If you’re a newspaper editor, people stop you at the grocery store to talk about what the paper is or isn’t saying. They buttonhole you at retirement parties, baseball games and funerals.
Eventually, you have to get away.
Joe Murray, who showed me what a small-town newspaper editor could be, used to slip off to the chapel at the Monastery of the Infant Jesus on Lotus Lane. He was not Catholic. He would sometimes go when the nuns were having a service. But mainly he just wanted to sit in the chapel in the quiet. He said he needed to be quiet.
When he needed a longer retreat, he’d slip off to the old Luther Hotel in Palacios, down on the coast. The Luther didn’t have telephones in the rooms. He’d take a bag of books and just get away for a day or two, be quiet and let his sense of urgency reset itself.
People who lead public lives owe it to themselves and others to find some quiet in their private lives. Joe realized that and worked at it.
• Note: For a note on Joe’s death, with a link to an obituary, see “Joe Murray, June 28, 2023.
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