A day late, but still plenty to be thankful for

First, let me readily acknowledge a things-to-be-thankful column running the day after Thanksgiving might seem a little after the fact. But, hey, I can't help the fact that my column runs on Friday, and Thanksgiving happened to fall on a Thursday this year.

On Wednesday, I announced the retirement of Mary Jo Porter. You rarely see her byline in the paper, but she helps us maintain our local focus in ways big and small.

Mary Jo has been with us since 1994, and has spent all that time doing the unheralded, but essential, tasks of a community news coordinator - duties that have ranged from backing up our switchboard operator to clerical work to, most significantly, getting community news items in our Neighbor editions. I suspect Mary Jo is better known to some segments of the community than our reporters. And, to illustrate the impact Mary Jo has made on the newspaper, consider this:

She came across a news release announcing Community High School in West Chicago was honoring alumni Kurt Johnson. She saw that Johnson's story of how he founded the humanitarian group that rescues Iraqis who are marked for death for helping the U.S. during the war might warrant more than a quick news blurb in Neighbor. The result was a Page 1 "centerpiece" a few weeks ago.

"The story never would happened without MJ," said Anne Halston, opinion page editor and Mary Jo's boss for several years. "That kind of thing happens all the time here."

I'm guessing just about everyone has a Mary Jo in their office, at least I hope they do.

Here are more things a newspaper editor finds to be thankful for.

I was interviewed this week by a college student doing a paper for an introductory journalism class. First of all, I'm thankful that students are still taking journalism classes, given all the doom and gloom about our industry. I also was given a question I'm not sure I've ever been asked before: What types of stories give you the most satisfaction?

I don't care, I said, if we never again write a murder story. Sure, we have to do them, and do them well, but I take no particular joy in them. I loved the story that Christy Gutowski did in Monday's paper on the judge and his lawyer buddies who climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. Coincidentally, Christy's the person who writes most about the murder and mayhem as our courts reporter. She, too, thought the story was a refreshing change.

I found myself, during the interview, gravitating toward our Neighbor section, where I hope we'll continue to do the kinds of stories that connect with our readers in a most personal way, and come up with the kind of news that makes a difference in their lives.

If you want a good example of that, please watch for Sunday's Neighbor, specifically our "lend a hand" feature created by editor Christie Willhite as a way for local service and charitable groups to let readers know who they are and what they do. This week we feature a group called "Normal Moments." Here is part of the intro written by Christie:

"If we're lucky, we can't begin to fathom what Patricia Fragen is talking about.

"Unless we've been there, we don't know what life is like when your child has cancer or any other potentially fatal illness. We can't feel the love, the sadness, the stress, the frustration, the exhaustion."

Patricia Fragen is the Naperville woman building a network of volunteers to help the parents of children with critical illnesses with the everyday tasks they can't get to, enabling them to share some normal moments with their kids.

If that isn't something to be thankful for, I can't imagine what is.