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Brooks Peterson
Brooks Peterson's column is published Mondays. Brooks also sits on the Caller-Times editorial board and can be contacted at petersonb@caller.com
Monday, August 28, 2000
A good man who touched so many of us
I don't have a lot of patience with people who wring their hands about the passing of the old order and moan at unraveling the bonds and well-worn usages that once tied us together.
Having said that, however, let me pause a moment here and . . . well . . . wring my hands about the passing of the old order and moan . . . just a little.
Take our jobs: Public radio ran a piece on how techno-creatures are carving out for themselves rewarding careers - without a workplace. Thanks to the Internet, they can work for multiple employers and complete elaborate, even grandiose projects, without having a workplace in the conventional sense.
Good for them, I say. But, as the late Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn so eloquently put it, include me out.
I like the workplace, you see. Not that it's intrinsically all that splendid. True, my employer has seen fit to provide me with my own little space, which is congenial to me. In fact it's quite homey. Some dare call it sloppy; I call it a work in progress.
But it's not the surroundings; it's the people. I was reminded powerfully of that on Wednesday when I attended the funeral of one of my favorite Caller-Times people of all time: Robert A. Tapia.
I came into contact with Robert when I was dragooned into - er, when I was given the opportunity to play a role in - the layout and make-up of the editorial and op-ed pages. (Read: When the people who know what they were doing were on vacation, I filled in.)
You want to talk babe in the woods? That was me. Writing headlines to the proper length, editing copy and - by no means least - making things fit in the spaces allotted to them on their respective pages: It was, er, challenging
That's one reason I was, and remain, so grateful for the presence of some remarkably able and patient people in what we called back in those days Photocomp. Robert was one of those people, and he was a rock - for me and plenty of others.
I can sketch, sort of, what people in PhotoComp did back then. Don't ask me to tell you how they did it, though. (I definitely can't tell you what their successors do in what we call Pre-Press. Very mysterious. Scanning. Imaging. Techno-magic.)
What Robert and his colleagues did was to ensure that the verbiage churned out by reporters and editors, and the photos generated by our lenspersons, made it successfully onto the pages. Sounds simple to you? Don't believe it. Velox machines and long sheets of slick gummed film and Exacto knives were involved - along with occasional bloodshed. Accidental, of course.
Whatever befell, and a lot did befall, especially on Fridays, I knew that when a glitch developed, Robert could bail me out. You remember that Kipling line: "If you can keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . ."? Robert was the guy keeping his head when the rest of us were running in circles and gabbling incoherently.
He was not only a pleasure to work with; he was also a friend. Somehow, he discovered my burnt-orange legacy, and from then on he made it his business to (try to) teach this Teasip humility. For years we'd bet a Coke on UT games - and in those (highly atypical) seasons when the 'Horns struggled, he was a gracious winner. Indeed, so much so that I suspect there was some burnt-orange in his DNA. Had to have been.
It was at Robert's funeral Wednesday that I realized just how many lives he had touched. The chapel was overflowing. Flowers everywhere. Caller-Times veterans, relatives, members of his church: It was the kind of tribute that can only come straight from the heart.
As I sought to offer some kind of comfort to his family - does anyone ever know the right thing to say at such times? - what came out was: "He was the best."
And he was.
Brooks Peterson
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