“It was nice.”
I immediately knew it wasn’t my column. It was Dale Huffman’s.
Their confusion was understandable. We both wrote newspaper columns with our photos on top of them. We both were middle-aged white guys with curly hair (mine artificially curled, his, I assume, natural). We even had names that sounded alike.
But that’s where the similarities ended.
• Before our papers merged, he wrote for the Dayton Daily News and I wrote for The Journal Herald.
• As columnists, we were polar opposites; he was positive, I’ve always been negative.
• He went for smiles. I went for yuks.
• He sought out stories that were uplifting and inspiring. I went for stuff that was goofy and weird.
• He chronicled major and minor moments in the lives of everyday people. I enjoyed writing about famous people, especially if they were goofy and weird.
• He wrote about how much he loved his mother. I wrote about how my kids drove me crazy.
We may have been yin and yang, but we got along well. We appeared together often at fundraising events, occasionally wrestling for the same microphone. We traded journalistic “war stories.” We commiserated with each other about how our profession was being taken over by “kids” who didn’t have a feel for the way things were done in “our day.”
When our newspaper moved from its building on Fourth and Ludlow to our current location, we were assigned adjoining desks. But, already weakened by the cancer that was to claim his life last Saturday at the age of 79, Dale never got to sit at his.
Throughout the four decades we worked against or with each other, I couldn't help but be impressed by his achievements. OK, and perhaps a little envious, too. Many of them were documented in the story that ran in Monday's newspaper. That he was named by President George H.W. Bush as the nation's 1,001st Point of Light. That, for eight years, he wrote a column every day — more than 3,000 of them.
But the desk to the right of me — Dale’s desk — was removed a few months ago, leaving behind an empty space.
A space that never can be adequately filled.
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