Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, June 4, 1993 TAG: 9306040470
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That year I was a very young and still very inexperienced reporter for the old Winston-Salem Journal, barely a year out of college and still mostly untested. But a major polio outbreak had occurred in and around Wytheville and few newspapermen, if any had gone to the scene to report it first-hand. Being young and single, not to mention curious, I got the nod and went.
In the course of the day I spent there, interviewing health officials and others, I naturally wandered into the newspaper to see what the folks there knew.
A stocky kid with the face of an intelligent basset hound was the only person on hand, and he and I talked for half an hour or so. He seemed to know as much about the polio epidemic as anyone I'd interviewed, and I left with some valuable tidbits in my notes.
I'd forgotten him altogether by the time, a bit more than three years later, I met him again. This time he was a junior at Washington & Lee, majoring in journalism, and I was a newly hatched assistant professor. He was in several of my clases, and we renewed acquaintance enthusiastically.
As before, too, I had about as much to learn from him as I had to teach him. Teachers generally, in my experience, have little actually to "teach" their brighter students, and the job is principally to give them encouragement and as long a leash as academic conventions allow. Cecil Edmonds was already, at 20, a gifted writer and a natural reporter, and letting him loose, and recognizing the quality of his work, was about all I had to offer him. But it was enough. He did well, I survived my first year as a college professor, and we got along handsomely from the start.
After his graduation he moved on to Roanoke and this newspaper, and I saw him only occasionally. But he quickly became a star, bright, sparkling, a bit of a wise guy, I gathered, but with the saving grace that he was neither arrogant with his colleagues nor jealous of their own very different talents from his.
Perhaps the work that gained him his widest public recognition was his "File 13" column. In it he regularly skewered town fathers and other self-designated "civic leaders" for their contradictions and blunders, and he did it with such amused, laid-back wit that few took permanent umbrage.
He was, like most of us, neither as "liberal" nor as "conservative" as his detractors frequently accused him of being; but it was his nature to be skeptical of most human pretensions, of which he saw an abundant display, and he believed it was his job - as it was clearly his pleasure - to identify them.
When he left journalism for advertising I regretted what to me seemed a defection, but that was, of course, merely the arrogance of my profession. As an advertising executive he quickly established himsef as the best anywhere around, eventually creating his own agency and annually winning almost every advertising award Virginia had to offer.
Later still, leaving advertising for other business ventures, he did equally well; and it was in those later years that he began, once again, to offer his wry comments to the op-ed page of the Roanoke Times & World-News. They were as funny as ever, sometimes off the wall, sometimes so sensible the rest wondered why it hadn't occurred to them first, but always sharp and witty and wise.
He and I were never close friends, though I think we were good friends, but it was always a pleasure to see and talk with him. Now that he is dead, at 60, much too early, I will miss him. But I shan't forget that basset-hound face of his, more than 40 years ago, in that dark Wytheville newspaper office.
Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB