Foy Evans was a newspaperman and he really didn’t like flowery writing, so I’ll keep this simple.
I didn’t know him when he was mayor of Warner Robins or even when he was at the Daily Sun. The Foy I miss is the grand old man of Georgia journalism, who came prowling into the newsroom a couple of times a week and sat down to talk.
He knew everything that was going on in Houston County, and most of what was going on in Atlanta – as well as having some very definite opinions about Washington, D.C.
He was conservative to the core, but he was the old-style conservative – a man who thought that everybody should work for a living and that the government should mind its own business and keep taxes down.
On the big issues, he was measured and thoughtful, never really partisan. Like any good reporter, he was a little skeptical of any pie-in-the-sky ideas, and he wasn’t overly impressed with anybody. I don’t mean that he didn’t like and respect a great many people. I mean he wasn’t awestruck, and – to use the word that’s much-used by today’s commentators – he didn’t pander. He kept his sentimental feelings for his family, and in that respect he wore his heart on his sleeve. Just about anybody at this newspaper shop could tell you from observation that Danny Evans had a father who loved him, was proud of him and took an ongoing interest in his endeavors. I can tell you myself (because so many of our conversations ended when Julie Evans popped into the newsroom to tell Foy they were ready to go out to lunch) that his face lit up with a smile every time he saw her.
For myself, his passing makes me feel like one of the last leaves of fall on an old tree. Foy was a bit older than I, but as far as newspaper work went, we were of the same generation. We didn’t just remember the days before computers. We remembered the linotype days before photo-offset printing.
We remembered writing stories on old manual typewriters with cloth ribbons and cheap yellow paper, and the days when cut-and-paste actually involved scissors and glue. We didn’t sit around talking about the good old days, though. We just agreed that while computers had made production easier, but they hadn’t really resulted in better newspapers – the heart of it all still being the written word.
Which is why Foy is irreplaceable.
If you were just reading his column every week and didn’t much notice Foy’s writing “style”, that’s because he was a very good writer. The style was invisible.
He had your full attention, didn’t he?
You didn’t have to go back and read sentences over. You didn’t run into words you didn’t understand or find yourself lost in the middle of sentences put together like Chinese puzzles.
He wasn’t writing down to you and he wasn’t trying to impress you with his writing.
He knew his audience. He knew what he was talking about. He was a pro. And for a great many of our readers, this page will always be missing something.
