I had experienced the special joy Martha and Gerald shared with others through their clown company, Carrousel of Clowns, when my late husband and I lived in Los Angeles.  I was especially honored back then in the early ’90s when they asked me to help them create a brochure and invited us to many of their events, including cheering up the elderly in nursing homes and sick children in hospitals, as well as clowning at festivals and parades and private parties.  But I didn’t realize that the clowning began so early in their marriage – and that Gerald had already discovered his lifelong avocation before they met.

Carman George, a reporter for Sierra Star, a local newspaper, captured the joy that clowning brought to their lives and to those around them in a half page article before the event that seemed to set the tone for the actual day.  She also was there that day to chronicle the fun and laughter shared with their friends.

As we entered the community hall, each guest was quietly given a squeezable red clown nose to hide In a pocket so that everyone could surprise the couple before they cut their anniversary cake.  More than 80 people crowded the hall. I sat next to three generations of a family involved in my relatives’ clown company, which is still active in Los Angeles.  They talked about what great role models Martha and Gerald were for them as they shared their love of clowning.

Finally it was time for the toast and Gerry and Martha were asked to close their eyes while everyone put on the red noses.  We toasted the surprised and delighted couple and laughed at each other’s funny faces.  Thank you, Luther and Molly( their clown names), the revelers seemed to be saying, for taking your magic and  laughter to Coarsegold and brightening up the lives of yet another community!!  They love you for it!

SierraStar-smaller

Malcom Gladwell writes about it in Outliers and Keith Ferrazzi in his new book Who’s Got Your Back. My late husband Tim Robinson, a legendary journalist, often said he wasn’t sure if it was talent or pure luck that got him bylines covering major civil rights stories and then a key role on the Watergate team at the Washington Post, pioneering legal journalism and finally one of  the early experts inventing the editorial side of search on the internet – he always seemed to be in the right place at the right time.  But he also surrounded himself with amazing “teams,” and I think the most remarkable was his family.

It all started in the south, in a small town called Dora, Alabama.  I remain so proud to have been accepted as an honorary Southerner and part of the extraordinary Sumner and Robinson families. Tim’s parents, Clarence and Edith Sumner, both alumni of Samford University in Birmingham (then known as Howard College), were the first dream team in Tim’s life.  He adored them.  Samford was the school that gave the entire Robinson family the key to a brighter future. Clarence Robinson had started college at Howard but dropped out because of the depressions to work as a coal miner for most of his early career until around the age of 40. That’s when the mines started closing and he lost his job. Tim’s father’s solution to this midlife crisis?  He found the courage to go back to college and. finish his degree in education at Howard, becoming a high school teacher. He also encouraged his wife Edith to get her education degree, and later pushed all their kids to attend: Terah, Gerald, Mike, Nelson and Tim, the youngest.  When they were together, the Robinsons generated amazing warmth and love as a family, something I got to experience when I was first engaged to Tim.  He father was also a Baptist preacher and the first time I flew south to meet the family, Tim happily took me to the small Baptist Church near their home for Sunday Service  (where his father preached while Tim played the piano), followed by a potluck lunch on the grounds with heaping servings of his mom’s delicious chicken and potato salad.

When Tim announced to his parents at an early age that he wanted to be a Washington Post journalist when he grew up, they encouraged him.  Tim was taught his first lessons by his mother in a one-room schoolhouse in Pumpkin Center. He had mastered the violin and piano by age 5 and tested out at 170 IQ long before he graduated from Dora High School at the age of 15. He started college and also landed the first job in his storied newspaper career at the Daily Mountain Eagle, where he had already been calling in football scores to the sports pages while in high school.

Before he could vote, he was assistant city editor at The Birmingham Post-Herald and working on the weekends as a reporter for UPI, all as he finished his degree at Samford.  And yes, he made it to the Washington Post, but not until he was turned down a few times by the hiring editor as too young. Tim’s solution to this setback was to get his graduate degree in journalism from American University and keep trying.  He then took an interim job as an editor at the weekly Examiner, but was still in his early 20s when he finally was hired and eventually named to the Watergate team.

