columnist Jim Gordon. It was in today's paper.
His death left grieving friends and colleagues to remember a man with a quick wit and a quick smile, though he seldom displayed both at the same time.
A journalist dedicated to what is just and right.
A solid friend.
A funny, funny guy.
Someone who got the job done, no matter how tough it was.
That’s the man I remember.
We worked together for 21 years, and I find it hard to believe I’ll never hear him call me Gordo again or that he’ll never send me an e-mail pointing out how much the composite drawing of a robbery suspect looks like me.
“He was a deadpan comic,” said longtime radio and television personality Tom Higgins, who was a target of Richard’s humorous harpoons at a roast Tom’s friends threw for him after he and WYIN-TV parted ways.
“He’d make you laugh, wait until you had quieted down and then he’d kick you in the butt again. He had people wiping their eyes.”
Former Post-Tribune reporter Joe Conn knew Richard, who he describes as “a merry prankster” from the time they were seventh-graders together at Gary Edison.
Richard sat in front of Joe in Ms. Perino’s art class. “Rich was always turning around,” Joe said. “Finally, he got on her last nerve, and she took us both out in the hall and swatted us. I never let him forget that he got me into trouble.”
Joe moved to Hobart and played football, as Richard did at Gary West Side, but they never played each other.
Richard started writing for the Post-Tribune as a summer intern while attending Ball State University and became a full-time sportswriter in 1973.
When Joe returned from Africa after a stint in the Peace Corps and took a job at the Post-Tribune, there was Richard, ready and willing to get him into trouble again. “I never let him forget he’d gotten me paddled once,” Joe said.
It was former managing editor Terry O’Rourke who hired Richard, a decision he never regretted, he says. “He was good for the paper,” Terry said. “There was nothing bad you could say about him.”
Richard’s deep attachment to his hometown was the journalistic commitment that Higgins thought extraordinary.
“He knew Gary from way back,” Higgins said. “He knew the old guys, but he also stayed up on the timely stuff.”
Writing a weekly column in addition to his duties as North Lake editor, Richard embodied the age-old mission of a newspaper, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.
But Conn, a former president of The Newspaper Guild, also recalled a man who was, in earlier times, a rock-solid member of his union and a tireless worker on behalf of the Christmas Neediest Fund, the holiday charity the union sponsored.
“He was the heart and soul of that enterprise,” Conn said. “He would marshal the troops, wrap the presents, do whatever it took to get the job done.”
He and Richard used to drive to a toy warehouse in Schaumburg and fill a delivery truck with gifts. They were road trips filled with laughter.
When I saw Rich in the hospital a week or so ago, he seemed to be on the mend. We talked about old times and about what’s going on at and around the newspaper now. We had a few laughs, but he was itching to get out of the hospital, not a man to willingly take things lying down.
Now he’s gone.
He was feeling the way many of us are feeling now when he wrote a column in March about a woman who tirelessly gave of herself to others.
The column, which touched many people, ended with these words.
After losing her ability to give, she lost her will to live.
When her suffering ended, it hurt me, but I was glad.
At her funeral this week, it’ll hurt more because I fear I’ll see her for the last time.
I know she’s earned a spot in heaven. I’m not sure about her youngest son.
You may not have been sure, Rich, but we are.
We know wherever that good woman who bore you is, there you are, too.
And we know you’re smiling.
