Awards are one way of recognizing good journalism. Brian Willoughby, who died Tuesday in a house fire, won more than his share.
Newspapers assign their best people to big stories, and The Columbian tapped Brian for high-profile topics such as life after 9/11.
Brian also went to Albania in 1999 to cover a team of Clark County volunteers working at refugee camps.
But there is another way to recognize writing that matters. That’s when you see a story that somebody has clipped from the paper and stuck to the refrigerator with magnets. When I visited a home a few years ago for a kitchen-table interview, I noticed one of Brian’s columns on the fridge.
I don’t remember which one it was. Over the six years we alternated weekly “Slice of Life” columns, Brian probably wrote 150 of them. But that one certainly resonated with that family.
I took some small bit of pride in that moment because I might have made a contribution. We were writing partners in the Sunday column slot. From talking over potential topics to suggesting the right punchline, Brian was an ideal collaborator.
Columns gave him a chance to switch between big-issue stories and more personal reflections: his long-distance relationship with his father, and how he dealt with the approach of Mother’s Day each year after losing his mother to cancer.
Even when covering an aspect of just about the biggest topic in Brian’s dozen years with us — the 9/11 attacks — he could write on a very personal level.
On Sept. 25, 2001, The Columbian sent Brian on a flight from Portland to Los Angeles and back to assess the new world of air travel. This was one of his first entries:
“3:25 a.m.: You slip into the kids’ rooms, kiss them on the forehead as they sleep, realize that two weeks ago today, dozens of airline passengers did this same thing, not knowing it was a real goodbye.”
As a columnist, Brian could share things he couldn’t write as a news reporter, even on the same topic. In his column on April 9, 2000, a year after his assignment at the Albanian refugee camps, he wrote: “I still get choked up. I still can’t talk about some aspects of my trip without losing my voice for a moment and finding tears in my eyes.” Even though, as he observed, “I spent less than a week actually in Albania.”
Then in one of those column punchlines that might well describe his own life cut short, Brian wrote: “But this isn’t about a matter of days. It’s about days that mattered.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
