Good morning!
Former Recorder staffer Denny Wilkins is on summer hiatus from St. Bonaventure University in Olean, N.Y., where he’s a tenured professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Two weeks ago, Wilkins returned home to visit family and friends, and we we met for coffee on a Tuesday morning at Green Fields Market.
Denny and I have known each other well since the 1980s when he was The Recorder’s editorial page editor and I worked in sports. He was prone to looking over my shoulder, like the night he saved me from the wrath of the Frontier Regional School basketball boosters.
We were covering the team’s clamorous run to the 1986-87 state championship. The season would climax with Mark Chmura almost single-handedly beating Fairhaven High School in the Division III final.
At the time though, Gary Sanderson headlined him as “Team Enigma’s Problem Child.”
The parents and fans were angry and wanted more ink. The acrimony reached its nadir one night during a timeout. The crowd inside the Frontier gym had settled into a quiet lull when a Frontier fan rose and screamed, “Chip Ainsworth, write better!”
I was stunned; I think everyone was. Back at the office I rewrote part of my column, including an item about the movie “Hoosiers.” It was a box office hit about an Indiana high school basketball team that won the state championship. I wrote that the coach and players endured endless grief from the town’s small-minded parents and fans.
Then added: “It’s a lot like the fans at Frontier.”
In those days the column was pasted on a smoked glass board for copy edits. Wilkins strolled past and stopped to read, then made a beeline to my desk. Jabbing his finger he spoke in his deep bass voice and said, “Think twice or you’ll be in deep s— down there.”
It was hard to admit, but an editor had saved me from the wrath of my own hometown. Using an X-Acto knife I walked over and peeled the item off the page.
Wilkins left The Recorder in 1988 to pursue his master’s degree in environmental studies at The Evergreen State College in Washington, and a doctorate in communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
He had graduated from UMass with a degree in biology and remains intrigued by the study of rocks. After classes ended this spring, he drove to Utah to see the 40-year-old outdoor sculpture created by artist Nancy Holt called the Sun Tunnels.
At first glance the four enormous sections of concrete pipe look like an unfinished construction project, but it’s more. With the help of an astronomer, astrophysicist, surveyor and others, Holt drilled holes on top of the pipes for the sun to beam through and produce “stars” inside the pipes that replicate the constellations.
“Step inside and it’s 20 degrees cooler,” he blogged. “I’ll return for an overnight sleep.”
Wilkins’ passion for the written word began with English teacher Bart Boyden at Deerfield Academy. Years later, he devoted a column to describe Boyden’s penchant for using correct grammar and having a good vocabulary.
A few weeks later, he received an envelope with Boyden’s return address. He opened it and found his column, corrected in red ink from top to bottom. “Fortunately no grade,” laughed Wilkins.
Deerfield headmaster Frank Boyden stressed athletics and every student was required to play a sport. “I was too small for football, too short for basketball and I couldn’t skate. So I went out for cross country and track. I stunk at the pole vault, couldn’t get the steps down for the hurdles and was too slow for the 100-yard dash.
“Don Enoch was there in that trench coat of his and I knew nothing about him.” Enoch was a Deerfield math teacher and WWI vet who’d coached track and won 17 state championships at Newton High School. He was a Penn State grad who’d set the broad jump record at the Penn Relays “for about 10 minutes,” according to his son Mark.
“Notch (as he was called) came over and said, ‘I just told Mo Hunt you’d be a very good quarter-miler, but you’ll need to learn to pace.’
“Larry Boyle pounded pacing into my head. He taught me to take the lead early and run to the outside and ‘float the backstretch’ and pump the arms
“I hated the workouts, but (coach) Mo Hunt made sure I was ready to run harder than anyone in the last 110 yards. Eventually I became good enough to get a track scholarship to Syracuse.”
Wilkins’ track career and Syracuse education ended after he tore his Achilles’ heel. He returned home, enrolled for a year at GCC, transferred and graduated from UMass in 1970.
One morning after a workout at the YMCA, he was headed to Brad’s Place when he decided to take the back path down to The Recorder newsroom. “I walked in and asked (managing editor) Al Oickle for references and walked out a sports writer.
“Go figure,” he laughed. “I lied about being able to type. I bought a typing booklet at Barrett & Baker and stayed up all night practicing on my dad’s Smith-Corona.”
His first job in the outside world paid $92.50 a week and Wilkins loved it. He stayed at The Recorder for 18 years, moving from sports to general assignments to the copy desk before being named the editorial page editor. “Even in that job I spent mornings on the desk, editing local copy.”
The 5-foot-7 Wilkins has close-cropped gray hair, a well-trimmed goatee and peers through wire-rimmed, oval-shaped glasses. Sturdy and fit at age 70, he was quiet and thoughtful until a sly grin portended an amusing anecdote.
“(Publisher) Al Hutchinson and I were always butting heads. One day he walked in and yelled, ‘You want to know what I thought of your editorial?’ He crumpled it up and threw it in the waste basket.”
The editorial had influenced the selectmen to give a thumbs-up to the Greenfield Criterium, a bike race that would wend through downtown. “Thanks to you,” barked Hutchinson, “I had to park four blocks away!”
Wilkins credits long gone and (alas) little remembered Recorder editors and newspaper writers Neil Perry, John Haywood, Bob Dolan and David James with helping to nurture his journalism career, but discovered that to actually teach writing, he’d need to go outside the box.
The revelation came while he was watching the school’s varsity sports teams practice. The word in itself is revealing: practice, practice, practice. Hence, he said, “I don’t teach writing, I coach writing.”
He watched and learned from softball coach Mike Threehouse and women’s basketball coach Jim Crowley (now at Providence).
“They built ‘form’ one skill at a time. Their players would practice a skill repeatedly, then the coaches would add the next skill.
“It’s repetition, practice. The kids in my classes who want to be good writers need to understand that.”
He looked at his watch and saw it was time to leave. “And when they do, they will find that having written well is like a drug.”
And with that we walked down from the mountain top and out the door.
Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning columnist who has penned his observations about sports for four decades in the Pioneer Valley.