Tim always loved to talk about his family and the importance of being in Alabama for Christmas while his parents were alive.  Even after their death, Tim still had the strength of family to lean on  – when we moved out to California, we got to live near the two oldest brothers he had missed knowing well as an adult, Gerald and Mike and their spouses Martha and Caroline in LA and his Uncle Mike and Aunt Adah’s large family in  Northern California..  Then when the economy got tough in southern California and both of us found our jobs threatened, Tim kept listening to LA’s Tom Petty and Heartbreakers singing “Running Down a Dream” and refused to look back as he took on the Internet and brought me along, all the while remembering his courageous parents were not afraid to dream big when the world was changing around them.

Oh Joe, you do Tim a disservice. He was a ball of fun! Party boy extroadinaire. Right Al?

Surely Ron Tate could attest to that. Tim and Howell Raines were contemporaries at the BX Post-Herald in 1964-65; BX-born and bred Howell was a recent graduate of Birmingham-Southern College, a Methodist school. Tim was a full time student at Howard College, a Baptist institution. Did Tim and Howell’s somewhat divergent personalities tell us something about the difference between the Baptists and the Methodists?

You know (skuse, uk) that’s an ongoing study in the South, or at least it used to be. While Tim was a daytime student at Howard and a nighttime full-time journalist for the P-H, his school acquired Cumberland Law School and moved it from Tennessee. That gave Howard university status, Tim noted.

BXers will recall that BX’s Howard’s prexy at the time, Leslie Wright, was an ardent champion of Gov. George Wallace. Tim noted that, too. So Howard was renamed Samford University after its most generous benefactor, Frank Samford, founder of Liberty National Life Insurance Corp., which was a huge success (It’s name now is Torchmark Corp.).

As I recall, Tim graduated at a tender age, 18, or thereabouts. His youth came up at dinner Virgie and I had him over the house for while he was visiting Atlanta to make a speech in the mid 1980s. He was editor of the National Law Journal by then.

Once, he told us, a staffer of his suggested that Tim could graduate from college at such a young age because Howard must’ve been “one of those crappy southern schools.”

“No,” Tim said he responded, “I’m smart.”

Indeed, he was one of the smartest persons I’ve ever known. The expansiveness of his mind could be breathtaking. For example, he liked all kinds of music, including the subversive variety. On more than one occasion he, I and others would gather in my apartment (near the Charlie Boswell golf course) to guzzle some beer and listen to Pete Seeger do his kommonist songs, including We Shall Overcome, as well as hear early Bob Dylan (Tim especially liked The Ballad of Hattie Carroll). We were joined at least once by two of Tim’s hometown friends, Jimmy Blackwell and a fellow named Monk whose full name I cannot remember. They were Tim’s age, and like Tim they were fine young men.

Besides being a fan of subversive music, Tim was also an aficionado of classical European music. So when the BX Symphony season was underway Duard LeGrande (was he news editor?) assigned him to review opening nights.

I usually accompanied him, free-loading on the comp ticket Tim was entitled to. We were both impressed by an operatic rendition of “Knoxville 1915,” which was adapted from the opening chapter of James Agee’s masterpiece novel, “A Death in the Family.” Tim thought Agee was a tragic genius, too.

Tim and I recently exchanged e-mails on how we both still remember the Knoxville 1915 performance. And, of course, he was into Rock, becoming an aficionado of the Doors. When its lead singer Jim Morrison died, Tim wrote the obit for his then-employer, the WA Post.

In the process, Tim had the task that all of us in our business hate — getting comment from Morrison’s father, a retired U.S. Navy admiral. Tim told me about that while I visited with him in WA. What was doubly awful was that it was Tim who broke the news to the father. (Tim and I had gotten together while I was stationed in Richmond, just from the road from the Nation’s capital).

I guess you could say Tim was good to me before we even met. Or better, I should say, a friend of UPI. While he was assistant state editor of the BX P-H I was manning the one-man UPI Mobile bureau. The P-H’s bulldog edition circulated in south Alabama and therefore it contained just about every south Alabama story produced by UPI and AP. Consistently, more than 90 percent of that copy was UPI’s. Tim was responsible for that section.

