the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Old School and New

(June 19, 2008) Well, Rich Somerville, welcome to Humboldt County. Here’s a briefing from The Town Dandy, and don’t say I never did you any favors … I sincerely hope you stay for a while, at least. But if you do end up moving on, please tell your reporters one thing:Don’t sit on the story!

— “Town Dandy,” Sept. 21, 2006

As it happened, they did sit on the story, at least until the middle of the next day. But the circumstances were not those I had envisioned back then, a time when the Times-Standard’s parent corporation, MediaNews Group, was throwing people around left and right and apparently somewhat panicky about the insurgents over at Eureka kazillionaire Rob Arkley’sEureka Reporter. They sat on the story, so far as I can tell, in order to notify their chief’s family of his sudden and untimely death.

The Times-Standard of today is not the Times-Standard of five years ago, or even two years ago. No matter what obstacles the penny-pinchers at MediaNews continue to throw in its path, it must be said that the Times-Standard newsroom of today is a fantastic little machine firing on just about all cylinders. I can’t really say how much of this is directly due to Somerville, but the transformation under his reign has been a marvelous thing to behold. And not a little vexing, from our point of view. Again and again they’ve beaten us on stories that we would have owned, back in the day.

I got to meet Somerville very shortly after publishing the above piece, which poked fun at his advanced degree in “Alternative Futures” and other sundry details of his resume, which was all I knew about him at the time. He was about as nonplussed as could be imagined, and I later came to realize that this was not because he was simply a happy sort of guy (which he was) but because he’d spent a lifetime in serious newsrooms around the country. As irate readers came to learn, he was a naturally cool customer. He didn’t fight back criticism — he absorbed it. He was a very shrewd fellow, really. Deceptively so.

Luckily, he and I had occasion to meet several times over the months he lived here, the last months of his interesting life. We served on panels and commissions together, gave presentations to groups interested in hearing about the newspaper business, did the KEET-TV fundraiser. He didn’t make a big deal of it, but he always had a story or two from the old days, when papers were still printed with hot lead and journalism was absolutely the most glamorous imaginable job. I came to envy him some. But he was rare among old-timers in that he was really more interested in the present and the future, and he should have had more days ahead of him to see his “Newstradamus” predictions come true. He would have been there to help any way he could.

Rest in peace, big man.

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