Editor’s lounge

When Mark LaFlamme showed up for his job interview wearing an Elvis tie, I figured he had to be good.I was the justice-team editor at the Daily Press in Newport News, Va., and needed a police reporter.

Mark and I went to Mike’s Place for lunch. It’s a good burger joint on Warwick Boulevard not far from the paper. The waitresses there remember your name and the kitchen stays open late for weary reporters and bleary-eyed editors.

Mark wasn’t big on chitchat and it made me wonder if a demon or two didn’t lurk somewhere inside his thin frame. He spoke passionately about his years of covering crime in Lewiston, a gritty, blue-collar town in southern Maine. He wrote about Lewiston’s darkest characters: from the corrupt to the addicted, from the pitiful to the disturbed. Some reporters look at these people the way you look at carnival freaks, warily, and from a distance. These reporters like the safety of closed screen doors and interviews you can do over the phone.

But not Mark LaFlamme. He didn’t work that way. He was comfortable talking to drug dealers in foul-smelling alleys and to prostitutes in dingy diners. The way some people are drawn to sandy beaches on sunny days, Mark yearned for darkened, fog-filled streets on October nights and eerie sounds in the distance.

If police suspect a body is folded inside a footlocker, Mark wants to be there when they open it.

I wanted Mark for the job, and we eventually hired him. Within a few weeks, Mark settled into his beat and his stories became commonplace on the front page. As he became more comfortable, he brought some of his favorite possessions to the newsroom. He placed a feathered raven on his computer and a rubber, red-eyed rat beside his keyboard.

Mark and I were not only co-workers, but also neighbors. He moved into the building across from mine at St. James Terrace, a collection of downtown apartments on the banks of the James River. The downtown was desolate. Newport News Shipbuilding had transformed a once vibrant city into little more than a massive employee parking lot.

Besides a 7-Eleven, a courthouse and a couple of dismal bars, the downtown was dead. That’s usually where trouble lurks and trouble makes for great stories. Mark knew how to find them.

One of his best was the sad tale of Beulah Kaiser. Once a woman of means, Beulah fell on hard times. The woman, who needed a cane to get around, sold her big house and moved into a depressed apartment not far from the paper. The type of person she might have hired for a few dollars to weed her garden now lived across the hall.

One day, somebody broke into Beulah’s apartment, beat her savagely and suffocated her by shoving the cane down her throat.

Mark worked tirelessly on the story. He got to know Beulah Kaiser’s friends and relatives, her neighbors and church members. While other reporters were put off by yellow police tape, Mark knew the contents of her apartment. He wrote powerful stories and Beulah’s killer, one of her neighbors, was caught.

The months passed, the stories followed, but it soon became clear that Mark — for his own reasons — needed to get back to his roots. He headed back to Lewiston.

I carefully packed the stuff from his desk sent them to him.

Both of us have moved on. I’m teaching journalism, and Mark’s work – and I think Mark – have never been stronger.

I haven’t been inside the Sun-Journal’s newsroom, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find the raven on Mark’s computer monitor and the red-eyed rat near his keyboard.

Sharon Santus has worked as a reporter, projects editor and writing coach for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Missouri. She is now a member of the adjunct faculty at the Missouri School of Journalism and teaches conflict and peace reporting for the Conrad Adenauer Center for Journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in Manila.She has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and a master’s degree in journalism with an international affairs concentration from Columbia University in New York.

Editors discuss… whatever it is that they discuss when we’re not around. How to finesse your boss and avoid weather stories.