Because I never really got to know Don Boxmeyer, the St. Paul Pioneer Press writer/columnist who died late last week, I won't get into an extended eulogy. Our mutual colleague, Dave Hawley, filed a gracious and thorough obit/remembrance to the PiPress a couple days ago and clearly knew Don much better than I did.

What I do remember is that Don, sixty-sevent when he died, was an archetypal nice guy. A sweetheart. Exactly the sort of next-door neighbor everyone hopes to have; self-effacing, good humored, curious, full of fascinating firsthand stories and blessedly light on the self-serving bulls**t. Don knew at least two things vital for any writer. A: He knew how to listen (not to me, no one ever learned anything from that, but to the people he wrote about), and B: He knew how to read his audience. If he sensed you weren't tracking with whatever he was talking about, he cut himself off and moved on. We were out in Stillwater on some story a few years ago, and he got talking about another story he had been working on. Just as he got rolling, I got distracted by something going on nearby. Don stopped talking and apologized for "rambling on." I felt bad and tried to assure him it was just the commotion and not him and to please continue. It was an awkward moment. But like I say, we didn't know each other all that well.

I regret never taking the bus tour of St. Paul Don gave with (I'm told) stories of every damned alley, bent sign post, and neighborhood bar in the city.

About the time I got to the PiPress in 1989, Don had settled into the role of the "local color" columnist, as opposed to Joe Soucheray's curmudgeonly voice of bootstrapping wisdom and Nick Coleman's populist political fervor/indignation. In that mix, Don was decidedly number three and probably slid lower in the pecking order of the paper's "stars" after Katherine Lanpher was bumped up to columnist status. The contrast of egos among that quartet couldn't have been sharper, and I say that as someone who has great affection for both Coleman and Lanpher. (Joe is Joe.)

Newspapers are like any other workplace with the exception that you sign your name to your work, and some of us got our picture in print three or four times a week. Like Ace Widgets, there is no shortage of people in a newsroom who believe they are the one true alpha dog and resent any suggestion to the contrary. But I would be astonished if Don Boxmeyer ever once complained to anyone that he wasn't being promoted sufficiently, or properly, or ever threw a s**t fit in the editor's office demanding a raise. Maybe I'm wrong. But he struck me as a guy who took what he was given.

That last quality may not even be a virtue. Even in the 1990s, remembered today as the final golden era of newspapers, the PiPress was notoriously tight with cash. You needed leverage to get a nickel for travel or anything beyond a desk and a phone. (And those were the "fat" days.) Where others were shameless—and successful—about playing their leverage card(s), I never got the impression Boxmeyer even attempted to play that game.

I can't decide if Don Boxmeyer's neighborly virtues would serve him well in today's newspaper environment. On the one hand, the meek and productive would seem to be the ideal employee in papers managed by perpetually second-guessing (and second guessed) editors and owned by companies that couldn't care less if some guy out in Yakupitsville has a pitch-perfect ear for neighborhood lore. On the other, the survival game at papers today requires a level of self-aggrandizement designed to keep you off the next buyout hit list.

Then there's the question of whether any major news entity gives a damn about the sort of stuff Don wrote about. Editors whose careers are umbilically knotted to corporate template notions of "news"—a concept where relaxed storytelling about less than urgent topics is an archaic indulgence—are not likely to ever bring a writer like Boxmeyer on staff, even if he does know everyone in town and their second aunt. Papers today are written and edited for "busy consumers" not readers.

You struck me as a genuinely good guy, Don.