A Decent Man
Decent. That seems like faint praise, but good, decent, upright, honorable - words like that, describing people who are like that, say more than effusive puffery. Len Gross was a decent man, a good man, and seeing his name under "in memory of" on the last page of the School of Journalism newsletter this afternoon took me right back to those West Virginia newsrooms and the inevitable calls, unwanted on both ends, to find out what happened when a mine accident took a life. Len - later the Rev. Leonard Gross - graduated from the journalism program at West Virginia University in 1949 and went to work at various newspapers and TV stations around the state. In 1962, he went "over the fence" as we say and joined the public relations staff at Consolidation Coal Co ., one of the predominant corporations mining in the northern coalfields. It was inevitable that I would be calling Len after I graduated from WVU in 1978 and went to work in local newspapers. The relationship ...