By Patricia Larson Guilfoyle
 |
| Rick Bacon was there waiting for Patricia Larson right before she married Stephen Guilfoyle, another of Bacon's wayward children. |
#RickBacon freaked the hell out of me before we'd ever even met. I had driven down from Athens, Ga., where I was wrapping up graduate school and awas nxious to get back into the newsroom. I had a job interview in the morning with Richard N. Bacon, regional publisher of the Barnwell Group of Community Newspapers, Inc.
CNI's Senior Editor Phil Hudgins just smiled when he had told me Rick wanted to
interview me down in Barnwell. Phil knew me from when I worked in St. Mary's,
Ga., for then-Publisher Dalton Sirmans. Dalton hired this naive 16-year-old who
walked in one day off the street asking for a job. ("Can you write?"
he said. "Sure," I said, and brought him my latest term paper about
graviton particles and the space-time continuum. He hired me the next day, and
one of my first assignments was covering a pipe-bomb explosion at the new
Subway in town. I was hooked!)
Well, Phil knew Dalton, and Phil knew Rick, and Rick knew
Dalton. So before I knew it, I was driving east, trying to figure out where the
heck in South Carolina Barnwell was.
I checked into the one motel in town and went to my room.
Before I had even swung the door open all the way, the phone on the table
started ringing. The sudden noise made me jump -- who in the world knew where I
was? I mean, I wasn't even inside the room yet.
Of course, it was Rick.
"Hi! It's Rick Bacon. Do you want to get something to
eat?"
That was the first thing I realized about Rick: Nothing –
and no one – got past Rick. He was crazy like a fox.
We headed over to Anthony's, one of his regular spots. Of
course, he knew the waitress and pretended to give her a hard time. He ordered
a beer and asked if I wanted one, too. I thought, "I'd never been on a job
interview like this before." But Phil had told me that he was good buddies
with Dalton, so he couldn't be all that weird.
Boy, was I wrong. Rick was a lot weirder than Dalton. Dalton
liked to drive gold-colored cars and made fun of his alma mater, Abraham
Baldwin Agricultural College ("I'm just a poor ol' country boy from
ABAAAAAC," he'd say in his best south Georgia drawl). But Rick had a
thousand crazy voices, which he'd pull out at just the right – or wrong –
moment, and his collection of pig paraphernalia bordered on the fanatical.
Don't even get me started on his cars.
I don't even remember what all we talked about, sitting
there in Anthony's eating open-faced steak sandwiches and drinking beer. I just
remember thinking, "I gotta come work for this guy."
Turns out, Rick had already decided to hire me after talking
with Phil and Dalton, so the entire "interview" was just to test me.
That was the next thing I realized about Rick: Rick was
awesomely cool. He could be exasperating, but only in the nicest possible way,
and for all the right reasons. And he knew what was important as a leader and
manager, whether people liked him or not.
The next three years were a blur, but a couple of moments
will always stand out.
Less than a week into my job, Rick tells me I have to fire a
sports correspondent. The guy had been writing for The People-Sentinel only about
50 years or so, he said. But people at the rec league baseball games he'd been
covering smelled alcohol on his breath a lot. He had to go.
"I've never
fired anyone in my life," I told Rick. "Can't you do it?"
"Nope," he said. "You're the editor. Oh, I've already called
him, and he'll be here in a few minutes. Take him into the conference
room."
Well, the guy came in, still smelling of alcohol. He cried
like a baby when I gave him the news. At 23, I'd never seen a grown man cry in
real life before. After he left and I went back to my desk, which I had
strategically positioned right next to Rick's, I was shaking. I felt awful.
Rick looked over, with that fake-innocent look of his, and
mouthed the words, "You bitch."
That was Rick. Rick could make you laugh no matter what.
Another moment that stands out was back at my desk, sitting
right next to Rick. That week's edition had two big stories in it: One about
students having sex in the bathrooms at Allendale High School, the other about
workers accidentally wringing the necks of two ostriches that were the sideshow
attraction at the local flea market, which happened to be owned by the mayor.
I'm on the phone getting blessed out by the principal at Allendale High, when
the mayor's wife walks in and sits down in the chair beside my desk. She
doesn't care that I'm on the phone, she's just read the paper and is crying/mad
because I've just ruined her husband's reputation.
"They didn't mean to hurt those ostriches – it was an
accident."
Then on the phone: "You think writing about our
problems is what you should be doing? You should be building up our schools,
not tearing them down."
"The birds just got excited and pulled back on the
ropes while they were being unloaded. They wrung their own necks, see?"
"Don't you know these kids are going to read that on
the front page and think they can go have sex in any bathroom now? You're
making our jobs harder."
I hung up on the principal and tried to explain things to
the mayor's wife, but I could not get a word in edgewise.
