Years ago, when I was just starting out as a newspaper reporter, I worked at a paper run by publisher Dave Lawrence. Although he was in charge of a large, busy daily metro newspaper, he often took to the time to send out handwritten notes when someone’s work particularly pleased him.
They arrived in stiff, yellow inter-office memo envelopes, closed by a string, and were known around the newsroom as ‘Dave Raves.’
I’d been at the paper for a few months, working the night desk, and was pretty sure he had no idea who I was. A couple of my stories had made the front page, but mostly I wrote minor briefs and obituaries that got tucked away in the back sections.
And then one day, I came in to work and found, in my mailbox, one of those little envelopes from the publisher’s office. It was a handwritten ‘Dave Rave’ praising an obit I’d recently written about a local cartoonist.
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