THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, August 14, 1995 TAG: 9508140136
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A2 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Editor's Notebook
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
For too brief a time, Robin Clark was my brother.
We met in college, where we both worked on the student newspaper. I was 21, a senior; he was a sophomore, 19 or 20. I was tall and awkward; he was short and smooth. I watched the world from the margins; Robin plunged into the middle of the action, to the heart of things.
He was the rare townie on the newspaper staff, a reporter who had grown up in Chapel Hill and partied at fraternity houses while still a high school kid.
Robin often arrived at important milestones ahead of his time.
We didn't become real friends until we were both reporters in Raleigh. I covered City Hall for The News & Observer, the morning paper. Robin started as an intern at The Raleigh Times, the afternoon paper. He never returned to school after the paper offered him a full-time job covering the police beat.
For three years, Robin was my best friend. Over 20 years, we stayed in touch as he moved on to ever-grander reporting jobs in Charlotte, San Francisco and Philadelphia. He wrote wonderful tales and conducted searing investigations - covering such topics as the Outlaws motorcycle gang, disability-pay abuses at Philadelphia City Hall, the Waco confrontation and - his last assignment - the O.J. Simpson trial.
Robin humored me when I fell in love with one of his Raleigh Times colleagues. He distracted her sons when she and I needed time to ourselves. He visited us in the hospital when her younger son was struggling back from a near-fatal car wreck. He flew in from Philadelphia when Sharon and I were married. He showed off Philadelphia when we went to visit. He counseled me on career options just before I moved to Norfolk.
Robin combined cocky enthusiasm and caring attention, as a reporter and a friend. When he wasn't wearing a wide grin, he was sending his eyebrows soaring - suspended somewhere between expectation and disbelief.
Jerriane Hayslett, the public information officer for the Los Angeles Superior Court, sat next to Robin at the Simpson trial. She recounted last week his hushed running commentary, ``often with no more than a lift of an eyebrow - usually on the fashion taste, or lack of it, of lawyers, witnesses and spectators.''
When the buyer for an upscale department store took the stand wearing a rumpled blue suit and dull brown shoes, Robin whispered: ``Not the shoes I would have picked for that outfit.''
I hadn't talked much to Robin since he moved to Los Angeles in 1993 to cover Southern California for The Philadelphia Inquirer. I'm a lousy letter writer, and the three-hour time zone frustrates me when I think about calling the West Coast at some odd hour of the day.
Besides, I always thought of Robin as being in a wide elliptical orbit that soon enough would bring him back East with more wild stories to share. I often wondered how we might entice him to return to what Carolina alumni call ``the Southern part of Heaven.''
But on Friday, Aug. 4, during a lunch break in the Simpson trial, Robin and two visitors - his cousin Nicole Weaver and her friend Melissa Penn - were killed instantly in a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. His Volkswagen bus was brushed by another car and swerved into oncoming traffic, where it flipped and was slammed into by a Volvo.
Today in Philadelphia his friends and family will gather to say goodbye.
He is still my friend. And I am still his brother.
Cole C. Campbell
Editor ILLUSTRATION: Robin Clark
by CNB