Samizdat

Brewster Globe vet Jeff McLaughlin, dead at 65

Jeff McLaughlin, Globe veteran, community volunteer, dead at 65
Harvard grad, won Pulitzer, covered Cape Cod

Jeff McLaughlin rowing his dory across Little Pleasant Bay in 2000.
Photo courtesy of Barry Donahue of The Cape Codder.

By Jeff Blanchard

He ended all his emails with "peace," and concluded his conversations, on the phone or in person, with "Be well."

Jeff McLaughlin, at 65; was longtime Globe writer, editor

Much as Jeff McLaughlin loved language, writing could bring as much pain as pleasure, starting with the lead paragraph of each newspaper story he wrote for The Boston Globe.
   "I know that writing was agonizing for him," said his daughter, Megan Frampton of Brooklyn, N.Y. "He'd spend as long as he could on the lead, and then go from there."
   Beginning with dispatches from villages and state capitals in northern New England and ending with reports from Cape Cod, Mr. McLaughlin wrote thousands of stories for the Globe, covering everything from North Country politics to Boston's music scene. Early in his years at the newspaper, he worked month after month of 14-hour shifts as an assistant city editor during 1974, the year the Globe's coverage of desegregation in Boston's schools earned a Pulitzer Prize for public service.
   Mr. McLaughlin, who also had been a city editor and arts columnist in his 29 years at the Globe, died Wednesday in his Brewster home. He was 65 and had suffered either a heart attack or stroke, doctors told his family...  Globe.  Well, right back at ya, buddy.

Jeff McLaughlin died Tuesday night, sometime after lights out, literally falling face down next to his bed in the home he rented on Sheffield Drive off Freeman’s Way. Stroke, heart attack, whatever it was that finally got him, Jeff had never completely recovered from a viral infection that disabled him in late summer, to the point of not wanting to eat and not leaving his bed for days at a time.

The doctors prescribed antibiotics, and he recovered well enough to make his annual drive around the mid-Atlantic states to visit family over the Thanksgiving holidays, but the last few months he was mostly tired, and it wasn’t like him.

Jeff was an early bird. He awoke before the birds, actually, and would be disappointed with himself if he wasn’t up before the newspaper was delivered at around 5:30. "Beautiful morning," he’d write to a friend, "great day to play in the dirt."

On Wednesday, December 5, 2007, he never got up.

Police and medical personnel were summoned to the home last night after being alerted to his death. At once the dark silence of a quiet Cape subdivision was splashed with lights and populated by strangers who moved respectfully, almost wordlessly, back and forth between the bedroom and the vehicles out front, a procession of practiced dignity.

They moved him to the Nickerson Funeral Home in Orleans to await further instructions from the family, with his daughter, Megan, on her way to the Cape from Brooklyn, his brother, Jon, here from Virginia, sister Donnell and other loved ones gathering here to begin the rituals of remembrance and celebration and putting the past behind.

He was born on November 20, 1942, in Fall River. He began his college education at Harvard at 15, and after graduation and a very brief stint in the insurance industry, worked for the Boston Globe for 30 years, including one in which he and his colleagues would cop a team Pulitzer, an award he kept somewhere, he wasn’t exactly sure where, among the newspapers, magazines, books and records that served as his cocoon against the chaos.

As a father, grandfather, uncle and brother, McLaughlin achieved and accomplished much, but always gave more, and to a wide variety of people and causes, spending most of his time in recent years helping others, whether as a volunteer at the library, as the bookish guy who volunteered weekends in the Swap Shop at the dump, as a member of the town’s affordable housing committee and the Friends of Pleasant Bay, or as a guy who’d think nothing of going to pick up your 90-year old Aunt Mary at the airport if you didn’t have the time.

He always did.

Peace, Jeff, and be well.