Over the past several days, many folks have taken the time to say a kind word or two about longtime BDN outdoor writer and artist Tom Hennessey, who died Dec. 14 at the age of 81.
Many folks shared memories of words Hennessey had written or of brief interactions with him. Others were proud owners of a Hennessey print. Few, however, knew him well.
Truth be told, neither did I.
Hennessey and I were, I suppose, brothers in a very small fraternity, as writers who have been outdoor columnists at the BDN.
But we really didn’t cross paths all that often. He was a private man, and by the time I began writing outdoors pieces, he was rarely in the office.
When he did drop by, he would always answer any questions I had — most of those revolved around outdoors newsmakers or issues that were new to me, but old hat to him — and point me in the right direction.
Later, after I had been on the outdoors beat for a bit, we had occasional chats about topics in the news. Most of those conversations would begin when Tom stopped by my desk and asked his standard question: “What do you know?”
He was a bit crusty, too, and sometimes lamented the fact that the Maine he grew up in continued to change in ways that he didn’t think were necessary, nor beneficial.
He was never a mentor to me, and looking back, that’s really not much of a surprise. He was a quiet and private man, and wasn’t one to tell anyone else how to do anything.
But that’s not to say that I didn’t learn lessons from the man, whether he knew it or not.
Tom was perhaps best known for his artwork but was equally serious about his writing. At times as a young staffer, I’d field his columns after he filed them and would give them a first read-through. Those columns all read like they had been edited a half-dozen times. The copy was polished, precise and every word was spelled correctly.
Each word mattered to Tom.
Doubt it? Pity the poor staffer who dared tinker with a Hennessey column. That rarely happened, but when it did, you could be sure that sometime the next day, the sports editor’s phone would ring, and Tom would tell him exactly what he thought of the editing job.
He was protective of those words. He chose them for a reason. And he wanted them to remain there.
As writers, I think all of us can learn something from that kind of dedication to craft.
Look at a Hennessey painting, and you know who created it. The same was true of a Hennessey column. Read it, and you could hear him reciting the words.
And often, you would end up chuckling at his idiosyncratic ways of saying certain things, recognizing them as pure Hennessey.
Fishing rods always seemed to end up with “a case of the bends.”
He favored the word “directly,” rather than “soon” or “next,” and his columns often included that construction.
Tom retired from the BDN, officially, kind of, in 1999. That didn’t mean that he stopped working, though. For the next 17 years, he wrote and contributed artwork on a freelance basis.
And when he finally decided to fully pull the plug and step away completely, he made his position quite clear. He didn’t want his boss to write any glowing farewell on his behalf. He didn’t want her to write a send-off at all.
So she didn’t.
I did.
You don’t get to walk away from a company after a 54-year career like his without anyone even mentioning it, we reasoned.
Then, after the piece went to press, I began waiting for the phone call I figured would eventually come.
Hennessey let us know his wishes, you see. And we ignored them. I knew he would have something to say about that.
I wasn’t really prepared for the response we got.
A couple days later, my phone rang.
“I just wanted to tell you that you did a great job on that story,” he told me. “I didn’t want it. But thank you.”
And thank you, Tom, for all of your fantastic work. Rest easy.
John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.com or 207-990-8214. Follow him on Twitter @JohnHolyoke.