When I arrived in Birmingham in summer of 1964, I learned from our stringer budget that we were paying Tim the grand sum of $5 per month and his boss, State Editor George Cook, the princely amount of $10 per month. But Tim was also on our regular payroll as our part-time weekend staffer. Even though he was a mere teenager, he handled filing both the newspaper wire (7562) and the broadcast wire (7551) like an old pro. And for his $5 per month stringer fee, he was always on the lookout for stories that UPI could use that the P-H would reject. Translation: racial stories.

One of his highlights was the story that he and his friend and roommate Al Benn, a full-time BX Unipresser, ran across at the Alabama State Fair: A Ku Klux Klan exhibition booth. Manning the exhibit was one Gary Thomas Rowe.

Later, Tommy Rowe would burst onto the national scene as an FBI informer who tipped the Feds to who the Kluxers were who assassinated Viola Liuzzo as she drove blacks from Montgomery to Selma at the conclusion of the historic Selma-to-Montgomery march. Rowe and three other Kluxers were in the car from which the fatal shots were fired. Rowe would maintain he pointed his pistol away from Mrs. Liuzzo. (Al, correct any confusion here on my part since you were directly involved in the KKK exhibit story).

Prior to the Selma-MG march getting underway, three of Selma’s low-lifes one night bludgeoned one of the “white niggers” who had arrived to participate in the event. In BX we got word that the victim was in an ambulance headed to BX’s Methodist Hospital (correct despite some “official” reports have him being taken to a different hospital).

Almost simultaneously we got a report that a passenger train had derailed near BX. And that’s all we knew. So not knowing the seriousness of either the Selma attack or the train wreck I decided to go to the train wreck, leaving behind my stalwart sidekick Al Benn to handle the ambulance arrival with P-H Asst. State Editor Tim Robinson ready to help out.

The train wreck turned out to be virtually nothing. The train jumped the track at a slow rate of speed and noone was even shaken up, let alone injured. By the time I got back to BX there was pandemonium. The Selma victim turned out to be a Unitarian minister from Boston by the name of James Reeb. He was unconscious and the prognosis was negative and he would die.

The always-thinking Tim had rushed to the hospital with a CAMERA and snapped Reeb being wheeled into the emergency room. That was the only still photograph of Reeb. AP was stuck with having to use a fuzzy TV frame from WAPI-TV. Reeb’s murder prompted then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to make a televised national address to Congress to urge passage of the Voting Rights Act, which changed the face of our nation.

We didn’t have TV in our office, which was just off the P-H’s newsroom. But we had a radio and we listened, Tim, Al and me and maybe Joe. Tim was reading Johnson’s text on the B-wire as Johnson was delivering his address and suddently Tim blurted out, “Ooo, hoo, hoo, wait’ll you hear this.”

Moments later LBJ would use the phrase “We shall overcome.” The segs in the P-H newsroom were not happy.

Tim was first and foremost a newshound. For example, four BX public high schools were about to be desegregated in Sept. 1965 and that put us in a bind. Eye knew we could rely on ex-Unipresser and then-BX broadcast news director Elvin Stanton to cover one school and Al to cover another. But what about the other two schools?

Well, then Southern Division News Editor in Atlanta HLS volunteered to send over race reporter Al Kuettner, an offer I leaped at.

But what about the fourth school? Should eye un-man the bureau and go myself? But Tim came to our rescue by volunteering to cut his classes that day and cover the fourth school. A godsend to UPI.

I should like to mention here that George Cook, Tim’s boss, was 100 percent cooperative when it came to springing Tim loose to cover a racial story for UPI. It would’ve been nice to have had George at the UPI/Alabama reunion in MG in April of last year. But George died some years ago. And the reunion was the last time I saw Tim; he looked completely fit. So you never know.

Did Tim ever cause me some grief? In a way, yes, but not really. In 1964 or ’65 Tim’s alma mater, Walker County High School, called him to find someone of some “prominence” to help judge the upcoming Miss Walker County High School beauty pageant. Tim asked me.

