Anniversary is reminder of the importance of the community story

Crandall Library to hold Dec. 12 event for The Last American Editor, Vol. 2

By Ken Tingley

The anniversary passed quietly and without any notice except perhaps from the closest of family and friends.

That’s how life works after 22 years.

That’s when Mary Joseph was taken from our newsroom by cancer at the age of 39.

Earlier this year while looking for stories for my second volume of columns, I found the story again. In some ways, the pain was still fresh.

“We've lost one of our own here at The Post-Star and our foundation has been shaken,” is how I started that column in November 2001. “Newspapers are too often seen as faceless institutions taken for granted by their communities, a daily visitor with their readers' cups of coffee who can spin a good yarn one morning and leave you cut-off-in-traffic-angry the next.”

The column was a reminder of how temporary life can be.

It was a reminder to live life while you can and not to take for granted the job and satisfaction of a job well done.

“I ask you on this day to take a moment to think about the faces behind the newspaper, the dedicated men and women who not only try to do a good job, but live and breathe their profession,” I continued that day. “Our Mary Joseph was just such a person.”

I was surprised I had not included the column in the first volume of “The Last American Editor.”

When people asked me about the book, I sometimes struggled for an answer.

Essentially, it is a collection of columns about the people and events in our community. But it is more than that. Those people, those stories were often as inspirational as they were heartbreaking.

The fact they are rarely written anymore is a loss for us all.

Mary Joseph performed her duties at The Post-Star quietly and with little fanfare as a copy editor catching typos and designing eye-popping feature pages.

“This is not a glamorous job,” I wrote at the time. “She worked nights that turned into mornings. She created the feature pages that made you, the reader, want to read those stories. You don't know that. I know you don't know that and maybe our writers don't even know that. But there is a pretty good chance that the reason you found yourself late for work reading a lengthy feature story was because of the creativity Mary Joseph took in presenting the story to our readers.”

There are lots of people in our communities who do the thankless job that impact us all with little thanks. I’d like to think I told many of those stories over the years.

The ones I missed in the first book are now told in the new book, “The Last American Editor, Vol. 2.”

I hope those who read it will find themselves late for work once or twice while absorbed in another story from the past, another story of our shared history.

There is a lot of my own life in there. too

The death of my father, the closing of my brother’s company and the only job he had known in 25 years, my son’s first college acceptance and my wife’s gift of Christmas year after year after year. These stories are special, not because they happened to me, but because they are stories that are common for all of us.

What this book is really about is people.

Local people.

Ordinary people that did extraordinary things that continue to inspire.

It’s about life, and death too, as we lament the ones we lost along the way, like Mary Joseph.

What I tell people now is that the two books are history books, too.

They define a time and the people who inhabited the world we call Hometown, USA.

But perhaps no story tells it better than the one about Mary.

I’ve told it often over the years.

I included it in my second book “The Last American Newspaper.”

It was about Mary’s dedication to the task, maybe to the community in which she was raised. You see, Mary was a Glens Falls girl. As sports editor on Friday nights, I worked well after midnight, but it was Mary who usually turned out the lights.

What I will always remember about Mary is that last day when I stopped by the hospital to see her just hours before she passed away. I had meant to do it all week, but I kept putting it off.

“I’m not sure why I went Sunday,” I wrote in that column 22 years ago. “I just felt I needed to see how she was doing.”

When I got to the hospital elevators, there was no one at the information desk to give me a room number. I had my excuse. I turned around and began walking for the door.

Then I stopped.

To this day, I don’t what made me stop.

I took the elevator to her floor and was directed to her room by a nurse.

She was struggling to breathe, gasping for air and her mother said they were going to take her to intensive care.

I told her how much we missed her, how much we needed her at the newspaper. But as I was about to leave, I caught her gaze, an intensity on her face and she began to speak, haltingly.

“I really….miss…working…at the newspaper,” she said punching out each word between gasps.

There was something in the way she said it, its intensity that caught me off guard. It was if she knew the thing she loved the most was about to be taken away.

Over the years, I thought a lot about those words.

About the look on her face.

I suspect it impacted my own intensity for the work, my own desire to make a difference in the community.

And maybe that’s why I’m still writing.

And still remembering Mary Joseph.

Book debut

I’ll be holding my first event to celebrate the publication of my third book - The Last American Editor, Vol. 2 - at Crandall Library in Glens Falls on Tuesday, December 12 at 7 p.m.

I’ll go into more detail about the stories and people in the latest book.

I’ll be inviting some of the people I wrote about and hopefully you can meet them first hand,

The event will be in the  Christine L. McDonald Community Room downstairs. I will be signing books afterward.

Correction

In Monday’s column about the road forward for the Rockwell Falls Public Library, Sarah Dallas, director of the Southern Adirondack Library System, wanted to clarify two points.

SALS got its provisional charter on June 27, 1958, its absolute charter on March 29, 1963.  Not in the 1800’s.

Also, it is the New York State Board of Regents who will be appointing the trustees in Lake Luzerne, not SALS.

Beware speeders

The Times Union reported last week the state of New York was going to issue automated speeding tickets in work zones on I-87 and I-84, including one local work zone.

It said the experiment would take place on the Monday thru Wednesday before Thanksgiving and include Exits 22 and 23 where construction work is being done.

The tickets would be issue without a traffic stop and cost $50 for the first violation and $100 for the second violation within six months.

The radar system will identify vehicles traveling equal to or faster than the speed limit and trigger the system to capture photos of passing vehicle. Anyone caught speeding will receive a ticket in the mail within 14 days of the incident.

The new enforcement program is based on legislation that was passed in 2021 to improve driver behavior. So far the program has been used primarily in work zones. I suspect this is the future of speeding enforcement.

VP choice

The New York Times also did an analysis Sunday about who Donald Trump might pick as his running mate if he gets the GOP not and Elise Stefanik was again among the candidates.

It broke down the candidates into groups: The Political veterans  (Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, others); The Loyalists (J.D. Vance, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Kristi Noem, others); The Up-And-Comers (Elise Stefanik, Byron Donalds, Nancy Mace, others); And The Wild Cards (Tucker Carlson, Rick Scott, Marjorie Taylor Greene).

For Stefanik, here is what the Times wrote about the pros and cons of her selection:

PROS

• A 39-year-old woman and rising Republican, Stefanik would bring youth and gender diversity to a ticket with the septuagenarian Trump.

• She has a proven ability to reinvent herself as the political moment necessitates.

CONS

• Her devotion to Trump may be surpassed only by her own political ambition. There’s room for only one personal brand at Mar-a-Lago.

• She’s from New York, which despite Republican gains remains a solidly blue state.

NOLA Sunrise

We’ve been spending the holidays down in New Orleans and absorbing all the culture we can. Here is one final sunrise from the bridge crossing the Mississippi River.