When your heart hurts and you don’t know what to do, a writer writes

In September 1982, I interviewed for an editing job at the Hagerstown Morning Herald. I got into the hiring process late and the editor, Dave Elliott, already had a solid candidate in mind. But after meeting me, Dave said he wanted to hire both of us and asked me if I had ever written any sports.

I had.

I had covered high school football and basketball games and one WVU football game at other newspapers where I worked, so Dave sent me to interview with the Sports Editor, Darrell Kepler, who wasn’t expecting me and was stunned when Dave asked him to interrupt his busy day to meet with me. Long story short, Dave hired both of us and I became a sports writer along with Darrell, Doug Dull and Tony Mulieri.

Al Weinberg was hired to be the Wire Editor – the job for which I had interviewed – and we all became fast friends almost immediately. Four months later, another Wire Editor resigned and I took the job I was originally intended for. I did it almost reluctantly, because I really liked writing sports. Eventually, I was promoted to City Editor, but my time as a sports writer is what enabled me to join the Herald staff, where I met a guy named John McNamara.

“Johnny Mac,” as we called him, was hired about a year after me, if I recall correctly, and joined the sports staff with Doug and the others. He came from Washington or some place in Maryland where they call pizza “za” and are rabid fans of Terrapin athletics and the metro-area pro teams. He fit in perfectly with the Herald sports department, where I can say honestly, if not modestly, there were no “dumb jocks.”

Like everyone else I worked with, John was highly intelligent, extremely talented and very funny. He had a deep, made-for-broadcast voice, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that extended way beyond the goal posts or the three-point line. He was also a damn fine basketball player.

I only worked at the Herald for three years, but they were three of the best years of my life. I knew that from Day One when three old-timers took the new guy to dinner and we hit it off immediately. I’ve made a lot of work friends over my career who remained my friends after I left those jobs, but there is no finer group of people on the planet than the Hagerstown crew.

We considered ourselves the second-best newspaper in Maryland after the Baltimore Sun and our standards were very high. We worked long, hard hours in the newsroom and washed them down with beer from the Antietam Tavern across the street. Because of the hours we worked – before noon to after midnight many days – we became a kind of closed loop, which is to say we spent a lot of time together.

It was probably the only job I ever had where everybody who worked there liked everybody else without qualification. I can say that honestly. To say we were like family is a cliché, but hey, we wouldn’t have clichés if we weren’t supposed to use them, so there’s that. I am proud of the professionalism we applied to a stressful job, and after work, our “fun-o-meter” was off the charts.

  

I left Hagerstown to return to West Virginia – mainly so I could be closer to my two young children and to share my father’s final days – but Hagerstown never left me and never will. I was deeply saddened when Darrell Kepler died several years ago, and others I knew then have also passed on to whatever comes next. Now, Johnny Mac has been murdered for no apparent reason – at least no reason that makes sense to me – and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.

I don’t have a lot of funny stories to tell about John – others were closer to him than I was – but we were friends all the same. I do remember Saturday morning pickup basketball games with the sports guys and dinners with John and his wife Andrea at some Italian restaurant whose name I have long ago forgotten. I think the last time I saw him was at a mutual friend’s wedding in Nemacolin Woodlands, where we stood outside on a stone patio and talked about his book.

My head is still too cloudy to recall a lot of what we said and did back then, and my heart hurts knowing that no one will ever see John again. The world is a lesser place because of his loss. It doesn't seem real that I turned on my TV set yesterday a few minutes after 4 p.m. and saw a crawler about a mass shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, or that I ran to my computer immediately and at 4:13 p.m., sent a Facebook message to John McNamara asking simply, “Hey man…are you OK?”

The question still hangs there, as I never got a reply. I even called his office phone but, of course, no one answered it.

I wrote yesterday that John was a good guy, and that’s a world-class understatement, but the shock of what happened at the Capital Gazette has apparently numbed me from using more appropriate words. I assume they will come in time. For now, I just want to thank John McNamara for being my friend. His death has shaken me badly but also brought back memories of our mutual friends who now get together only on Facebook – Doug Dull, Al Weinberg, Cathy Mentzer, Bob Fleenor, Bob LaMendola, Donna Bertazzoni, Dave Elliott, Liz Douglas Medcalf, Diana and Keith Snider, Robin Straley, John League, Diane Fries Pryor and anyone else who I forgot.

That’s all I can say right now. It’s hard to type through the tears and the words just don’t come as easily as they should. I just want to say that I was proud to be a journalist, and I was honored to work with people like John McNamara who elevated the profession with his skill and his love for the work.

I’ll miss you, Johnny Mac. And that’s really all I can say.