Jack Monaghan taught this 'kid' newsroom lessons that won't be forgotten

It was perhaps the key turning point in my career.

It is 1976, and I’m walking into The Providence Journal newsroom in hope of a job. I claim to have an appointment with the managing editor, so they call over Jack Monaghan, who knows I have no such thing. But he appreciates a slightly pushy reporter, and it so happens he has no one to go to lunch with.

“Come on, kid,” he says, later passing me on to other editors, and I get the job.

That was 45-plus years ago, and somehow, here I am still.

Because of Jack.

It’s heartbreaking to have to write about him today in the past tense, but last week, at age 89, he moved on to the great newsroom in the sky, a metaphor that would no doubt bring a small smile from him. That was his habitat. Well, a canoe in New Hampshire rivers, too, as well as his wife and three kids in Cumberland.

But Jack Monaghan will forever live on in my mind as an iconic editor, a hard-news guy who also had a love of literary style. A good news operation, Jack felt, needs both. I still remember the time, in the midst of frantic deadlines, that he paused to sit with a woman reporter who’d just done a sensitive portrait of a Holocaust survivor.

“This is lovely,” Jack told her. “I’m putting it on the front page.”

Then he jumped back to being the day’s air-traffic controller, surrounded by dozens of news folks sending things his way. It was quite the operation, with a staff of 300 at its peak, and Jack in the center of it.

It is common to eulogize colleagues no longer with us, but Jack was more than someone important to me. For decades, he was a pillar of the Journal, the guy who decided what went in the paper, framing Rhode Island’s agenda and conversation. These days, that’s also done by Twitter, Facebook and a dozen other news and content providers. Back then, the Journal was the unrivaled big dog.

Wherever Jack is today, I trust he is still getting a subscription, so I’d like to apologize to him for being a pain.

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I was probably given the job of columnist too early, at age 26, with Jack my supervisor. He continued to call me “kid,” – as in, “What do you got for me today, kid?” Occasionally, he’d cut out a lame paragraph, but being a diva who didn’t know what was good for me, I at first pushed back, in an annoying motormouth way, which Jack didn’t suffer gladly.

But he never quite got to the point of yelling because his face grew so flushed with hot Irish blood it petrified me into conceding the point.

Yet Jack believed in me when I didn’t deserve it, which is what you need coming up – someone who both chews you out and cheers you on.

A moment ago, I mentioned frantic deadlines. That was Jack’s life. We had two distinct papers back then, the Evening Bulletin the bigger one, with Jack its editor. Since you needed time to print it, load it onto trucks and get it on doorsteps by late afternoon, final deadlines were around noon. Jack would start his day in the hot seat at dawn with a lot of pages to fill and a drop-dead cutoff.

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If you said you needed another 10 more minutes, good luck. Jack wasn’t the type to yell – he did something scarier. In a calm, measured voice, he would say, “Push. The button. Now.”

He struck me as the kind of editor who one day simply emerged from the printing presses and walked into the newsroom, so I was surprised at first when I heard he went to Brown. But a few times, he even snuck a little Latin into the paper. Once, the Bulletin’s big headline was simply, “Gloria Monday,” indicating the arrival time of Hurricane Gloria. Jack inserted a small topper headline above it saying, “Sic transit…” He didn’t explain it and neither will I, but look up the whole phrase.

Jack was smart enough to hit retirement age at a good time, the mid-1990s, when newspapers were still dominant. But his journalism genes ran deep, with a dad who’d been an editor at The Pawtucket Times. So Jack occasionally kept writing for us, often about skiing and canoeing in New England.

It's a big part of who he always was. At times, after asking what I had for him for the next day’s paper, he’d talk about his outdoor adventures. Often, it left me thinking that Jack Monaghan knew how to live.

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Less than a year ago, I got a note from Jack. He was in his late 80s, myself in the late 60s. The note was about a recent column.

“Good one today, kid,” he wrote.

Coming from Jack, it meant as much to me as any accolade I could hope for.

I miss him already.

mpatinki@providencejournal.com

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Jack Monaghan, former Evening Bulletin editor, remembered