To Walt

I want to take a step back this week from discussing the security industry to discuss a personal topic, the passing of a friend and a colleague who shaped my views on journalism.

On April 7, former reporter and then editor of the Copper Era newspaper, Walter “Walt” Mares,  passed away at the age of 71. He was there when I began my first job in the newspaper industry, and he can’t be described as having been anything less than larger-than-life. He was as old-school as the come for a newspaper man, sporting a beat-up old hat with a press ticket in the brim.

Reading the sympathetic notes that poured in from the community in Greenlee County following his passing describe a kind man who loved his community and its people more than anyone else. When Walt retired from the Copper Era I was asked to replace him as its full-time reporter, with my Managing Editor David Bell encouraging me to take ownership of the publication, to treat is as my own so that I would give it the consideration and respect it deserved. I took those words to heart, but I was only able to do so thanks to Walt Mares.

It was Walt who took me on and introduced me to the people and leaders of my new community. Walt, who made sure I was welcomed when he could have just as easily have made me alienated, a gift I could never truly pay back. But I also remember a different Walt, a diligent journalist who wasn’t afraid to get in the trenches and scrap with the enemies of truth. A man with a crass demeanor and spitting hellfire at anyone who would desecrate the sanctity of journalism.

He was the kindly old man who knew everyone’s name just as everyone knew his, but he was also the man who blew into Clifton, AZ, on the day of its infamous 1983 flood and stuck around to help the Copper Era keep its publication date by assembling an edition of the paper using a photocopier (his favorite story to retell). He was the man who taught me to be a certain kind of angry, to ask uncomfortable questions that needed to be asked, because it was your job to ask them.

This world is poorer for being now bereft of a man like Walt Mares when it needs him most. During my time at the Copper Era, I did my best to honor that integrity by making that paper my own until the day I left.

But if we’re being honest, I was only ever borrowing it from Walt.