The Gazette-Mail lost a frequent and enriching contributor to the opinion page last week with the death of Charles McElwee. He was 97.
I didn’t know Charlie that well on a personal level. By the time I had taken over as opinion editor, I’d been at the Gazette-Mail for a mere two years, and only just moved to ÂÒÂ×ÄÚÉä. Charlie would’ve been 91 when we first started corresponding, and most of our discourse was of a professional nature.
What we did share, though, was a deep relationship as writer and editor. Charlie, whose first career was teaching (before he graduated from law school and became an attorney after serving in the Korean War), was a very scholarly writer. He would put what resembled abstracts from academic studies or headers for legal filings as the introduction of nearly every column he submitted, laying out the terms he was going to use and the precise meaning of those terms as it applied to the subject matter. Charlie would also outline the points he was going to make and how he was going to make them.
I would read all of that every time, and then cut it entirely, so that his column would begin in a more direct fashion, at, well, the real beginning. I would try to work anything from that opening bit that was essential for context into the column if it meant a more precise conveyance to the reader of what he was trying to say.
Charlie never, that I can recall, complained about these structural changes. He trusted me to do my job as an editor, and trust is the best gift an author can ever give.
Charlie was obviously brilliant. He was certainly much smarter than me, though that’s a bit of faint praise. I was impressed with the way that he thought, and how he didn’t shy away from tackling difficult and multifaceted problems in the state, such as education quality and teacher shortages, population loss and West Virginia’s economy.
I was equally impressed at how sharp he remained throughout our time working together. You can say age is just a number, but I’ve not known many people in their 90s who were still so engaged in modern issues in such a detailed way (Charlie almost always proposed solutions to the problems he saw, which any writer will tell you is much harder than simply pointing out and exploring the problem).
In spite of the seriousness he put into his contributions, he could also be damn funny.
In a column he wrote last year headlined “The things I wonder about,†which contained some legitimately deep and fascinating questions about human behavior, Charlie threw in the line: “I wonder why we rarely, if ever, see a lady at the controls of a motorcycle with her husband or boyfriend hanging on in the rear.â€
I don’t know if it was because the line was sandwiched between much more serious stuff, or that it came from Charlie or that it just conjured a funny image in my head, but I literally laughed audibly when I read that, and I told him so in an email. My exact words, in fact, were that the observation “was so well-delivered, well-placed and unexpected that it actually made me laugh out loud, startling the sleeping, 16-year-old beagle snuggled next to me in the living room.†(The beagle, unfortunately, like Charlie, left us this year.)
Oddly enough, Charlie said he had considered taking that bit out and possibly withdrawing the column entirely but was encouraged by the positive feedback. He closed by saying, “Thank you, Ben. You are a delight to work with.â€
