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Memories of John Walter


by Donna Rosene Leff (J70, GJ71)

Reprinted with permission from the Feb. 11 Daily Northwestern.

When my oldest daughter was in 10th grade, she wrote an essay called "Daddy's Favorite" about the day she realized that her Dad had in turn told each of his three daughters they were his favorite. At first she was crushed. But she came to realize that it was his way of making each of his children feel special, as if she were the most important person in his life.

I thought of that essay when I read John Wesley Walter, the Story of a Much-Loved Man. The book was written by Jan Pogue, his wife, as a gift to their children at Christmas, the first Christmas without John, who died on Sept. 11 last year. The book was rich with reminiscences and tributes from his memorial service on Martha's Vineyard and from notes to the family. But the book could have been titled The Story of a Man who Loved Much. Like my daughters' father, John had made each of the people whose lives he touched feel incredibly special to him. Reading all the essays at once, I was struck by how many of the feelings expressed were my feelings, written by people I had never met, people I never knew existed, people who like me, counted John as a friend.

I knew John first as a reporter and then as editor of The Daily. John, the editor in chief a year ahead of me, taught me so much about writing, editing, telling stories, omitting unnecessary "thats," taking yourself seriously, not taking yourself too seriously, having a sense of humor, loving newspapers, having integrity and having passion. He was then, in 1968–69, funny, quirky, demanding and kind and he never changed. He had a distinguished career as a journalist — he was executive editor of the Atlanta Journal Constitution, which won a Pulitzer in 1993 for explanatory journalism under his leadership, and was one of the founding editors of USA Today. One of his earlier jobs was at the Pacific Daily News, a Gannett paper on Guam. His wife recalled that while there, John "learned to love pie, served up to him by two local ladies of the night who refused to sell whole pies because their regular customers might then have to go without a slice."

My favorite stories, though, were the ones from college, written by the people who knew John as I did, from all the time we spent together down in the windowless basement room in Fisk Hall that was The Daily's home. Someone years before had painted the lake and the beach on the faded white brick wall and sometimes that was the only outdoors we saw for days on end.

Andy Lippman (J70) of Los Angeles, a college roommate and Daily reporter, recalled those days when he wrote of inviting John to speak to a group of Associated Press editors in Nevada (Andy was a bureau chief). "After I picked John and Jan up at airport in Las Vegas, where John was going to speak one year, the first thing he did was go to the newsstand and buy several papers. Why should this surprise me? This was a man who kept his college bedroom filled with old copies of the New York Herald Tribune, a newspaper that hadn't existed for years."

Our basement Daily office is long gone but the yellow house on Main Street that held John and those Herald Tribunes is still there. I think of him and of newspapers every time I drive past. I think of him when I delete unneeded words from my students' copy and when I feel defeated by the assault on "Journalism" in the Medill name. John W. Walter has always inspired me and the many others whose lives he touched. He'll go on inspiring us to be good journalists, to be good people and to keep fighting battles we know we can't win.

Donna Rosene Leff (J70, GJ71) is a Medill School of Journalism professor and was editor in chief of the Daily from 1969–70.

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