April 4, 2007

BY BRIAN DICKERSON
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Neal Shine was that most delightful of contradictions -- a serious newspaperman who never took himself or his craft too seriously.

So he would have appreciated the preparations his old Free Press colleagues made for the unwelcome news of his death -- their foresight in preparing a detailed obituary while he was still healthy, their sensitivity in withholding publication of his passing until his six children had been notified, the care with which they culled his best work for a posthumous tribute.

And he would have chuckled when, after so much planning, a portion of that tribute -- a collection of his columns -- briefly slipped onto the Free Press Web site while the paper was waiting to post news of his death.

As Shine, a world-class ironist, would have been the first to observe: No good turn goes unpunished.

From publisher to prankster
I met Shine shortly before his first, unsuccessful attempt at retirement in 1989, and I'm not the least bit embarrassed to tell you I loved the man.

After his second retirement, he continued to call from time to time, usually posing as an irate reader. Once, after I ridiculed a member of the local Cosa Nostra, he impersonated a well-known mobster to deliver a convincing death threat.

I incurred his genuine wrath just twice: once when I published a profane quotation in our Sunday magazine and once when I startled him with the news that he was to deliver a keynote speech in 15 minutes.

It was a Sunday afternoon in May. Shine was regaling me with vignettes from his wife's high school reunion, which they had attended the evening before, as we drove to a luncheon to honor the state's outstanding high school students. A few blocks from the banquet venue, I reminded Shine that he was the featured speaker and asked what he planned to talk about.

An awkward encounter
Shine swerved onto the gravel shoulder of the road, stopped sharply enough to raise a towering plume of dust and seized me by the necktie. "Tell me," he demanded, pulling my face to within inches of his own, "that you are kidding" -- or words to that effect, although his actual syntax may have been more direct.

I wasn't, of course, and minutes later he was smiling nervously from the podium, utterly unprepared as he confronted an audience of 400 students, parents and educators.

I could see the sweat glistening on the back of his neck as he resumed the story of his wife's high school reunion, picking up right where he'd left off in the car. Afterward, several people told me it was the best speech they'd ever heard.

"I hope we die before Neal does, so he can talk about us at our funerals," another Free Press columnist whispered to me more recently as we listened to Shine eulogize a departed colleague. I just nodded.

We didn't get our wish. And our lives will be the worse for that, even when they're over, because in Neal Shine's telling, everybody's story was a little more interesting.

Contact BRIAN DICKERSON at 248-351-3697 or bdickerson@freepress.com.