Doc had cure for cynicism in the newsroom

One fall Friday night, Merle Derrick clomped into the newsroom – galoshes may have been involved – after another Albi Stadium doubleheader, and before he even unlooped the scarf from around his neck and pulled off his coat, he brightened and announced to the desk crew, “I saw a pretty good 0-0 football game tonight.”

To which one of the resident sourpusses replied, “That’s a little like ranking vinegars, isn’t it?”

Now, that’s a zinger I’ve stolen and recycled more than once – and no doubt will again. That confession of personal profit notwithstanding, the truly memorable part of the moment was Merle’s almost childlike astonishment at the entertainment possibilities in a scoreless football game – and then his refusal to have his enthusiasm doused by a cynic’s gibe.

In 48 years at the Spokane Chronicle and the Spokesman-Review, Merle Derrick covered high school tripleheaders and roughhouse hockey, kept voluminous records we still rely on, ran the department and then graciously subjugated himself when the two papers merged, cajoled crusty coaches into becoming trusted sources, never budged from an opinion no matter how misbegotten I inevitably proved it to be, and considered it a privilege to write thousands of scrapbook histories for teenage athletes – and then for their sons, and then again for their sons and daughters.

You know what he didn’t do?

He didn’t do jaded.

This would make him solely, but not sadly, unsuited to newspapering today and maybe even to covering high school athletics, which shed its uncomplicated veneer sometime between the first instance of a buck being made off a summer camp and when words like elite, select and premier began insinuating themselves into the sports vocabulary.

So while it’s painful to bid goodbye to him today – Doc passed away on Tuesday, at the age of 76 – we’re persuaded that his was a life well lived and well loved, and also that he got out of his chosen game when the getting was good.

The tributes at his services today will be more eloquent than anything you’ll find here, but they will be simple and sincere, too, like the subject himself. This is what I know: that every workday, the person I looked forward to seeing in the newsroom above anyone else was Merle Derrick.

He did that to your day.

And if there was a high school coach or athlete who didn’t feel the same way, we have yet to hear from those precincts.

Being universally liked is no way to get into the newspaperman’s hall of fame – indeed, it is pretty much considered a failing, for whatever that’s worth. But Merle’s mission wasn’t to ingratiate any more than it was to antagonize, and the fact is the respect and esteem he forged in his community were due to the singularly underrated quality of our humanity: common decency.

And when people picked up the paper the morning or afternoon following a game, they discovered in his words all those things his friends already knew about him.

He was reliable. He was accurate. He was fair.

And he had no agenda to make anyone look good at anyone else’s expense, and that was especially true of himself.

Yes, he had his favorites among coaches and sources he liked to deal with, and there were those whose methods and demeanor he could not abide. But it never managed to creep into his writing – which is to say, kids didn’t pay twice if they were unlucky to have a horse’s backside as a coach. Their teams and achievements got the same treatment from Doc in the newspaper as everyone else, a legacy to which we’re not always faithful, alas.

Of course, the flipside of reliability is a certain, uh, inflexibility. OK, stubbornness. To say that the man was rigid in his routine is to say that lint is a lousy paperweight.

Merle Derrick could be a world-class old coot, and proud of it. His trick was that he managed to turn this into an endearment.

Our favorite example in the office came on those occasions when his boss, Jeff Jordan, would dispatch him to write a feature on a young athlete. Merle loved covering his games, compiling his stats and touching bases with his coaches afterward – but he had more enthusiasm for facing a dentist’s drill than he did for the prospect of trying to pull cogent quotes out of a teenager.

So he’d missile-lock Jordy with a death glare over the top his glasses. Jordy would implore. Doc would glare. Jordy would coax. Doc would glare. Jordy would say we need it by Thursday and head for the cover of his office. And Doc would trudge off to the appointed interview.

Without fail, he would return a couple hours later, gushing about what a terrific young gal he’d just talked to, how it just made his day, what pleasure it would be to write the story.

A few weeks later, he and Jordy would do it all over again. And every time Doc returned, it was a revelation.

He was an old dog who could learn new tricks, and even if it took a lot of biscuits, they were biscuits well invested.

It was sad to lose him to retirement a few years ago, and indescribably sadder still to lose him for good this week. But every bit as sad is the sense that there doesn’t seem to be room for 48-year guys in the newspaper business anymore – or in any business for that matter.

The concept of someone who doesn’t aspire to more than doing worthy tasks thoroughly and well isn’t just viewed as quaint, but almost irrelevant. Nowadays, ambitions have to be contrived, weighed and indulged. Service and institutional memory tend to be devalued rather than valued.

Sometimes, it’s a little like ranking vinegars.

Merle Derrick might not acknowledge the analogy. Surely he wouldn’t let it infringe upon the delights to be found in the 0-0 football game, the surprisingly good teenage talker, the fun, the friendships and, yes, even the nobility of a newspaperman’s life.