[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 104 (Tuesday, July 7, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4682-S4683]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       REMEMBERING NORMAN RUNNION

  Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, I would like to take a moment to honor the 
memory of a longtime journalist and true friend, Norman Runnion, who 
passed away in a Vermont hospital last month at the age of 85. Norm was 
many things to many people, but as they say of those in the newspaper 
business, he had ink coursing through his veins. Norm was born into a 
news family and he loved to tell stories of his early days spent in 
newsrooms, watching his father work the trade. But when tragedy struck 
home--Norm's father was killed after falling under a train--the younger 
Runnion dedicated himself to the profession.
  From his gritty beginnings working the night cop beat on Chicago's 
South Side, Norm worked his way up as a reporter and editor with United 
Press International, covering the biggest stories of the day, including 
the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Warren Commission report. By the mid-
1960s, Norm made the wise decision to ply his skills in Vermont and 
settled in at the Brattleboro Reformer. He soon made his way to the 
managing editor post, where he earned deep respect from his community 
and his State over the next two decades. When newspapers lost a bit of 
luster for Norm, he turned to the seminary and became an Episcopal 
priest, further dedicating his life in public service.
  In retelling the path of his colorful news career, Norm suggested 
that fate led to his successes. ``I was really incredibly lucky,'' he 
told a younger reporter who he once mentored. ``Everywhere I went was 
one after another of the biggest news stories of the world. Those were 
the most monumental news stories of my generation.''
  I believe it was far more than luck that made Norm Runnion the talent 
that he was. It was devotion to a trade that he believed was worthy of 
that commitment. And his readers were incredibly lucky for that. I feel 
fortunate to have spoken with Norm shortly before his passing. Although 
weak, his spirit was still very much evident. In honor of that spirit, 
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a remembrance of 
Norm Runnion, which appeared on VTDigger.org.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                   [From VTDigger.org, June 22, 2014]

            Vermont Journalist Norman Runnion Dies at Age 85

                          (By Kevin O'Connor)

       Ask Norman Runnion for his life story and he'd point to a 
     newspaper.
       Take the old Kansas City Journal-Post, where he played as a 
     child while his father pounded on a manual typewriter.
       Or the Evanston (Ill.) Review, where he broke into 
     journalism pasting up the sports page for $5 a week.
       Or Vermont's Brattleboro Reformer and The Herald of 
     Randolph, where he capped a globetrotting career covering the 
     world for wire service desks in New York, London, Paris and 
     Washington, D.C.
       ``I'm a newspaperman, my father was a newspaperman--I love 
     that word, I grew up on that word. It would never have 
     occurred to me to be anything else.''
       ``I'm a newspaperman, my father was a newspaperman--I love 
     that word, I grew up on that word,'' he said in 1989. ``It 
     would never have occurred to me to be anything else.''
       Except an Episcopal priest, which he tried for a decade at 
     midlife. But Runnion eventually returned to writing, which he 
     did until shortly before his death Friday at Randolph's 
     Gifford Medical Center at age 85.
       When Newfane mystery novelist Archer Mayor wanted an 
     interesting character name for his 1993 book ``The Skeleton's 
     Knee,'' he borrowed Norm Runnion's. But fiction was no match 
     for the real man's feats.
       The lifelong scribe made his own headlines as recently as 
     two years ago, when he wrote a widely circulated column 
     recalling his work as Washington night news editor for United 
     Press International when President John F. Kennedy was 
     assassinated Nov. 22, 1963.
       ``For those of us who were around on that searing day in 
     American history, it could have been yesterday, not 50 years 
     ago,'' he recalled of an event for which UPI's coverage won a 
     Pulitzer Prize. ``I can hear today the haunting sounds of the 
     muffled drums as they passed below our windows, leading the 
     solemn procession past the thousands of people who jammed the 
     sidewalks to watch and mourn.''
       Runnion went on to write the main story about the 888-page 
     Warren Commission report on the shooting.
       ``The report was embargoed for a later release to give 
     journalists time to absorb the contents instead of rushing 
     out with the first available tidbits,'' he wrote. ``But the 
     stark principal finding was right there: Oswald, acting 
     alone, had murdered America's beloved president.''
       Ask Runnion what sparked his interest in journalism and 
     he'd rewind back to his birth in Kansas City, Mo., in 1929. 
     His mother was a teacher; his father, like his grandfather, 
     was a newspaperman.
       ``I grew up in a newsroom--quite literally,'' he told this 
     reporter in a 1989 interview.
       For Runnion, home was wherever his father worked. At age 
     12, his family moved to St. Louis and the Star-Times; in 
     1941, it was Chicago and the Sun.
       Life changed in 1945 when Runnion's father fell underneath 
     a commuter train and was killed. The next day, Runnion, then 
     a high school junior, enrolled in a journalism course. 
     Eventually receiving a degree from Northwestern University's 
     Medill School of Journalism in 1951, he worked ``four god-
     awful months'' at the Chicago City News Bureau, servicing a 
     half-dozen metropolitan papers with crime reports.
       ``I was covering the night police beat in the south side of 
     Chicago, which had the second highest crime rate in the world 
     outside of Singapore at that time,'' he recalled. ``Earned 25 
     bucks a week for approximately an 80-hour week.''
       Runnion went on to join United Press International, 
     reporting and editing in New York starting in 1953, in London 
     in 1955 (where he covered Winston Churchill), in Paris in 
     1957 (where he covered Charles de Gaulle) and in Washington, 
     D.C., in 1960.
       ``Came in on the tail end of the '60 elections, spent the 
     next three years covering Kennedy, the civil rights movement, 
     covered Martin Luther King's march on Washington, got 
     assigned to cover the space program, covered Alan Shepard's 
     flight, covered John Glenn's flight,'' he recalled.
       Runnion was also the lead writer of UPI's coverage of the 
     Cuban missile crisis.
       ``I was really incredibly lucky,'' he said. ``Everywhere I 
     went was one after another of the biggest news stories of the 
     world. Those were the most monumental news stories of my 
     generation. What the hell more do you want?''
       In 1966, Runnion decided he needed a break. Moving to 
     Vermont, he joined the Reformer in 1969 and became its 
     managing editor in 1971. Working in Windham County for two 
     decades, he both reported and made state news.
       In 1983, for example, Runnion was the only journalist 
     invited to the wedding of then Vermont House Speaker Stephan 
     Morse--a ceremony presided over by then Gov. Richard 
     Snelling--with explicit instructions not to write a word.
       If the bride and groom didn't suspect Runnion had other 
     thoughts when he arrived

