Sandy, you did it to me again

A tribute to Sanford Levenson by the BJ Retirees blog guy:

Sandy did it to me again. I was wondering, waiting, watching for any new word after I got the first urgent message from Olga Reswow in the newsroom that Sandy Levenson had died.

Was it possible he could have died on Wednesday and the funeral was already planned for Thursday? I had my wife looking through all the old Tower Topics and Sidebars for a good mug shot of Sandy. I called the newsroom to see who was writing the obit. It was apparently a young reporter who answered to say they just heard about it.

With Sandy it was always this way. I was always up against a deadline, wondering how we could manage–but Sandy always came through at the last minute.

Sandy never had a hot shot title at the BJ. He didn’t get in the front row of the photo of those who helped win the Pulitzer prize for coverage of the Kent State shootings. But he was there doing his job. He was among those great craftsman who at one time or the other edited the old Beacon Magazine.

He was a brilliant copy editor. Tom Moore, in his memories of Sandy, tells how Sandy could take a half dozen stories and weave them together. But I doubt if Tom got to the truth of the matter. The truth is probably that he and Sandy were alone on the desk. It was deadline and Moore was wondering what to do about the main story of the day. There was a ton of copy. He tossed it to Sandy who probably said. “I don’t know. Give me a minute.” And they made the deadline by a few short minutes.

The glory of those like Sandy is not in job titles, maybe not even in important work.

I can explain it best by Sandy’s earliest years as an old State Desk reporter at the Beacon Journal when he was responsible for filling the Region page for the Barberton area edition. He had to write a column, shoot a photo and write two or three stories each day to fill the page.

On most days, Sandy would have his column, a photo and a couple of rinky-dink stories ready. But you had to have a play story, something you could put a big headline on,

“Nothing’s going on,” he would tell me. “Nothing’s happening. I have to make a few calls.”

I would shout across the room to his desk 50 feet away, “Do you have anything?”

The clock was ticking and I was starting to wonder what story I would have to play from one of the other region pages to fill the hole. I look frantically toward Sandy again. He is on the phone. Finally, I get that hand single from Sandy with a twinkle in his eye meaning. “I have a good lead on the line.” The good lead who provided some relief for us often was Mayor Kenny Cox who seemed always to come up with a genuine news tip when we needed one.

So, as usual, we made the deadline with a few minutes to spare.

That is the real, unglamorous world of news.

So, as I might have expected, Sandy died on a tight schedule of the Fourth of July and the Jewish Sabbath

I can imagine God saying, “What’s the story? We have been waiting for you. But, well done, good and faithful servant.”
~liggett