Barb took the news seriously--she was a graduate of Boston College's J-school, which was unusual for a woman in the 1950s--but she knew not to take the business too seriously, and we had some good laughs in that newsroom, in between the usual bullshit of operating a shoestring business in a small town whose principal industry has just collapsed. One day a guy she'd spoken with on the phone earlier in the day called back and asked for "the young lady" he'd talked to earlier.

We didn't have anyone fitting that description in the office, so I was confused. "Er, what young lady would that be?"

"You must know who I mean," he said. "The one with the husky voice."

I did know who he meant then, because Barb had a very distinctive voice--the kind detective writers used to call a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice, although she neither drank nor smoked when I knew her. Suppressing a snicker, I put him on hold and called over to her,

"Hey, Barb, you have an admirer on line 1." (We only had one phone line, but everyone called it "line 1" anyway, just for irony's sake.)

She swiveled and gave me a puzzled look. "What?"

"He says he wants to talk to, quote, the young lady with the husky voice, end quote."

Barb, who was 73 or 4 at the time, cracked up laughing, and we all had to giggle for a while before she could take the call.

She retired for good the following year, when the Henleys hired a young go-getter from downstate to be the paper's permanent editor (old-timey readers of the LiveJournal I kept at the time will remember him as "Captain Wonder"). By then she figured she had me trained up well enough to survive him, and she was too old for that shit, so she bought a little house on the main road out of downtown and moved her things out of the apartment above the office. I used to see her sometimes at the store, and since her house was right by the bridge downtown, I had to drive past it several times in any average week, so I used to glance at it and think of her often.

A couple of weeks ago I was going by on the way down to a session in the VAB when I noticed a couple of guys moving furniture out of her house. I thought that didn't bode well, but hoped it meant she was going to assisted living, or moving in with relatives, or something. Alas, no; my mother spotted her obituary in the Bangor paper a short while later.

The other day, I looked it up wondering if there might be a "memory book" or the like at whatever funeral home handled the arrangements. this led me to said funeral home's website, and while I was scanning down the list of recent entries looking for her name, I saw another name I recognized: Catherine Bonis, who was the principal's secretary at Stearns High School for decades that included my four years there.

I didn't know Mrs. Bonis even as well as I knew Barb, since we never worked together, but she had been an institution in the Stearns High office for many years before I ever went there and stayed on for many years after. She was a kind and dignified lady, and seeing her was always the best part of having to visit the office. Years later, when I returned to town in the early 2000s, Mom's second husband Vincent was still working as a teacher at Stearns, and Mrs. Bonis was still in the office, so we used to see her when we went over to have lunch with Vince at school or the like. She was very fond of Wolfgang, and being a fine judge of character, he returned the sentiment.

So... yeah. Two ladies of almost the same age (Barb was 95, Mrs. Bonis 96), both fixtures around this town for decades, gone within a month of each other. Barbara never appeared in an EPU story, as far as I can recall, but you may remember Mrs. Bonis as Principal Strickland's secretary at Fritz Koopman Memorial High School in Symphony of the Sword.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.