George Kennedy as I remember him most: Giving me a look that said, “Fair enough.”
George Kennedy, the former managing editor of the Columbia Missourian, longtime faculty member at Mizzou and legend of journalism education, died Friday after more than a decade of battling Parkinson’s.
Daryl is not alone in this, given how many people have already shared memories of George as well as the speed at which this information spread among those people who knew George.
One of the many difficulties with getting older is that I find myself losing mentors and heroes who helped me become the person I am. Of all those losses, this one really cuts me to my core.
But I wanted to be George Kennedy, even though our first conversation led me to believe I’d never spend one day working for him.
I was finishing my master’s degree in Wisconsin when I applied for a city editor position at the Columbia Missourian. I had about three years of part-time work on the State Journal city desk and about a year and a half of teaching experience.
I didn’t even realize that I was applying at Mizzou (God’s personal journalism school), in that the ad called it “the University of Missouri-Columbia,” which I took to mean a branch campus or something.
When I got there, it dawned on me these were the big dogs. George Kennedy would be my boss, the same George Kennedy who helped write the textbook that introduced me to journalism and the same textbook from which I was currently teaching.
My interview with George was a lunch date at Glenn’s restaurant, a few blocks from the Missourian office. On our walk over there, I was chattering away like methed up monkey, trying desperately to engage the man. He remained silent until we got to the restaurant.
He sat down and said two things: He turned to the waitress and said, “I’d like iced tea, please,” and then turned to me and said, “I have four people up for this job and everyone is more qualified than you are.”
I didn’t flinch, probably out of a youthful lack of self-awareness, and responded, “Maybe so, but none of them will work harder for you than I will.”
I still have no idea what possessed this man, who was doing important journalism before I was born, to hire a 23-year-old kid to run his night city desk, but from that point on, my sole goal was to prove he didn’t make a mistake.
Over the next few years, I learned more from George about journalism and life than I did from all of my degrees combined. So much of what George meant and the impact he had on me came from little moments that still make me laugh:
– We had misspelled the name of a soccer club in the paper, only to misspell it in a different way in the correction. Since all corrections had to run in my section, I asked if he wanted us to take another stab at it:
“No, I think we’ve done more than enough damage at this point.”
– We had one particularly terrible day, where it seemed everything in the paper was screwed up in some way. At the afternoon meeting, George let us know:
“Not only did we not manage to add to the sum of human knowledge today, I think we actually managed to subtract from it.”
– My first winter we got about a seven-inch snowstorm that managed to shut down the entire city for about a week. When I complained about Columbia’s ineptitude when it came to snow removal, he put it in perspective:
“Vince, you moved to Baptist country. They believe God put the snow there and God will take it away when He is ready.”
However, when I sat down to really think about the bigger things I learned from George, I came up with a handful of life lessons that shaped who I am and that continue to guide how I teach my students today:
INSPIRE CONFIDENCE IN THOSE WHO NEED IT MOST: One of the comments a friend left on my social media post about George’s death captured the essence of his leadership in one sentence:
“He believed in me before I did.”
That was never more true for me the night in October 2000, when we got a late-night call about a plane that crashed somewhere south of St. Louis. A rumor began to circulate that Gov. Mel Carnahan was aboard and had died in the crash..
I was dragging reporters in to make calls and confirm the rumor so we could put something together for a front-page story. The copy desk was redesigning the front on the fly, even though no one was sure we’d have the goods to run the story.
We had a midnight deadline and right around 10:45, I got a phone call from George.
“So, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty interesting night there…” he began.
He asked what we had and I filled him in on everything we were doing before asking him the obvious question: “Are you coming in?”
I figured he’d want to captain the ship, making sure that we made the right calls about what to run and how to state what we knew. I also figured he would want to keep the situation from going off the rails if things got out of hand and we had to redo the paper yet again. To this day, his answer stunned me:
“Why? I’ve got you.” And then he hung up.
I was 26 years old and had about two years of experience running a night city desk. George knew more about covering stuff like this than I’d ever know. This was probably the most important story we would have in the paper for years to come, and if we screwed it up, we’d be the cautionary tale for all journalism students going forward.
And yet, George never hesitated about putting the ball in my hands and telling me, “Go win this thing.”
From that moment on, I realized that inspiring confidence in others was the greatest gift a teacher could give. Every day, I sit with kids who are frustrated with their inability to get a job, get an internship, complete a project or even write a single sentence. They feel lost and incapable. They feel scared that they won’t get where they desperately want to go.
My job at that point is to do for them what George did for me: Give them the confidence that they need to accomplish these things on their own.
IN PUBLIC, PRAISE INDIVIDUALLY AND CRITICIZE COLLECTIVELY: Each day, students waited anxiously for George’s critique, titled “Second Guesses.” They’d look to the cork boards in the office for the print out or check their email repeatedly in anticipation of what George had to say.
In each edition, certain names got published in all caps, meaning those folks did something really good. It might have been a great story, a fantastic photo or an amazing graphic. A particular copy-desker might get a nod for a great headline or some deft editing.
