tom.
I never would have been hired by the Times-Picayune without the skills learned under Tom, without the creativity he not only fostered but cherished. I never would have been part of the nation's No. 1 designed sports section without Tom. I probably would still be in Columbus, Miss., or some other small town without Tom.
As we all get older, as we learn that death might be right around the corner, I say again, knowing the love of God is so important, not just for life, but for eternity.
No comments:
Post a Comment