BELFAST, Maine — Back in the 1990s, longtime Bangor Daily News reporter Walter Griffin told President Bill Clinton how to eat a lobster when they met as guests at the wedding of a mutual friend.
But it would take a lot of asking before you’d hear that story from Griffin, 68, who died Thursday morning after a battle with prostate cancer.
“Some people like to really tell those stories. They dine out on a good one. Walter was never like that,” David Grima of Rockland, a former reporter at the Courier Gazette of Knox County, said of his friend. “He wasn’t the kind of person to be blathering about it. He wasn’t trying to claim anything other than what he was.”
The news of Griffin’s death saddened many around midcoast Maine who remembered him as a careful, talented beat reporter of the old school and a genuinely good person.
“I don’t think I ever knew another reporter whose word I trusted more,” said George Chappell of Rockland, who shared the BDN Belfast Bureau with Griffin.
Over the 33 years Griffin worked for the BDN, he covered topics ranging from municipal meetings to homicide investigations, from festivals to a gunman who had taken a Stockton Springs Elementary School classroom hostage in 2008.
“Walter was such a key member of our reporting staff for so long,” Richard Warren, publisher of the Bangor Daily News, said Thursday. “His dedication to and persistence in his work were remarkable. We are all saddened by his death.”
After retiring from the paper at the beginning of 2010, the Belfast resident spent time visiting family, helping on a friend’s lobster boat and traveling before his health declined.
He is survived by his longtime partner, Denise Remy, his daughter, Julia, and his grandchildren.
Griffin also played guitar and sang, went on annual wilderness canoe trips with his friends and also seemed to know “just about everything,” according to Grima.
“He was our Google before Google was invented,” Grima said. “If ever anyone was talking about something and needed a fact or date, we’d say, ‘I bet Walter will know.’ He knew a lot of things and a lot of people.”
One of those people was Belfast Mayor Walter Ash, who remembered Griffin covering Belfast City Council for many years.
“He used me very fair,” Ash said. “I couldn’t have asked any more. He became a friend, Walter did. He was an all-right fellow, and I’m truly saddened at his passing.”
Over the course of his career, Griffin won awards from the Maine Press Association, including a 2009 continuing story award for his coverage of the December 2008 homicide of James Cummings, a Belfast man who was found to be accumulating a cache of explosive materials in order to manufacture a “dirty bomb.”
BDN editor Mike Dowd said in 2010 that Griffin, who broke that national story and ended up going on “The Rachel Maddow Show” to discuss it, “used all of his amassed knowledge and reportorial skills” while reporting on the Cummings case.
But, according to his friends, Griffin had a workmanlike approach to that story, as he did to all his stories.
“He said why was that different from any other story that had to be covered?” Grima recalled. “He didn’t think it was anything special. He just went out and did it.”
Remy said that Griffin, who died in the company of his family and was not in pain at the end, did not want to have a public funeral or memorial service.
“If people want to get together and remember him — it’s not inappropriate for a group of people to toast him with a little Jameson and a beer,” she said.