Requiem for a newsroom ‘Renaissance man’
Since long before Bat Masterson put the Wild West behind him and traded in his six shooters for a job as a sports columnist at the New York Times, newspapers have had a reputation for attracting unconventional characters.
In five decades of working in newsrooms, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to understand where that reputation came from. Even so, I’ve known few people in this business quite as amiably distinctive as Bill Gowen, who died last week at the age of 82.
I got my first inkling of Bill’s idiosyncratic nature shortly after joining the Daily Herald’s night news desk in 1989 and noticed that this outspoken sports copy editor doubled as the newspaper’s opera critic. Journalism is known for demanding its personnel be flexible enough to cover a wide range of topics, but sports and opera was a combination of cultures I could never have predicted. Yet, Bill transitioned as smoothly between those two worlds as the movies’ dimension-hopping neurosurgeon/rock star/crime-fighter Buckaroo Banzai.
With white hair that seemed to wave over his balding head in random wisps, perpetually rolled-up sleeves and his shirt fighting to stay tucked in behind his belt, he did not have Buckaroo’s sartorial bent, but when it comes to the topics he cared about, he was as articulate and diverse as they come.
He was a recognized authority on fictional rags-to-riches hero Horatio Alger and wrote frequently for the Horatio Alger Society’s newsletter. According to friends, he had a vast collection of books for young readers, including copies of nearly every Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mystery. A U.S. Navy veteran, he served a year in Vietnam. He owned a vast collection of music CDs and could speak almost as knowledgeably on rock 'n' roll as on the classics. He loved to cook.
“Bill truly was a Renaissance man,” says ex-Daily Herald sports writer, copy editor and assistant city editor Mark Ruda. “His weekend could include basketball games Friday and Saturday night, probably a wrestling meet Saturday afternoon, calls to coaches Sunday, then off to the symphony Sunday night.”
His friend John Bumbales, a Daily Herald sports correspondent, said in a Facebook post, “He was one of the funniest people I ever met … He also was a big movie buff, and he had a huge collection of DVDs and CDs.”
Working more on the news side than sports, I was personally familiar with him more as a meticulous grammarian and a somewhat delightfully irascible stickler for detail. But perhaps what most made him memorable to me was his capacity to be passionate without being emotional. For all his diverse interests, he was manifestly down to earth.
I called him a few months ago when I learned he had been diagnosed with prostrate cancer. I asked how he was holding up. He replied plainly, almost matter of factly, “Well, I let things go and didn’t pay attention. I should have gotten the checkups. I didn’t, and this is what happens. I knew it. I just didn’t do it until it was too late.”
Bill worked for the Daily Herald for nearly 38 years, from 1971 until his retirement in 2009. It is true to his nature that no funeral is planned. He has roots in the Northeast and his burial is planned in Connecticut. I make this nod to him, not just by way of eulogy, but for you, as readers, to know what interesting, special people toil in these trenches of journalism.
Bill was a remarkable person and a legend among those who worked with him, but not known widely outside the newsroom. Bat Masterson was a legend, too, of course, but not well known for his work in newspapers. It is that way with so many who do this work. Most are better at telling other people’s stories than their own. But for so many, there are still important and interesting stories to be told.
• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “To Nudge The World: Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.