Photograph by Amanda Keefe
Ed Bishop.
Seldom deviating from his basic uniform, the late Ed Bishop stood guard at various entrances to the buildings of Webster University, clad in khakis (either short pants or long), buttoned-down shirts, white tennis shoes and hats of varied styles. Outside those entrances, he served as a greeter to all and as a confidant for a smaller group: several decades of the school’s journalism students, many of whom dubbed him “Smokey,” in honor of the cigarette usually seen accompanying him. Inside the classroom, those that survive the man remember a journalist cut from old-school cloth, a cantankerous grader and a man of considerable wit and outspoken opinion.
Beginning his teaching career at the school in January of 1994, he was scheduled to appear in the classroom again this fall. In addition to that, he hosted the talk show Reality Now on KDHX for several years; served as managing editor of the Riverfront Times; and was a columnist/editor for the St. Louis Journalism Review (SJR), which he guided under both the long-time ownership of Charles Klotzer and as a subsidiary of the School of Communications at Webster. (It’s since become the Gateway Journalism Review, now housed at SIU-Carbondale.)
His death this week came as a shock to many who knew him, as editor, teacher, confidant, friend and even sparring partner.
Don Corrigan, whose career is inextricably linked to both his editorship of the Webster-Kirkwood Times and his lengthy oversight of the Webster University Journal, was among the first to spread word of Bishop’s passing, sending a note to many former students on Tuesday morning. Overcome by emotion, he left the Times for the bulk of the day, after fielding a full morning’s worth of correspondence about Bishop’s death; he was finally able to return to the empty offices of the Times for deadline proofreading on Tuesday evening.
“He was such a crusty old character that I couldn’t imagine being that beat up about this,” Corrigan said. “But I was.”
During much of Bishop’s time at Webster, Corrigan served as coordinator of the journalism department; they also shared hours of work together on the board of the SJR, and may’ve tipped a pint, or two, in social hours. Regarding students, Corrigan said that Bishop wasn’t one to tuck away honesty when giving feedback.
Taking coursework with Bishop, Corrigan said, was akin “to working for an old-time editor from the ‘50s or ‘60s. He didn’t spare any feelings if he thought you sucked, or you missed the whole point of the story, or you were too opinionated, especially if those opinions didn’t coincide with his own. He could be pretty nasty. I think almost every academic year, there’s a story of a student running out of the classroom in tears. But they always made up. I think they respected that somebody didn’t mollycoddle them. In some ways, it was just a shock to hear someone so abrasive, which I think is preparation for the real world. I think he was good in helping them develop a thick skin. I don’t think he ever did it because he was unkind. He could be very compassionate.”
Former students had plenty of stories, even in the short hours after the news of his passing.
"I've been very busy the last 11 years because of Ed Bishop, and everything he did for me to be the journalist I am today," said his former student Jill Moon, assistant editor and lifestyles editor at The Telegraph in Alton, Illinois. "I've never been out of work as a journalist since I graduated from Webster in 2005, and it's because of how and what he taught me. Despite the decline of jobs in the 'newspaper' business, journalism and the daily news business have been constants for me, and the center of my life, since I left Ed's side. I also worked for him with St. Louis Journalism Review. We also were extremely close personally.
"Ed was my first and strongest mentor, the most fearless journalist I've ever known, and I keep his example and guidance with me every day," added Moon shortly after hearing about Bishop's sudden death. "I loved his direct, straightforward style from the very beginning in Fundamentals of Reporting class. I thought, 'Cool, I'm really gonna learn something from this guy.’”
Gabe Bullard, now in the employ of National Geographic, wrote that, “I had Ed for my Introduction to Journalism class, first semester, freshman year. The class was even on Monday mornings, so this was my first glimpse of college and of the career I wanted. In a lot of ways—the occasional gruffness, the smoking—he fit into one of the four or five journalist archetypes I imagined. I remember him drawing a line through a story I'd handed in and writing ‘I didn't read past here.’ After that, I pushed up to the deadline with every assignment, rewriting to avoid another red line. He was a tough professor and a tough editor, but I also always felt that he wanted me and the other students to become better reporters and better writers.”
He added an anecdote: “I remember I was also taking a class on jazz. One time, I was talking to another student about it, and Ed was sitting outside smoking between classes. He joined the conversation and we ended up having a great chat about music and experimentation that somehow ended up with him making a trenchant point about the song ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ It was surprising and outside the character I'd imagined for Ed, but it stuck with me for a long time.”
Adam Linhardt, another former student, riffed on a similar theme in a much-distributed Facebook post.
“Smokey had high standards and expected good work from his students, qualities in a teacher I generally frowned upon in school,” he wrote. “But I liked Smokey immediately. He was an unapologetic truth-teller, as another friend recently put it. He would likely tell you he was a truth-searcher, but by the time it reached his typewriter—he only came around to computers in more recent years—it was gold.
"My conversations with Smokey over the years ranged from the latest line changes with the St. Louis Blues hockey team, to politics—of which I credit Smokey not for changing my politics, but forcing me to think—to the arts. Smokey always pushed me to learn more about things I generally hated: opera, ballet, classical music and the like. I’ve always disliked ballet and that’s never changed, but I’ve exposed myself to it, mainly at Smokey’s advisement.”
Students who stayed friends long after taking his class number a goodly group, including Dawn Grodsky Reeves, a Washington, DC-based reporter who remembered him as “always a rabblerouser.” Last communicating via email in late January, the two planned on meeting up for a drink upon her visit to St. Louis in mid-August, a catch-up brought on when “he was looking through old copies of the SJR and thought of me and wondered how I was doing.”
For years, the SJR was a fascinating piece of the local newspaper community, a watchdog publication that sought to critique local media, typically through the use of writers that had retired from other local publications, or young freelancers, often those whom he’d taught. At times, Bishop’s ideas were tough for a freelancer to tackle, taking on major publications like the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or various TV news departments, while not enjoying full-time employment themselves. Often, you couldn’t say “no” to a story without at least one impassioned pitch from Bishop, telling you why the piece was important, if not downright critical, to that coming issue.
At times, his pointed, demanding and outspoken style could rub some the wrong way. One local radio host, contacted about this piece, noted that during Bishop’s sole appearance their station, the two argued, never to be paired on-mic again. For the legend of Bishop, that’s not a negative or a surprise, really. It just sounds like something that could/would happen to the man.
For Corrigan, a friend as well as colleague and boss, Bishop was simply of another time, operating in contemporary setting through the prism of a different day and age.
“Ed always reminded me of that movie, Goodnight and Good Luck, where you had to watch the movie through the haze of smoke,” he said. “Ed harkened back to that. Students who were into journalism, who really studied it, picked up the accoutrements of being hard-nosed journalists (including smoking). He was always outside the Journal newspaper office, with five or six students, smoking cigarettes. And they’d be talking about what story they would be breaking.”
Egged on, no doubt, by their dual cheerleader and critic, Smokey.
Thomas Crone, a 17-year adjunct at Webster University, replaced Bishop as staff writer (and sole employee) of the St. Louis Journalism Review in 1990 and occasionally freelanced for the publication through Bishop’s tenure in the later ‘90s.
