Newspaperman.
Pat Howard's Twitter bio for years was simply "newspaperman."
It was the second word that came to mind Monday when I learned he'd died. He was 59, four months into retirement after 37 years at the Erie Times-News.
The first word I can't repeat. Pat probably could have found a way. He was that creative and skilled a writer, and while he was a reporter for years before becoming an editor, it was the column he wrote across the years and job titles that let Erie see most frequently a newspaperman at work.
More: Pat Howard, longtime Erie Times-News columnist, dies at 59: Remembered as 'our conscience'
Anyone can write an opinion column. With enough lead time it might even be a good piece of opinion writing.
But do it every week, sometimes three times a week, for decades, and you're not writing a column. You have a column — a craft and a commitment. And that's something few people can reputably pull off.
Pat not only made it work, he made it look easy.
It wasn't.
His method for the Sunday column was to wait until as late as Wednesday or even Thursday morning for a topic to emerge, then research it in the Times-News electronic archives. Pat would occupy one of the glass-walled meeting rooms at 205 W. 12th on Thursday afternoon to start piecing together facts and observations and opinion, all in longhand on a yellow legal tablet, his printed research and a dented water bottle filling a table.
He'd retreat home on Friday afternoon to pick up what he had started Thursday, often working into Saturday afternoon, filing just hours from deadline.
And then he did it again the next week. And again. And again. A voice emerged in that frequency, an identity that was uniquely Pat's, knowable even if you were to remove his photo and name and contact information from his work. Journalists who try can go careers without forging even a froggy voice. Pat made his keyboard sing.
He was the best critical thinker I've known in this industry, and many others, and that clarity of thought played out in his writing. Illogic was the enemy, as any guest learned who came unprepared to an Editorial Board meeting. Governors, state and local leaders, U.S. representatives and senators, candidates seeking endorsements, college and university presidents, community and business leaders with big ideas; more than a few left stewing over propositions they couldn't sell with facts they didn't possess.
That need for fact and detail hints at Pat's long-ago work as a reporter, experience that later led him to a stellar editing career. He specialized in shepherding investigative projects from beginning to end, working with reporters on sensitive stories in which the reporting and writing unfolded over months or even years.
"Pat was my heat shield, or so I would joke with him," said staff writer Ed Palattella, who shared the newsroom with Pat for 30 years. "He would field the angry phone calls and threats from lawyers. He always defended me and my work and told the callers and lawyers that the investigation would continue. He took the heat. He counseled me. He made sure my reporting was sound. He taught me how to just keep going. "
Staff writer Kevin Flowers worked with Pat for 31 years. "Pat supervised a number of the in-depth and investigative projects that I've worked on over the years. Without fail, his editing, advice and direction on those projects made the work more robust," he said. "He had a unique way of helping you see the bigger picture even more clearly, and Pat made it clear that the final product must be as sharp, accurate and contextual as possible for our audience's benefit. He was a fantastic sounding board for talking out such complex stories. And as a reporter, you had his unwavering support when news sources pushed back because you were coming at them hard. I will forever appreciate — and miss — all of that."
Starting in 2016, Pat and editorial writer Lisa Thompson teamed to advance the Times-News' ongoing Erie Next initiative. Pat viewed the work as a meaningful capstone to a career devoted to the health of the native city he loved. The project aims to provoke and marshal critical conversations regarding Erie's deepest problems and greatest opportunities after decades of loss. It arrived in conjunction with planner Charles Buki's wake-up call to the city and at a time when too many leaders were reclining in a damaging status quo.
"Pat urged leaders and residents to step from silos and act with intention to craft a new, viable path forward for a city," Thompson recalled. "There were plenty of topics for us to engage — blight, economic development and regionalism — among them. Most of all, he championed Erie's children, whether it was equitable funding for Erie's public schools, rooting out the corrosion of institutional racism or advocating fiercely for the establishment of a local, bricks-and-mortar Erie County community college, which he viewed as a linchpin to both Erie's economic viability and racial equity."
More: Pat Howard: Erie County makes a stand
As recently as this past fall Pat was editing my irregular columns. One led off with a 60-word sentence that by any editor's measure was at least half too long. I knew it but moved the file into the editing process nonetheless. I saw a notification from Pat on my computer screen a short time later and clenched my teeth.
"Matt," he wrote, "the old-school me would have chastised you for a run-on lead. Except it's wonderful."
It brought me a smile that day. Rereading it brings me to tears.
Newspaperman. Concision is one hallmark of a good editor. A single, strong, perfect noun beats a string of neon adjectives every day. Newspaperman is a royal flush of a noun. It captures everything about Pat. Everything, and barely anything.
It doesn't suggest how openly he wore the hurt of the loss of family members and friends, or his love for his wife, their moms and dads and extended family, his goddaughter, his great friends.
Or how he took up cycling in middle age, rode relentlessly in those years, once even across the state, recorded Tour de France stages to watch and re-watch.
How he hissed at anyone who talked fantasy sports or statistics in his earshot, or cocked his head, peered over his eyeglasses and mock-frowned at gauche talk. Or chirped "Really?" and scribbled a note when something in conversation caught his favor, his yellow notepad landing on the mountain of them that threatened to topple his desk.
The word doesn't get at Pat's fondness for the Cleveland Browns or Penn State, weeks at the Indy 500, road trips to Cleveland's West End Market. It captures no semblance of his boundless musical appetite, rooted in the garage but stretching to almost anything he could get a ticket to with Trish and their friends.
And it conveys nothing of the truth of just how much he'll be missed.
Matt Martin can be reached at 814-870-1704. Follow him on Twitter at @etnmmartin.
The Link LonkApril 18, 2021 at 09:07AM
https://www.goerie.com/story/opinion/columns/2021/04/18/pat-howard-made-difficult-look-easy-erie-times-news/7194297002/
Newspaperman: Pat Howard made the difficult look easy at the Erie Times-News - GoErie.com
https://news.google.com/search?q=easy&hl=en-US&gl=US&ceid=US:en
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