Memories of Bandy from Dave Hess

In the nine years I was the BJ's Washington correspondent and filing quite often for the early afternoon editions, I frequently dictated stories from phone booths or the press galleries on Capitol Hill. Don was my savior. As a rewrite man, he was peerless. Without a single interruption of my rambling trains of thought, he swiftly typed coherent renditions of the stories, never pausing to ask for spellings of names or places (he already knew them) or punctuations (he got those right, too). It got to the point that, even if I had the time to sit down and write the reports, I preferred to pick up the phone and start talking to Don. I knew he would get it fast and right. His only gripe was for me to speak in shorter sentences. "Hey, Dave," he'd say, "fewer dependent clauses." He was a professional to the bone.
~Dave Hess