I did not consider myself prominent. But as a favor to him I agreed to do it. I figured I’d just be a passive judge. But one of the other judges, a BX disc jockey, had no clue about what was going on. The other judge was Miss Howard College who was totally deferential to those of us of the male persuasion. So after a couple of false starts I just took over the judging and in the end suggested the winner and the other two judges went right along.

Next time I saw Tim he informed me that our selection was unpopular. As I recall, we picked a 16 y.o. girl who was only a junior and we shudda picked a senior. Groan. So, whatever you were involved in with TIM, there was always substance.

Some of us have commented on Tim’s using as his professional moniker T. Sumner Robinson. I recall Tim telling me somewhere along the way that when he married Jan it was understood she would keep her own name. So, Tim said, since she wouldn’t change her name he’d change his from Timothy S. Robinson. Jan may want to correct me here. But it makes a nice southern story.

Tony Heffernan AJ BX MI MG Etc.

From TERRY CARTER: Journalists get good obituaries, fittingly, and today there’s one for Tim Robinson. That would be T. Sumner Robinson. His claim to fame was legal affairs journalism. He’d been an editor at the Washington
Post; he moved on to run The National Law Journal, where he hired me in
1987; and he then ran The Los Angeles Daily Journal, to which I followed
him – enabled by working at home as a widower rearing two young
children — and continued to have great fun. That’s the currency of our
compensation.

Ideas came off Tim like bubbles from an Alka Selzer in water and, mixing
metaphors, he and I were on wave-length. Tim knew a story and
appreciated the different ways of doing one.

He was an amazing talent, but that’s not enough anymore. The big marker
on Tim’s career path was being at the bus stop when the bus came by,
covering the local federal court for the Washington Post in the 1970s as the Watergate story met the judiciary. Tim was my guru in that wonderful niche of writing about lawyers and the law. I’m sad that we were estranged for the past six years, which can happen when situations change and personalities grow and develop. I had been his boy at The National Law Journal and followed him to The Los Angeles Daily Journal, which Tim liked to point out is, in the estimation of such as Nat Hentoff, the best legal daily in the country. All I know is I was encouraged to write, not just for lawyers, but pure writing. Tim sent me around the country, from my base in D.C, for our take on major stories in the 1990s, such as the trials of Noriega, Marcos and 2 Live Crew, as well as tales of Hillary Clinton’s Rose Law Firm and the abortion-protest battle in Wichita.

He not only encouraged me to write what I saw and felt, he let me do it. Tim could take over a bar-room piano from the hired help and show them up, and he played me like a musical instrument. I was able to write in my lede
that Wichita itself is so dead that if anybody there should be pro-life, it’s the leaders of the chamber of commerce; I could point out that women law professors unable to get tenure faced “bald-pattern maleness.” I was able to say that a lawyer charging $5 a minute to be cursed out by telephone wasn’t, once you talked with him, someone you’d tag with “the Oedipal noun of street-wise disparagement,” – as in m—–f—–. When copy desks protested such license, he said leave it alone. Tim pushed me to cover the workings of the American Bar Association to the extent that when I moved on to the ABA Journal, the Washington Post noted the irony that for years I’d “savaged the American Bar Association’s byzantine internal politics.” It goes on. Tim Robinson’s spark lit others.

Now I’m left wishing I’d made the call to make up. But he knows the story.

During World War II our father had a government job with the postal service. During the fall of 1944 we briefly lived in Tarrant in the house of our Uncle Curtis who had a war job and lived away. The spring of 1945 we moved to Pine Hill in Wilcox County. We lived in the house of a family who had war jobs in Mobile.

In those days, at least in our family, impending birth was not discussed. I knew, of course. In July mother went to the Thomasville Hospital. Tim was born July 16, 1945, four days before my twelfth birthday. His birth made the Thomasville paper. Somewhere among our Mother’s keepsakes is an article about the first two babies born in the new hospital, Tim and a girl.

