Tom
Buffalo News Photo/Bill WippertThis blog started, in part, with the passing of one of my former co-workers at the Buffalo News, Jay Bonfatti. Now another great guy -- and great journalist -- is gone.
Tom Borrelli died this morning. The News' story is at http://www.buffalonews.com/home/story/499559.html. He had been in the news since his fall while covering a high school football game.
Most people outside of the paper might know him as the paper's lacrosse and fantasy sports reporter, but within the paper he was mostly an editor. In the sports department, that meant everything from doing rewrite (handling stories off the phone) to copy editing to assembling and laying out the entire section.
And there was nobody you'd rather be working with than the Ox (as he was tagged) when it came down to getting the job done. Armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of sports (amid a department filled with people fitting that description ... and whose league I was never in), he could whip together a college football roundup off the wire, assemble a scoreboard page, handle some spillover from the high school phone calls -- and keep track of his fantasy baseball team, "the Oxen Train" -- all at the same time.
On top of that, he was the top practical joker and password hacker on the floor. If you received a message from somebody you didn't know too well at the News inviting you for a "piping hot cup of java" or attempting to sell you chocolate toads for their child's junior possum scout troop, you knew where it was really coming from.
As with Jay, Tom's friends were his family. And once you were a friend, you stayed one. ... I guess I'm stunned today, in part, because Ox was such a big character (both physically and figuratively), that I expected him to bounce back, to be sending those kinds of messages from a hospital bed while he wrote fantasy sports columns on a laptop, making his way back to the newsroom.
In my 23 years at The News (including about 10 working a desk away from Tom), I learned that the public's vision of the paper is of the bylined reporters, but the heart of the organization was the inside people who were fixing the reporters' errors, deciding what gets covered and just pounding away to make sure the paper gets out every day.
That heart is crying today.
posted by Mister E at
8:31 AM
2 Comments:
Elmer -- there are numbers referring to photo size early in the html link to the photo. You can just reduce the numbers down a bit to make sure the photo fits the space. Just do a little experimenting.
I put a link to your tribute (and mine) in the Buffalo News blogs. Nicely done.
He was not a good friend, like Jay in August, but Tom was an acquaintance and a real newspaper character. We shared in some fanstasy baseball and football. He worked nights. I worked days. I was in the library and he adjacent in the sports department. Everynight he would steal my chair and every morning I would retreive it. After tiring of this ritual, one evening I used a bike lock to secure my chair to my desk. The next morning, Ox, as we called him, had secured my chair to my desk using his own lock, rendering my chair completely useless. I had to get maintainence to snip the lock he installed. Classic Buffalo News lore. - Andy Bailey
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