[[Page S4683]]

     with a camera, they knew it when they picked up the Reformer 
     the next publication day and saw their nuptials splashed as 
     an exclusive atop the front page.
       Runnion, deemed by one competitor ``chief curmudgeon of the 
     Vermont press corps,'' surprised readers in 1990 by leaving 
     the paper to attend Virginia Theological Seminary, work as a 
     seminarian assistant at the all-black St. Luke's Episcopal 
     Church in Washington, and serve as rector of St. Martin's 
     Episcopal Church in Fairlee.
       Invited to address several New England press associations, 
     the new priest condemned the media for ``growing ineptness'' 
     he blamed on a loss of ethics and ``corporate obsession with 
     the bottom line.''
       ``I don't think the First Amendment is a protective 
     umbrella for the kind of sin journalism we are seeing in our 
     culture today,'' he said at one event. ``I don't think 
     picturing violence for the sake of money is what Thomas 
     Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton had in mind. The fact is, 
     the public has a right not to know a lot of the junk that is 
     being tossed their way in the name of the `right to know.' ''
       Runnion would retire from the church in 2001 and return to 
     journalism by writing for the weekly Herald of Randolph, near 
     his Brookfield home. His column on the 50th anniversary of 
     Kennedy's assassination was reprinted by the statewide news 
     website VTDigger.org, spurring a flurry of public comment.
       ``Hey, Norm: Oswald did not do it,'' one reader posted.
       ``Good point--I agree,'' Runnion replied. ``It was ET and 
     the aliens.''
       Runnion will be remembered July 8 at a public service in 
     Randolph to be led by Vermont Episcopal Bishop Thomas Ely, 
     with specifics to come from that town's Day Funeral Home. 
     (``He wrote a partial obituary and said, `You can fill in the 
     blanks,' '' his wife Linda said Monday.) He'll also live on 
     through nearly seven decades of his published work.
       ``I personally witnessed much of this history and believe 
     what I saw over what people who were not there claimed 
     happened 20 or 30 or 50 years later,'' he recently posted to 
     Internet readers sharing conspiracy theories. ``But hey, it's 
     differences of opinion that make the world go around. Cheers, 
     Norm.''

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