This marks the end of my run as Dispatch metro columnist | Theodore Decker

There's a certain skill to writing a good headline that I have never possessed, that I have struggled with since my earliest journalism classes at the University of New Hampshire.

The headline you just read might be the hardest I've ever written.

This column is my last as the Dispatch metro columnist, a job I've held for just about 6⅟₂ years. It marks the end of my 17-year run at The Dispatch and my 30-year career in newspapers. I'm headed to Denison University in Granville to be a marketing writer.

To borrow an album title from the idols of some of my UNH (University of New Hampshire) hippie friends, The Grateful Dead: "What a Long Strange Trip It's Been."

As someone waging constant war with the slow death known as boredom, I couldn't have asked for a better career.

I covered "The Perfect Storm" of Hollywood fame while an intern at the Gloucester Daily Times along Massachusetts' Atlantic coast. As pop culture columnist for the Greenfield Recorder in western Massachusetts, I wrote MTV cartoon hooligans "Beavis and Butt-head" onto the front page.

As my professional interest shifted to crime coverage, I covered a case of parricide in upstate New York that ended with an arrest in Texas thanks to TV's "America's Most Wanted," and I dug into the underground world of truck stop prostitution, drawing attention that helped to jumpstart a federal investigation in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

I started in Columbus as the daytime police reporter on Jan. 9, 2006. I learned the city alley-by-alley and chronicled hundreds of its most tragic stories.

Six years ago, then-Editor Alan Miller gave me this metro columnist gig. And what a gig it was.

I was afforded free rein to write about whatever tickled my fancy. That might mean knocking a hypocritical politician, eulogizing a tree lost to emerald ash borers and speculating that Amazon's Alexa will destroy us — sometimes all in the course of the same week.

I wish I'd done better. There were columns that missed the mark; some were too heavy on snark. Others I'd hoped to tackle will remain unwritten.

I know I went to the same wells a few too many times. The pandemic knocked me off my game and I never quite regained my momentum. I also never found a routine that allowed me to stay on top of my emails, and for that I apologize.

Enough rambling. Thanks to everyone who read me in this space. Sincerely.

Before I show myself the door, I thought I'd revisit a few things I've written since becoming a columnist, not because I thought they were especially poetic or took some bureaucratic blowhard to task. I thought instead I'd highlight just three of the many people I was honored to meet and won't forget.

Lowell V. Newsome had a passion for flying, so much so that he kept a helicopter in his garage. By the time I met him in 2017, the 75-year-old pilot with 5,000 hours of flight time, 500 of them in his Robinson R22 helicopter, had been grounded for two years after suffering a stroke.

Photographer Tom Dodge and I found him through Craigslist, where his 50-year-old son, Lowell C. Newsome, had posted a want ad.

"I HAVE A (ROBINSON) R22 HELICOPTER," it read. "I (AM) LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO FLY ME IN IT AND YOU GETTING SOME HRS IN IT ILL PAY FOR THE GAS IM 75 YEARS OLD AND LOST MY MEDICAL (CERTIFICATE) SO CALL ME."

I was the first and only person to call, but after the column ran I heard from helicopter pilots from all over the country who were eager to help out.

I'd like to say that column had a perfect ending, but I've been around long enough to know that true stories almost never end that way.

It turned out that Newsome's helicopter was considered an "experimental" aircraft, and the many well-meaning pilots who came forward decided they just couldn't take the professional risk of flying it. That meant Newsome, who dreamt of flying as a boy in a Kentucky hollow and made those dreams real only to find himself at 75 back where he began, would soar aloft in his helicopter only in his sleep.

"I'm just flying," he said of his dreams, "and having a heck of a time."

In 2018, Dispatch videographer Courtney Hergesheimer and I spent several weeks in North Carolina after Hurricane Florence, documenting the impact that hurricanes have on small, rural and largely poor communities.

One day we came upon three gravel lanes named Faith, Hope and Charity. All were in the A.E.&T. Mobile Home Park just outside the Jones County seat of Trenton, where about 300 residents had endured record flooding.

The stench of mold, river muck and rot was enough to make you gag inside Raymond Tucker's trailer. Yet Tucker, then 62, was still living there, laboring alone to clean up and salvage what he could.

For 30 years, Tucker worked at Warmack Lumber Co. in nearby Cove City. When we met him, he was living off $773 a month in Social Security. Right before the hurricane, he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

"He shouldn't even be in there, but he's not going to go nowhere," a neighbor, Lola Jordan, told us. "Where can he go?"

"Nobody will help me," Tucker said. It was not a complaint, but a statement of cold, hard fact based on life experience. He died about 16 months later, on Jan. 9, 2020.

I met Geneva Jackson, a South Side resident and retired Columbus City Schools teacher, in 2017. She shared with me her wish to live to 98. She had been raising great-great-grandson George from the age of 4 months, and she wanted to see him reach the age of 18.

We spent a few hours together, flipping through her scrapbooks and talking about her life. She was quick to laugh and seemed delighted by almost everything. She had been adored by generations of students who credited her with changing their lives, but she insisted she was the lucky one.

"I'm thankful for being alive," she said. "I'm thankful for being able to love so many people. And I've loved thousands."

She didn't get her wish. I was sad to learn on Jan. 8, 2020 that she had died at age 93.

Only as of this writing did I realize that she and Tucker — two people of remarkable grace and resilience — had died one day apart.

I hear them still.

"Life don't owe me nothing," Jackson said. "I've lived it."

Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.

tdecker@dispatch.com

@Theodore_Decker

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Columnist Theodore Decker leaving The Columbus Dispatch