[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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