That praise was more incredible than experiencing a first kiss for so many people. Students I taught, many now in their 40s, noted they still have printouts of “Second Guesses” tucked away somewhere in a file. Some have clipped out the paragraph that mentioned them and keep it taped to a computer monitor or pinned to an office wall.
(The students weren’t alone in their love of “Second Guesses.” I would model my night notes after George’s critiques and nothing made me feel better than when he would literally take my entire night note and use it as the basis for that day’s edition.
He’d start with something about how great the paper was and then say, “Here’s Vince, explaining how we managed to pull this off:” or something like that. Years later, when I had to do daily critiques, I realized he probably did this because a good night note essentially gave him a day off, but I still cherished the times he considered my words as worthy of subbing in for his.)
Not everything in those critiques was praise, however, as we screwed up a lot over the years. That said, never once did George lambaste anyone by name for their mistakes. It was always, “We need to do better” or “We shouldn’t have made this mistake” or “We can NEVER let this happen again.”
To his way of thinking, the “we” wasn’t providing cover for one bad actor. The “we” was really a “we” in that it wasn’t just the kid who made the mistake: It was the line editor who didn’t ask enough questions to improve the story. It was the copy-desker who didn’t catch the error. It was the designer who didn’t notice the mistake when we proofed the page. And George essentially included himself in that “we,” as he likely felt he probably should have done or said something somewhere along the line to prevent that mistake.
I found that I wanted to work for that kind of person and I really aspired to be that kind of person when I was in the critiquing seat. That approach always made me want to work even harder to make sure “we” got it right as often as possible.
NEVER BE AFRAID TO RECONSIDER YOUR POSITION: Despite the feelings most of us had about his omnipotence, George was always willing to hear opposing opinions and reconsider his own.
Case in point, we were chasing a story about who would be the next police chief in Columbia late one night. What we knew was that the city manager was going to make a public announcement the next day and that the new chief would be with him. We had four candidates, two of whom hadn’t heard from the city manager for months, one who said he wasn’t aware of the press conference and one who said he couldn’t talk that night, but would “gladly speak after the press conference.”
We basically connected all the dots we had, stopping short of declaring the one guy as the police chief, something George called us out for in “Second Guesses.” He felt we were trying to be cute about the situation instead of telling people what seemed patently obvious.
I went to see him after the critique published and I made the case that we didn’t have the final piece of the story for certain, so I’d rather be a bit soft than turn out to be wrong. At the time, there were a number of “Person holds press conference to announce what we brilliant media people know to be true, only for us to be totally wrong” stories happening. I explained I didn’t want to be one of those, nor did I want to teach the kids that a guess and a prayer was quality journalism.
George heard me out and then did this thing he always did when he was thinking about something: His tongue would touch the middle of his mustache and then he’d kind of pull his bottom lip in a bit as he furrowed his brow.
“Fair enough,” he said, using a phrase that was a trademark of his.
Another situation like this happened when George was on vacation. It was early in the summer term where a) the students are usually not as abundant or skilled because so many of them are off at internships and b) the students haven’t been trained enough to know how to “8-2” a phone yet, let alone cover major news.
However, in a small town nearby, two sheriff’s deputies were shot to death as part of a daring jailbreak that failed to break a guy out of jail. The deputies were well-known members of the community, the shooters were on the lam and the town was in a state of devastation. I made the decision to “flood the zone,” sending at least four reporters and a photographer to that area to get as many stories as we could about this.
The kids came back with great content about the town, the incident, the deputies and more. I think we took over most of the front page and a ton of space inside, where our coverage rivaled both the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star.
When George got back, I asked him what he thought about our approach and he told me he wouldn’t poured as much time and resources into that story, given where it happened and what our circulation area was. “That said,” he added. “I’m glad that you did.”
Too often, people in a position like George’s feel like they need to be an oracle or something, never wrong and never questioned. To be fair, George had an incredible batting average when it came to being right about stuff, but he wasn’t perfect and he knew it.
George taught me that it’s OK to be wrong and that when you are, it’s important to shift your thinking if you want to retain the respect of the people around you.
PLANT THE SEEDS AND WATCH THEM GROW: Perhaps the greatest gift George ever gave any of us was the ability to grow and develop in our own ways. That kind of selflessness is a rarity in the world of academia, to be sure.
Of all the stories people are sharing online after learning of George’s passing, the common thread is of how he influenced them by essentially helping them become the best version of themselves.
When George once asked me where I wanted to be in 10 years, I told him, “I want your job.” He got this kind of bemused look on his face, not because he thought I was incapable of growing into that kind of position, but because he didn’t want me to become George Kennedy 2.0.
He wanted me to become Vince Filak, 1.0.
George impacted the lives of thousands upon thousands of students by essentially planting seeds: He took what we were, put us in the best possible position to succeed, nurtured us until we could stand on our own and then let us become what we were destined to be. For that, I know I owe him a debt of gratitude, and I’m sure many others do as well.
George might not agree with that, but if he took a moment, he might say, “Fair enough.”
