The Willow Glen Resident Writer gets last word, but it's a sad labor Carl Heintze It is the melancholy task of those who survive to write memorials for those who have not. I write this remembrance of Ben Phillips even though I know he would not want me to do so. Ben Phillips was an intensely private man who shied away from the spotlight. He also was the model of a newspaper editor and that was what he was for much of his life. He died, alas, too young at 72 last month after his health gradually failed. He died as he had lived, quietly and without much notice and that is the way he would have wanted it to happen. But I cannot let his memory go without paying tribute to him. We began our newspaper careers almost at the same time after the end of World War II when newspapering meant writing on mechanical typewriters, using telephones that did not dial, when teletypes clattered loudly in the newsroom and when reporting meant covering the news with a pencil, not a computer. We worked side by side for almost 20 years. Most of the time I wrote. Most of the time Ben edited. If he was not a writer, he was a consummate editor. Writers need editors more than editors need writers, and we were not long into our relationship before I understood this. It also was not long before I came to understand that Ben had a standard by which he measured what I wrote. It was a part of a standard by which he lived. It was not an easy standard to achieve, and at first I do not think I appreciated it. But gradually as I came to understand it, I came to understand more about him; how his own code was the code by which he lived and by which he measured others, not only for what they wrote, but the way they behaved toward others. It was a code not reduced to words, but discerned by actions. As it happened, for the early part of our newspaper careers we lived near one another; we had children at nearly the same time; we sometimes rode to work together. On these trips I talked a lot about my children, more than I should have, and in a subtle way Ben indicated to me that he was as proud a parent as I was, but that he did not think it necessary to talk about it endlessly. I did not take this to mean he thought any less of his family than I did of mine, rather that he thought more of them and that he did not need to tell others what they had done--he understood it and that was all that was necessary. In the same way in the office, he did not participate in office gossip or office griping. He simply did his work quietly and efficiently. While he seldom gave me a compliment about what I wrote, when I did get one, I felt I had earned it. I knew I had measured up to the standard which he had set for himself. He did not require that others meet that standard, but he was pleased when they did.His interest in work was intense. Other than that and his family he had one other overriding interest and that was golf. I think he saw golf as he saw working with words. Eventually our lives took different courses. I drifted away from the newspaper business, not so much from choice as from the necessity to earn more money. Ben stayed with it and with the advent of computers for processing copy and setting type, he became fascinated by how the new technology made possible things that had only been dreamed about when we first started in the business. Eventually he came to head the interface between computers and the newsroom, largely through a process of self-education, and from all I could learn he was as successful at it as he had been when he wielded a copy pencil in the years when we worked together. Again it was the standard he had set for himself to which he adhered, and those who worked with him were better for it. We saw one another now and then in the years that followed his retirement; not often, but often enough to remember the days when we had been beginners. I knew he had not been well--he had almost died from a bout of meningitis, but he recovered--and then suddenly he was dead. But the standard he set was not, nor was the memory of him sitting quietly at the copy desk, efficiently and carefully working with what was both our lives: words. I can still write, but he will not be able to edit this copy. And perhaps that's good because by his standards it should not be printed. But in the end, I have had the last word. I have been able to write his memorial and to write what I hope has been a fitting tribute to his memory. [ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Willow Glen Resident, January 6, 1999. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.