We teased Tim about being born the same day as the Atomic Bomb.

Calendars and list of historical events name July 16, 1945 as the first successful Atomic Bomb tested in New Mexico. A few weeks later it was used in Japan.

The spring of 1946, our father’s war job was terminated and we moved back to Dora. Tim had no memory of his infant months in L. A. (Lower Alabama), Pine Hill or the house with the wrap around the porch and big rooms. A picture of the house is included in the grouping of childhood pictures. He spent his growing up years in Dora.

Tim was the last child in the family and also the first of the generation known as the Baby Boomers.

Tim picked up the T. Sumner in the late 60s after moving to WA where he earned the first of his graduate degrees — while working full time, initially, I think for the Agriculture Department, then at something called the DC Examiner. Tim wasn’t being effete with the T. Sumner, just making sure he could be distinguished from other people with a fairly common name — although I think he had some fun with it as well.

I can’t quite explain how it is that all of us can remember drinking with him when there weren’t that many hours in a day. In Birmingham, Tim joined the United Submarine Veterans of WWII, which was the way former submariner Julian Lapidus made it legal for a few to drink after hours in the Twin Dolphins Club.

After maybe three beers, Schlitz in those days, Tim would sit down at the piano (those were the days when many bars had one)and nimbly work through one of I think three songs, notably Gershwyn’s Summertime. He may have picked that up from another sometime member of the group, Harold Johnson, who played piano in bars for a living. The next day, he would get up, go to class and then go to work.

During Tim’s stint at the WA Post, Jim Morrison died and there wasn’t a writer to do that. Tim volunteered, cranked out a literate epic, then returned to his other work. Turned out he had something approaching inside knowledge of Morrison, The Doors and their music. He was always known for prodigious work habits.

Yale Law School came on a Ford Foundation fellowship and then went on to become editor of the National Law Journal. After 20 years or so, it’s easy to forget what a hot publication that was.

As Al said, Tim never forgot where he was from and the tough life of his parents, who were both school teachers in a county that paid rock bottom state level wages. In Alabama which was as usual contending with Mississippi to be 50th in education. I don’t remember the figure Tim named, but 40 years ago, both of his parents together earned well under $10,000 combined.

Walker County was also dirt poor coal-mining country with a passel of Kluckers. I remember Tim talking about his father working as a coal miner and his dad’s experience’s with the Klan as a preacher. In my e-mail I find a note from Tim re his admiration of Agee’s “Let Us No Praise Famous Men” and “Death in the Family.”

Tim’s life and career look like a succession of triumphs, but he showed a huge amount of character in coping with and moving past personal tragedy.

Joe

While this note isn’t the way I usually communicate my sentiments upon the death of a close friend, it seems appropriate as Tim, you and I have spent a good part of our time “together” using this method. Also, while his life is still fresh in my mind, I want to offer a few observations about him since we worked closely with one another for more than six months on my book, The Board.

1. Without Tim, I never would have finished the book and, to the extent it has received positive reviews, much of the credit for those reviews goes to him.
2. Tim had a wonderful mind: creative, incisive, thorough and, at the right times, challenging.
3. He had a twinkle in his eye and behind that twinkle was a world class sense of humor: warm, new and pleasantly different.
4. His knowledge and understanding of the political scene was incredibly good. In that regard, I was anxious to talk to him about what he thought would happen next here in the Golden State. I am sure that Arnold is going to need a press relations person and Tim would have been perfect. I don’t think their politics would have meshed too well, however.
5. Tim’s writing skills were superb. He had a way of taking complex material and untwisting it so that a reader could easily absorb the complexities without much effort. (In this regard and in connection with other traits listed above, it helps to be brilliant.)
6. As we both know, he had an incredible broad range of interests. I was looking forward to sharing some new wine with him but, instead, I’ll toast him with it.
7. Most importantly, Tim was a caring person. He cared about people and their concerns. I certainly benefited from that quality in so many ways.

To say that he will be missed is a gross understatement. To say that he made a huge contribution to others is an even larger understatement. Obviously, if I can be of assistance, please do not hesitate to call upon me or JoAnne Hooper.

