Thunderstorms, some heavy during the morning hours, then skies turning partly cloudy during the afternoon. High around 85F. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. 1 to 2 inches of rain expected..
Tonight
A few clouds. A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible. Low 68F. Winds SSE at 10 to 15 mph.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t salute Helen Roser one last time on this page. It’s the place that she’s probably best-known.
Ms. Roser wrote hundreds of letters to the editor that we published here. She also wrote book reviews that we printed, and probably thousands of letters and notes that we didn’t publish, either because she intended them as private correspondence or because she had exceeded our limits. Our policy is to allow one letter per month per person. In her latter years she even bought classified ad space to publish letters that she thought were important enough, limits be damned.
Helen – and I’m going to call her that out of familiarity and friendship, since “Ms. Roser” just seems too distant – was the best kind of reader. She paid very careful attention to public affairs, and even more careful attention to the way we reported on those affairs. She was there to critique tone, and word choice, and headlines. She was an independent thinker.
She often wrote notes of appreciation, a gesture I and many Mercury journalists appreciated a great deal. She also wrote scathing critiques; the thing about her critiques is that you had to take them seriously. As such she represented the conscience of the community, or at least our subscribers; I don’t know how many times, when editing the paper, I said something like: “We can’t write it that way, because what would Helen say if we did?”
She blasted me once a few years ago, so I went up to Meadowlark to visit her. She chuckled, offered me a drink – which I declined, since I was on the clock – and said she must’ve just been in a bad mood. We then went on for quite awhile about public officials, and what the local government was up to, and she re-told the story of how she ended up in Manhattan. That story, I’m grateful to be able to say, centers on The Mercury. She picked our community after subscribing to the paper and finding it excellent.
That meant she always held us to a high standard, which of course we did not always meet. Daily journalism is a rough-and-ready line of work, with limitations on time and space, and hard choices on tight deadlines. We’re human; we mess up. We get back after it the next day and correct our mistakes and try to do better. We try, and then we try harder.
I’ll miss Helen, personally and professionally. But as the newspaper publisher, I can tell you that she won’t ever entirely be gone. We’ve all internalized those high standards; we can all anticipate her critiques, what she might have said. She’s with us – in fact, she’s with all of us in this community – for the long haul.
Thanks, Helen. We look forward to hearing from you again.