Then Rick moseys over, puts on his best genteel Southern
persona and takes the woman's hands in his, pulling her gently up from the
chair as he pats her hands. He puts one arm around her shoulder to comfort her,
as he steers her smoothly to the door. He's thanking her, he's soothing her,
he's smiling at her in the kindest way possible. By the time she reaches the
front door, she's smiling up at him and thanking us for the good job we're
doing at the paper.
After the door swung shut, he turned around, bowing with an
exaggerated flourish as everyone in the room applauded. He was the master!
That was the next lesson I learned from Rick: No matter what
problems you're dealing with, other people have problems, too. Sometimes all
people need is a sympathetic ear and a smile to cheer them up. And the Big Guy
could cheer anyone up. Even people who got mad at him still liked and respected
him.
At some point along the way I started calling him Big Guy,
from "WKRP." And since he had a nickname for nearly everyone, he started
calling me PL or PT. Through the few months I worked in Barnwell to when I
moved to Winnsboro, he was always there with support and encouragement, and
when I screwed up or was unprepared, he was there to admonish as well.
I certainly wasn't looking to leave CNI, but when I got an
unexpected job offer to go work up in Fort Mill for literally twice the money,
I dreaded making the call to Rick.
I stumbled my way through the call, explaining that I didn't
want to leave but didn't think I could pass this chance by.
He asked how much
they were offering, and when I told him, he said, "Hell, PT, don't let the
door hit your ass on the way out. You'd be crazy not to take it." He
always gave you his honest opinion.
Over the years I've often found myself asking in different
situations, "What would Rick do?" His advice, his jokes, his voice,
his facial expressions, they're all ingrained in my mind.
When he stood up for Steve at our wedding, and when he met
our son, I saw a different side of Rick. The kinder, gentler, grandfatherly
Rick. No longer the boss, but still the Big Guy.
I called him for advice when I was eyeing whether to jump
from McClatchy, where I'd worked for over a decade, to go edit the newspaper
for the Catholic Diocese of Charlotte. I explained that it was less money but I
was working such long hours that I never saw my baby son. McClatchy seemed to be going
downhill fast, and the future didn't feel secure.
"What should I do?" I
asked.
He listened, then he reminded me of his test for any job:
"PT, does the money outweigh the crap?" Then he said, "The
Catholic Church has been around for 2,000 years. I don't think they're going
anywhere."
I took the job.
The most important lesson I learned from Rick happened in
Barnwell, one night in 1998 about 3 a.m.
I was tired of sleeping in the motel room in Winnsboro,
where he'd put me as publisher a few weeks earlier. I wanted to sleep back home
in Barnwell, in my own bed. So when I wrapped up work that night, I headed back
on the all-too-familiar drive down I-77 and Highway 3.
I fell asleep at the wheel just past the Barnwell County
line, waking up just in time to sideswipe the concrete wall of the bridge and
flip my car a couple times. It landed upside down in the middle of the road. As
I crawled out of the hole where the window used to be, I cut my elbow on some
broken glass, but other than that I was OK. When the ambulance dropped me at
the Barnwell ER, they asked me who they should call. The only family I had, I
said.
"Call Rick Bacon."
When he arrived and saw that I was all right, he gave me a
hug and cracked a few jokes to make me laugh. Then he took out a set of keys.
"What're those for?" I asked.
"Well, you'll need a car for a while, don't you?"
"You're going to give me the keys to your car, after I
was stupid enough to wreck my own car?"
"It's a piece of crap Buick. Have fun, Crash."
That was Rick. He never hesitated to help people in need, no
matter what. No questions, no demands, no exceptions.
In his last message to me, his voice was unnaturally soft.
But it was the same old Rick.
"Mrs. Guilfoyle, this is Rick Bacon. And I just wanted to
tell you that's a heck of a pope you've got now. He gives me faith that maybe
all religion isn't all totally crap. Just wanted you to know that. Have a good
day."
I hesitated calling him back, and got his voicemail when I
did call. I left a dumb, rambling message – not knowing what to say or what to
do, knowing it must have gotten pretty bad for him if he was talking about God
and religion without cracking a joke.
What I wanted to tell him is that he was a lot like Pope
Francis, and not just about their weight. I imagined him interrupting the
serious stuff I was trying to say, to joke about priests fondling young boys –
"Huh, huh," he'd grunt in his worst pervert voice – or about wearing
a cassock – "Do they wear any underwear under that dress?"
I wanted to tell Rick that soon after he was elected, Pope
Francis wrote an exhortation that spurred a lengthy interview with an Italian
Jesuit editor and it went global. The Pope, starting with that newspaper
interview, has recast the enduring Gospel message in a whole new light,
encouraging people think about letting God back into their lives, I'd say. Pope
Francis wants all of us to refocus on what's most important in life, because
it's not all about us, it's about how much God loves us, no matter what.
"The headline called the pope 'A Big Heart Open to God,'" I'd tell
him.
"You're just the same, Big Guy – except your headline
would be 'A Big Heart Open to People.'"
I wish I had had the chance to tell
him that, and to say, "I love you, Big Guy."