Sincerely,
Jim Ukropina

It was in the early 1980′s and Jilda’s first trip to New York City. We were there visiting our friend Keith Watson and pitching songs to a record producer. We called up Tim Robinson, a fellow graduate from Dora High School Class of 1961 just to say hello. He sounded delighted to hear from us and asked us to meet him for dinner that evening. We both agreed and found ourselves at a quaint little restaurant in Soho which had tables with white tablecloths and real napkins. They served warm fresh baked bread. I ordered sweet tea and the waiter looked at me as though I had a railroad spike stuck through my head. Tim looked at the waiter and said we are all from Alabama and the waiter nodded his head with understanding. We didn’t get sweet tea, but I did have my very first cappuccino.

We had a wonderful dinner and talked about what was going on in our lives. We told him about what we were trying to do in our music quest and he talked some about his life. At that time, he was Editor and Chief of the National Law Journal, which was the largest selling journal in America, read by lawyers. In short, Tim was a very successful and important person and he was sitting there with Jilda and me talking about the old school.

After dinner, we walked around the city for a while and he told us places to go and things to see before we left town. It was an extraordinary evening.

We have kept in touch with Tim through the years and he was always very kind to us. He was a big supporter of the DoraHighSchool.com website. I asked him several months ago about doing a profile on him but he was a little hesitant. I got the distinct feeling that he did not want to appear to brag.

I thought his story would be an inspiration to the kids coming along. He did agree to let me do the story, but with his move from California to D.C. it got put on the back burner.

Tim was the son of Clarence and Edith Robinson, both were teachers at Dora. He has three brothers, Nelson, Gerald, and Michael and one sister Terah Sherer.

Tim was only 58 years old, but he crammed a lot of living into those years.

He started out as a reporter for The Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper in the 60’s and attended Walker College. He moved on to work at the Birmingham Post Herald as an assistant state editor and also worked as a reporter and photographer for the United Press International news service.

When I did the story last year about remembering the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Tim sent me a note about his memories of that awful day.
He went on to graduate from Samford University, in Birmingham and he received a master’s degree in communications from American University and a master’s in studies of law from Yale University.

He moved to Washington in the late 1960s to be a speechwriter for Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman. In 1968, he became editor of the Washington Examiner, a short-lived experiment in newspaper publishing by D.C. Transit owner O. Roy Chalk.

Tim joined The Washington Post as assistant city editor in 1969 and later was night city editor and day city editor. He began covering federal courts in 1973 and was assigned to the Watergate trials. He also did investigative reporting on judicial and police corruption and national security matters and wrote about developments in the legal field. He wrote a weekly column on lawyers for the Washington Business section. He also served as chair of the Newspaper Guild unit at the newspaper.

In 1989, after his stint in New York, Tim moved to California where he became editor and associate publisher of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. He went to work with Excite in 1995 just as the Internet was taking off. Tim worked on the cutting edge of technology and publishing and appeared on televisions shows such as Today, Larry King Live and McLaughlin.

Tim and his wife, Janet Andrew, operated a media-consulting firm. He also lectured on legal and media topics. His interests included the piano, singing and New Orleans cuisine.

He recently moved to Washington D.C. to take a position with Time Warner AOL. He was diagnosed with cancer a short time later and died from complications from surgery.

Tim Robinson is a great example of how someone from a small town can make a big difference in the world. He meant a lot to Jilda and me and I can tell you he will be missed.

Tim will be at New Horizon Funeral home in Sumiton. The viewing will be from 11:00 a.m. till 1:00 p.m and the funeral will be at 1:30 p.m.

I don’t know how to start this letter. I was devastated by the news. I could not bear to email, call, or send you a card – I felt the need to wait until I had the time and mental space to write you. Please excuse the resulting tardiness. My heart goes out to you and your loss, as I mourn the loss of a dear mentor and friend myself. I hope that you have found the support of family and friends, and that you find solace in learning how much Tim was loved and respected by so many people.

I don’t know what words to offer you. The best I can do is share my Tim story.

