On Mentors; Or, Don’t Pass Up That Phone Call

When the perfect adviser finds you when you're not even looking

I’ve been thinking a lot about mentorship lately while listening to the book “Bravey” by filmmaker and Olympic athlete Alexi Pappas, while on my morning runs.

Pappas, a track-and-field athlete, competed for Greece in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil and ran the 10,000-meter event, setting a Greek record in that distance that still stands today.

In Bravey she details the difficult childhood she endured with a mentally ill mother who took her own life when Pappas was four years old, leaving her to be looked after by a kind, but busy and grieving father.

This often left her in the care and supervision of neighborhood mothers and family friends.

Pappas says she became a master at seeking and finding mentors.

In my early career at a small community newspaper, I was far from a master at anything, let alone at finding someone to help guide me through the sometimes confusing process of post-college adulthood.

Luckily, one found me.

Patty McCormac was a larger-than-life figure—both literally and figuratively—who seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the newsroom one day. I was hired for that first job to work in the advertising department of the paper, but when the existing reporter covering high school football abruptly quit and moved out of state, I found myself with a reporter’s notebook and official-looking credentials to cover the local high school and its Friday Night Lights.

I had never really considered writing as a profession, but did have a freshly minted degree in English and could string a sentence or two together, though only in a college essay.

A couple weeks into this Friday football adventure, I came back to the office after visiting an advertising client (I was still working the advertising shift at the paper during the day.) Patty poked her head out of the newsroom and said in her matter-of-fact style and sly grin: “You’re a good writer. Any interest in joining the newsroom and doing it full time?”

I was a bit shocked. I had never been told I was good at writing, but it felt nice to hear it from someone who was a professional.

Patty was a veteran crime reporter from Ventura County, Calif., and had a plan to build the paper’s newsroom into a respected information source in the growing community. I was apparently the first piece in that puzzle. She had already cleared the move with Clay, the owner, and it was up to me if I wanted to make the transition from advertising to editorial.

I chose writing and, for the next five years, learned life skills in and out of the newsroom that shaped me into the person—and businessperson—I am today.

But Patty was the lynchpin.

She was experienced, feisty and not the type to take no for an answer. She knew how to foster and maintain information sources, especially in the police bureaus. She smoked a pack a day and had a mysterious past that she’d “tell me about someday.” But, most of all? She wanted to teach me how to be a good reporter.  She wanted to pass along something that she loved dearly.

Being a bit shy and having grown up in a household where you minded your manners and unquestionably respected authority, I wasn’t accustomed to asking hard questions or pushing back when someone didn’t want to detail an uncomfortable topic, despite the public having the right to know.

I quickly joined the ranks of reporters who were often hung up on, threatened, blown off and generally disrespected, but Patty was there, always offering encouragement and steadfastly having my back. Always.

She taught me not to give up easily—“It’s like a brick wall, Tom, keep pushing and eventually a brick is going to fall out, then another, then another. Pretty soon the wall will be down,” she would say.

She taught me not to get lost in my own head waiting endlessly for inspiration: “Creative people need deadlines.”

And most certainly: “Don’t take shit from anybody.”

One night she asked me to do a “ride along” story about the night detectives at the Phoenix Police Department. This unit investigated and detailed overnight deaths in the city, determining if they were accidents or murders. If the latter, the cases were turned over to homicide detectives, who worked daytime hours.

That night I got my first glimpse of violent death, including an accident that was particularly gruesome.

Patty was horrified at what I had seen and was concerned about my well-being afterwards, but deep down I think she was proud that I had grown up a little that night.

When she was notified by the Arizona Newspaper Association that I had won an award for a piece I had written earlier that year, she called me at home, unable to contain her excitement. 

Eventually the day came that I had outgrown that job and was offered a position as editor of a trade magazine for a publishing house in Central Phoenix. The little paper where I’d began now published twice a week, with a seven-person news staff, creating must-read news if you lived in the neighborhood. The paper had become an important and meaningful part of the community and was also on the verge of being sold to one of the major dailies in the Phoenix area.

On my last day, Patty mostly held back the tears. Standing outside, between drags of her cigarette, she gave me a big hug, and we stayed in touch over the years. She didn’t even bat an eye when I told her a couple years later that I was defecting back to the “dark side” of advertising.

By the time I launched my first publication, the South Mountain District News, Patty had become a freelancer, and wrote for me, monthly, for the next 16 years.   

 

After I sold my newspapers and said goodbye to publishing in 2018, we lost contact.    

Then, during my move from Phoenix to Portland, on the final push from Redding, Calif. to Portland, we passed signs for Cottage Grove, a rural Oregon town not far from Eugene where Patty and her late-husband Jim had once lived.  As Patty always said with a sarcastic eyeroll, “Jim had a midlife crisis and instead of taking up with another woman, we moved to Cottage Grove.” I laughed as we passed by the large, green highway sign, and told myself I needed to give her a shout. I did about a year later.  I sent a couple of texts that were not returned, as was a phone call soon after.  I received a suspicious-looking Facebook  message from her,  but after I wrote back, I got no reply.      

I guess she was just busy or not on social media much, I told myself.

Patty had died of cancer a few months prior.  According to her friends, she had kept the diagnosis secret until the very end.  She had fought hard, they said. 

There had been a small memorial service in San Diego shortly after, where friends and family spread some of her ashes at the Crystal Pier in Pacific Beach, a favorite vacation spot for her and friends.

I wished I would have told her the impact she had on my life.

I wish I would have called sooner.

Interested in pursuing your own business dream? Join Generation Next and sister publication Cento at Second Act Community, a virtual community for professionals, including coaches and creatives, who are pivoting from the corporate world to build businesses they love. We’d love to see you there: Second Act Community