Well friends, things have been tough lately.
As almost everyone coming across this knows, my Granny died last month.
She was 85, and while she had slowed down in the past two years, she had never truly retired. She was very proud of that, and out of all her accomplishments, it's what she'd most want us to say about her. Her obituary is here.
Her death was actually the week after one of our friends, Kirk Powell, whose obituary is here. I am obligated by years of telling him that I would tell him so to point out for years I have been telling him he didn't need to drive. If you knew Kirk, you'd know that I'm not only allowed to make that joke, it's expected of me, because Kirk's favorite jokes were the ones you absolutely shouldn't say.
Kirk had been brought into the family fold when he bought my great-grandfather's paper, The Holden Progress. He had the paper in Pleasant Hill until a few years ago, which is the role I knew him in for years, as well as, again, the world's corniest jokester, part of the inseparable Kirk-and-Jan duo who were always at football games and press meetings. After Jan died, Kirk was always with us at press meetings, because he and Granny were walking at the same pace. I guess we didn't realize just how much they really were going at the same pace.
Back in January, at Granny's 85th birthday party.
Granny, of course, was my first journalism teacher, mentor and boss, in addition to being my Granny and really my best friend. Some of my favorite memories are when she would pick me up from high school (the enabler behind my long years without a driver's license) and take me to Sonic while we listened to Mizzou sports radio... a departure from her usual NPR. When Mizzou was deep into the NCAA tournament one year I remember we sat in the parking lot of the office for more than half an hour listening to Mike Anderson.
I meant it when I said at the funeral that Granny and I had been a team since I came home from college. My best work was done when she was still in the office to handle the day-to-day stuff and look over my work and ask, as we always teased her about from her appearance in the Missouri Press Association documentary: "is that really necessary?" She also had an encyclopedic knowledge of everything that happened since she bought the paper in 1960, down to the month. We went to almost all meetings and events together for years, and handled a lot of issues.
As with anything tongue-in-cheek that ends up on our front page, my dad did the headline.
It's been an adjustment, over time, mostly when Granny had to start staying at home in early 2017. It wasn't easy for her to be away from the action, and she demanded first daily, then weekly reports of not just every bit of news (including full retelling of meetings on Wednesday afternoons, two hours before the paper got back and she could read it herself) but also everything else I knew about our friends and our friends' friends. She loved people, and there is a whole category of things I would report to her, like someone's kid's new interest or a story about their pet.
So, I'm flying without my encyclopedia, and without my "am I/is this right?" wisdom check. That came into play immediately, because as she was ailing I was juggling a few topics I was unfamiliar with. We were, of course, headed to print the day she died... which meant that my dad called her out in the headline of the story about her death for missing a deadline for the first time ever.
Clayton with Pam Schuchner, our ad designer, leaning over my dad's computer. When Clayton told me he was coming back for the funeral and volunteered to help with the paper, I told him to brush up on his CS2.
The paper looked particularly good that week, because we had help.
One of Granny's longstanding traditions was the intern program. Interns have gone on to impressive careers all over the world. I mean that literally, partially because Clayton Crabtree is design desk manager at the Times of London. He made it back for the funeral, and volunteered to help us out with laying out the paper.
Clayton usually gets a lot of teasing when he's in the office, because he's come a long way from the kid who rode his bicycle to work and had a lot of trouble spelling (though I'm pretty sure the spelling difficulties have just been masked by the excuse of British vs. American English). I was in middle school while Clayton was the intern, and spent a lot of my time tormenting him (to the point of throwing tennis balls!). It was really nice to have him back in town and part of the team.
We also put in a page of old photos that week, including some great pictures of her attending Mizzou games.
For the next week, we asked members of the community to submit their memories and remembrances of Granny, which we published alongside the card of thanks from the family.
We've been very aware that we can't be selfish — losing Granny has been a loss for the whole community.
It's a big change for us, but like my dad put in the main story, our goal is for everything to be pretty much the same. We've been very, very grateful for the care our friends have shown us.