Books columnist Bill Ruehlmann, a newsroom stalwart for 45 years, is retiring. He’s written a farewell piece, here, but I have a few things to add.
___
Dear Bill,
You’re retiring and I miss you. Such treasures you’ve given me — commentaries, kindnesses and grace, and an erudition that, never arrogant, thrives on the well-crafted word and story.
By the time I was a junior in high school, you’d published two books: “Saint With a Gun,” on detective stories and what they show about America, and “Stalking the Feature Story” — which found me later, in a college classroom.
“Stalking” came out the year you joined The Ledger-Star. You wrote and wrote. When I joined The Ledger, I edited. Our paths didn’t cross.
Three decades later, in 2007, they did. You wrote book reviews; now I edited them. When I too wrote a review, you phoned: “You’re one of us!”
On the occasional Sunday, you’d drop by the office and hang out in the room stuffed with books, books that publishers and authors wanted, impossibly, reviewed. (You: glee. Me: despair.) After some hours you’d depart with a few, leaving a note that always ended with a cheerful cartoon, a man in spectacles. He is, I think, holding a staff. It’s topped with a heart.
Once I asked: Want to write about the 50th anniversary edition of Strunk & White? (Hardcover, bigger, a foreword by Roger Angell. Of course you might.)
You answered; I took notes:
“It’s an adipose book!” you said, pitch rising.
“The whole charm of it,” you said, pitch falling, “was that you could keep it in your pocket.” The central point, you said, is simple: “Words matter; use them carefully.”
Later you gave me three of your E.B. White books: “Here is New York,” and two editions of Strunk & White. Tonight this jumps out: In the fourth edition, Page 33, a dark blue arrow extends from one instructive line,
Home is the sailor.
The arrow arcs down the left margin to your annotation “RLS” and eight more lines of dark blue. They fill the bottom, then head up the right.
You knew the entire, aching, exquisite poem.
Of course you did.
You knew, young, how good literature helps us connect. On teaching rowdy, athletic upperclassmen in Cincinnati clamoring for Christmas break:
I told the Wild Bunch that I’d arm wrestle the first volunteer. If he won, we’d cancel the class, but if I won, it would be the wrap-up on Chaucer.
Bang! He let me win. We did Chaucer. I asked him about that after.
“I liked you,” he told me, “because you dint give up on us.”
“Didn’t,” I said.
“Didn’t.”
Of course you didn’t.
You know the power of story. Of an annual confab that calls you to Tennessee, the National Storytelling Festival: We listen to storytellers for the same reason we read books, to see life. But reading is solitary. Storytelling is communal. Writing was invented to save us a seat.
And the power of sharing. During layoffs, 2009: I am reminded of the Cyclops, who, when asked by Odysseus what was his reward, responded: I will eat you last. …
Bill, your column retires, along with the worries it brings. But I suspect you’ll find ways to keep sharing and teaching, as you have long taught me.
— Erica Smith, erica.smith@pilotonline.com
