Gratitude for people, ink, and paper
This column marks the end of a short but fruitful run at the newspaper, and I’d like to spend some of my boss’s ink on gratitude.
This is the all-star team I’m grateful for, and White County readers are extremely lucky:
Susan Egan / Michele Quintal: Since 2019, Susan was the glue of this newspaper — office manager, copy editor, and keeper of a thousand moving parts. She retired last week, passing the keys to Michele, our new glue and another amazing human being.
Linda Erbele: I’ve known Linda as a pal, volunteer, fellow journalist, and now colleague. I've always been grateful for her friendship.
Mark Turner: Our paper’s celebrity. At career days, kids ask, “You work with Mark Turner?” His sports coverage shines, and working with him has been a blast.
Denise Etheridge: The only writer who makes FLOST stories both clear and compelling. Her reporting and guts recall Brenda Starr — with columns that read like New Yorker essays.
Erin Etris: More than a marketer or ad salesperson, Erin is a creative connector who understands how newsprint and digital and people work together to help businesses grow.
These are some people who have taken their backstage passes to the universe, but whose memories linger, like ink in my blood:
Billy Harper: I had the pleasure of working with this Athens sports legend for only nine months. He was one of the kindest people I’ve known in this weird business. I’ll never forget him and the scary flight to Orlando to cover the 1993 Citrus Bowl.
Millard Grimes: One of Georgia’s best, an editor/publisher, author, Pulitzer winner, frequent buyer and seller of newspapers, and a fine boss who hired me away from the good time I was having at the Athens daily and put me to work in the salt mines of Conyers.
Walt Herring: When I learned he died of a massive stroke in his mid 50s, I wasn’t surprised. No one was surprised. He was intense, loud, sometimes scary, sometimes funny, also a Pulitzer winner, and he always had your back. A bonafide roll-up-the-sleeves newspaperman.
Grant Vosburgh: This man gave me my first time job after college. His beautiful family let me crash at their house until I got my own place after moving to South Carolina from New York. Grant loved The Wizard of Oz, Dean Smith, could go both ways on the dribble, and was a great managing editor.
A final word about printing. My father opened a print shop and for a few years I operated a press (well, it was an offset duplicator if you want to get technical about it, a sheet-fed press as opposed to a web press). The point is, ink really is in my blood, and printing and paper have always mattered.