Newsroom’s Heart And Soul Says Goodbye

My secretary for the past 11 years retired Friday.

I was sad, sentimental, and made a mushy fool of myself at her retirement.

Later, I worried about the impact of being foolish and sentimental in public.

Such displays aren’t much in vogue.

They send a message counter to the crisp word from the street, the corporate headquarters, and politics.

We’re in the age of crush, not mush.

Companies must downsize.

The disadvantaged need to get a grip.

Government won’t solve all people’s problems.

These sober statements may well be necessary. They certainly echo throughout our society now and tend to squeeze out talk of much else.

But I want to talk about the lessons of Marge, and what the loss of a good person means to a workplace.

First, the plus side of an early retirement.

Marge’s position has been eliminated from my staffing chart.

The budget will be adjusted and, in time, the bottom line might be improved.

Productivity surely will inch upward. Marge’s work will be spread among the remaining staff.

An able, enthusiastic woman from another department already has been reassigned to help keep operations running as smoothly as possible. Marge’s departure represents an opportunity for her replacement.

The world will go on. The realities of the business world have been served.

But a sense of loss rippled through my downsized, suddenly more productive workplace at the end of last week.

A valued person has disappeared.

The shop has one fewer voice of reason.

We lost a major chunk of institutional memory about the people who call, write, and walk in the door. If a list were drafted of the 10 most valuable people who work down here Marge would be on it.

One of the all-stars, one of the all-pro, best-in-the-business players, no longer is part of the team.

Marge wasn’t fired, or squeezed out. She has this dream of taking a motorhome trip to the East with her husband before ill health prevents such travels and this seemed to be the time.

She isn’t a person to be pitied. She doesn’t think she has been treated badly by her employer. To the contrary, she spoke warmly of her years at the newspaper as we ate retirement cake.

But her departure represents a net loss for a company, just as the departure of good people in any workplace represents a loss that is difficult to quantify but can be very real to those workers, and customers, who are left.

For example, Marge was the opposite of phone mail. When you called the office she answered in a cheerful, Catholic-girl-from-Hillyard sort of way.

She wasn’t a recording or a message about pushing the pound key.

To the public, she was a warm, real voice who knew a thing or two about the newspaper business. She saved more canceled subscriptions than anyone.

She could listen well. She wouldn’t argue. She treated the public with respect and care.

Though her official title was newsroom secretary, that was wrong.

Marge was really the Newsroom Mother.

Inside the office, she was the one who offered graceful counsel to those tortured by internal politics. She was the one who listened with empathy to the personal troubles of those young and old who sought her out, standing by her desk as if it were a confessional without the door.

If tragedy rocked the family of a co-worker, she offered a steady hand and a prayer.

The old saying that you can preach a better sermon with your life than with your lips gave Marge much power and influence.

She didn’t go to a fancy college, but because she committed the Golden Rule to life, not just to memory, she came to represent, in some way, the highest standards of professionalism.

When her bosses talked of making this the best paper of its size in America, they could always look at Marge and said well, at least in terms of the newsroom secretary, we’ve made it.

Her success and her effectiveness grew from a core of personal strength and commitment. She wasn’t a fake, or someone prone to posturing for the bigwigs.

She wasn’t a jerk, or power hungry, or some one insecure in her role.

She was just a fine person, who lived a Christian life, and gave with all her might.

The talk already has begun about keeping the Spirit of Marge alive down at the office.

That spirit, that intangible ability to be the glue, the crying shoulder, and the example cannot be measured on the bottom line.

Yet recognizing and nurturing these qualities in people are what separate simply good workplaces from the best in class.

, DataTimes MEMO: Chris Peck is the Editor of The Spokesman-Review. His column appears on the Perspective page.