In Memoriam: Graham Hovey

They don't make them any more like Graham Hovey, and never will. The Midwest is the poorer for that fact.

Graham died last Saturday, aged 94, after a life of adventure, journalism and scholarship, much of it in service to the Midwest. He was an Iowan, born in Cedar Falls, attended what is now the University of Northern Iowa and later the University of Minnesota. He worked for the Waterloo Daily Courier and then for the old International News Service, first in Detroit and then, when World War II broke out, across northern Africa and into Italy and France, where he broke the story of the Nazi massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane.

After the war, he came back to teach journalism at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin. But daily journalism was in his blood and, in 1956, he joined the staffs of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, now merged into one paper. In 1959, the papers sent him to London, where he covered Europe for seven years, eventually returning to the U.S. to become an editorial writer and, later, Washington correspondent for the New York Times. He ended his career at the University of Michigan running the famous Michigan Journalism Fellows program, an on-campus year for working journalists.

I knew Graham during his London years. Basically, he was what we young reporters wanted to be when we grew up -- an erudite and sophisticated man, armed with a reporter's instincts and equipped by experience and scholarship to dig beneath the news to unearth its meaning and significance. He seemed the very model of the scholarly journalist.

And he did all this for a Midwestern paper. Graham worked at a time when many Midwestern papers routinely kept correspondents around the world. These men and women worked for papers in Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, Cleveland, even Toledo. Along with the star-spangled Chicago Daily News lineup, he was the best of the best, but almost every big Midwestern newspaper felt an obligation to bring the news of the world to their readers.

All gone now. The Chicago Tribune was the last Midwestern newspaper with its own foreign service. The Star-Tribune and other papers threw in the towel years ago. Graham and many of the others flourished in an era of the strong dollar, when it cost relatively little to keep correspondents overseas. The rest fell victim to the more recent economic squeeze on papers and the shrinking of their coverage to little more than locally-focused news-you-can-use. At a time when the Midwest is more directly affected by global pressures than ever before, almost no Midwestern paper even tries to tell its readers what's happening to their lives.

Graham Hovey symbolized a time -- long before cable, before the Web and Twitter and instant communications -- when Midwestern papers upheld their constitutional mandate to create an informed electorate, and employed journalists like Graham to make this happen. He was, literally, the end of an era and that era passed before he did.

Comments

[Widana Gunerathne]

Graham Hovey was a very kind hearted man. I came to know him during my Michigan days in 1982 at the famous Michigan school of jorunalism,Ann Arbor. He had a very soft corner for me and wanted to visit my country -- Sri Lanka--one day. But he could not make it. Graham effected a mid course correction in my life at the NEH fellowship office. I am indebted to him and his beloved wife Mary Jean for it. It was only today --January 4, 2011-- I came to know of his demise. Graha Hovey was a great journalist US has produced. I am proud that I was able to learn many things from him. My belated condolences go to Mary Jean children and grand children.Widana Gunerathne Sri Lanka email [email protected]