Otterblog

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I’ve been spending the past few days thinking about the death of Roy Thompson, who died Saturday at Salemtowne. For many years, he was the local columnist and a reporter for the Journal, and he was really one of a kind. In the golden age of newspapers, before the Internet, before cable news, he was the real deal. In that era, many columnists were almost inseparable from the identity of their city. Think of Mike Royko and Chicago or Jimmy Breslin in his prime and New York. The city’s stories bubbled through these people. For better or worse, Winston-Salem’s stories bubbled through Roy Thompson. Its quirks. Its optimism. Its manners. Its sense of place in the world.

As somebody who loves journalism and thinks he’s reasonably good at it, I can tell you that it’s humbling to spend an hour or so thumbing through Roy’s clip files. He could flat out write. The Roy Thompson column was a work of beauty. Sly. Visual. Elegant in its simplicity and respect for clear writing. Roy was of the old school, where columnists never said what they thought. They just described what was going on and let the weight of their words paint a pretty clear picture of the events as they ought to be seen. As a reporter, he was wide-ranging, covering everything from the Klan to Thomas Wolfe and the Vietnam War. I’ve attached one of his later columns, which is both an essay on clutter and the ineptitude of state government.

There’s an expression somebody told me several years ago that applies to many of the jobs that people do. It goes something like this: Imagine a triangle with three words at the corners. One is Good. The other Cheap. The last Fast. When you are getting a job done, you can at most pick two of those. In other words, something that is cheap and good isn’t going to be fast. Roy was fast. And he was good. I don’t know if he was cheap, but whatever we paid him back then, it was a bargain.

Roy retired a year before I came to the Journal, so we never had a chance to work together. Surely my loss more than his.