A friend, remembered

 A newspaper clipping hangs on the side of the refrigerator here at the house, held in place by a Chicago fridge magnet at the top and a Niagara Falls magnet at the bottom. It's yellow with age and worse for the wear now, but then it should be. It's 28 years old.

Nineteen-ninety five. That's when Dell Ford drove down to Wells County to interview my dad.

He wasn't John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Stewart or any of the other luminaries Dell interviewed in her long and illustrious career as one of Fort Wayne's newspaper legends. He was just an ordinary man with an extraordinary gift for making beautiful things out of wood, and an even more extraordinary gift for sharing those things. 

A wheelhouse deal for Dell, in other words.

In her 50 years at the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, Dell, who died today at 92, wrote about the famous and not-so-famous, and also the gems who were always hiding in plain sight in northeast Indiana. She told their stories in plain English, and the stories were always good because Dell's greatest skill was any journo's greatest skill.

She got people to talk about themselves. 

Her interviews were never interrogations, she used to say, but conversations. A couple of generations and more grew up reading the results. I grew up reading the results, being a Fort Wayne boy whose mornings always began with the JG.

And then one day I was writing for the JG myself. And Dell Ford was not just a byline I'd been reading all my life, but an actual living, breathing colleague.

Gotta admit, it was weird as hell at first, and also a trifle intimidating. Dell was Dell, after all, and I was just the snot-nosed sports columnist. But somewhere along the line, the snot-nosed columnist earned her respect, and she started dropping by my desk on occasion, usually to talk about her beloved Michigan Wolverines.

Pretty soon we were more than colleagues. We were friends.

I was the one, in fact, who told her about my dad, in the interests of full disclosure. And she took it and made something out of it, the way she always did.

One last thing about Dell: She wasn't just a classic journo out of the old school, she was also the unofficial JG meteorologist. We all have phobias, and Dell's was thunderstorms. So after she retired, she'd show up in the newsroom whenever the weather looked threatening.

That's how we knew a bad one was on the way.

Then again, maybe she just wanted to report on it. She was Dell Ford, after all.