The Mentor

When I first started working with Tim, I found him rather cool and standoffish. I was concerned – he was supposed to be working with me, but he just didn’t seem very open to the idea. I spoke with my boss and my boss’s boss (Abbot), and was reassured that it wasn’t me. Yes, Tim can be hard to connect with at first, but give it time. He’ll come around. I thought I would take the approach of communicating from my side – I kept him posted on my activities by email, and in person. He was not an easy person to win over. Gradually, he began to respond to the emails and provide feedback and ideas. He brought me into discussions with designers and engineers. I was impressed at his ability to draw out ideas and act on them. He showed me that good ideas come from bright people – regardless of designated role.

As Tim got to know me, and I him, he began to bounce his own ideas off of me, and bring me into planning and evaluation meetings. At this point, he really became a mentor to me. He intuitively knew how to encourage me to extend my experience, without ever feeling pushed. He demonstrated enormous faith in me by allowing me to present my ideas and concerns in high-profile meetings. When I would go astray, he would not step in and take over, as so many subsequent managers do, but wait until after the meeting and privately tell me what considerations I might want to take into account in the future. For a while, we had adjoining cubes and he could hear my phone conversations with partners. When he heard me going down the wrong path, he would IM me with suggestions to get back on track. It was a great system.
I was always surprised when he had praise for me. I was awed that a man as smart and experienced as he was actually saw potential in me. Somehow I never could quite fit Tim’s picture of me with my own view of myself.

The Cynical Optimist

AltaVista was a new scene. While Tim continued to be an incredible mentor to me, we began to take on slightly different, complimentary roles. He loved the tabloid headlines, the calls to action, the up-to-the-second news coverage, and the resulting page-view numbers. I liked long-term planning, working with designers and engineers. The Webster project was an incredible experience for me because Tim really let me take the idea and run with it. I learned more from that experience than I have learned from any other project in my career thus far. Tim really showed me that revenue and value for the user/customer/audience can co-exist. This is a model I continue to strive for. I always felt that I was a cynical optimist – highly skeptical of motives and declared objectives, yet, ultimately believing that people were essentially good and that everything would work out in the end. Or at least there was that possibility. Tim was a bit more extreme in his views. He was not skeptical of motives, he was down-right suspicious. (I always credited this to his background in journalism.) Yet somehow, amazingly, he really believed that the Good Guys, or Good Ideas, or Good Intentions would win. I guess he taught me that I could watch my back without sacrificing my spirit.

Friend and, once again, Mentor

I am sorry that Tim and I did not have a chance to work together again after AltaVista. I know I could have learned so much more from him in the workplace. Certainly, subsequent bosses could never come close to filling his shoes. I am thankful, however, that we were able to maintain a friendship – with the both of you. Outside of work, I looked to Tim for advice on personal grounds, which he doled out in careful measures, according to what he thought I should hear. I knew that there was always plenty he chose not to divulge. Tom and I have really admired your relationship, the way you embraced and respected each other for your differences while pursuing common goals. It was always a pleasure to be in your presence and sense the warmth between the two of you. We took inspiration from your approach to your relationship that did not sacrifice romance for rationality, or vise versa.

Jan, since October 8, when Tom and I read the email from Jamie Hammond, our thoughts and concerns have been with you. Selfishly, I will miss Tim for my own reasons – for the advice he never gave me, and the storied I never got to hear. I will miss his stoicism and enthusiasm. I also, again selfishly, mourn the loss of one of my biggest advocates. One does not get many champions in life. He helped me see possibilities for myself, and that is a gift beyond value.

While this letter is mine, I also want to pass along Tom’s sentiments. He admired Tim greatly. More than Tim knew, I think. Tom enjoyed getting closer to both Tim and you over the past couple of years. I hope and expect that you will continue to be part of our lives. Our home is always open to you. Please let me know if we can be of assistance now, or at any point in the future.

I am so sorry that we could not come to the funeral. I understand that a scholarship fund has been set up in Tim’s name. I have the address and will be sending a contribution shortly.

Much love to you,