With the retirement of Jim Kenyon at the end of October, the Valley News and the Upper Valley have lost one of their most distinctive features. For almost a quarter century, his twice-a-week columns illuminated the complexities and contradictions of life here, in a way that nothing else did or could.
In a sense, his columns held up a mirror in which the Upper Valley could see reflected its compassion and its complacency; its privilege and its poverty; its benevolence and its blind spots; its individual struggles and sometimes its institutional indifference. His most controversial work was both revered and reviled, but rarely disregarded by readers.
But before Jim Kenyon, columnist, there was Jim Kenyon, reporter. He returned to the Upper Valley, where he grew up, and to the Valley News, where he began his career, in 1996 after 10 distinguished years at the Tampa Tribune. The job was a newly created one, the paper’s statewide reporter for Vermont. I was the editor of the paper at that time and blush to remember how little we were able to offer in salary. He probably blushes to remember that he accepted it, but he did.
After several years of covering not only Vermont politics and the Legislature but all sorts of issues and events as they related to the Upper Valley, Kenyon undertook what would become his signature work: a year-long project that chronicled the struggles of four families living on the margins amid the plenty of the Upper Valley. I don’t think it is too much to say that the resulting eight-part series fundamentally altered the way the Upper Valley perceived itself. It proved to be one of the paper’s finest hours during my tenure.
This was not Kenyon’s work alone, as he would be the first to acknowledge. The paper at the time had the editing, photography, design and photo reproduction infrastructure in place to support his efforts, and the advertising and circulation revenue that allowed the newsroom of a small daily paper to devote an entire year of a reporter’s time to a single subject. This is not to mention that without a robust and engaged readership, nothing of the sort would have been conceived of, much less implemented.
I also think that the time he spent reporting and writing this series was the best possible preparation for becoming a columnist. Jim found his calling: to listen to and tell the stories of ordinary people whose struggles are so often overlooked or ignored. And he honed the narrative voice in which to tell those stories in compelling fashion.
The conception of the column was that it would not be an opinion piece appearing on the editorial page, but rather one that would be based on original reporting and would appear in the news pages under his byline. Crucially, Kenyon would be allowed to express a viewpoint consistent with the facts he uncovered. Such columns were fairly common in metropolitan newspapers at the time, in the tradition of a Jimmy Breslin in New York or a Mike Royko in Chicago. But they were, and still are, rare in smaller regional dailies.
What I did not fully anticipate was the degree to which his reporting life up to that time would inhibit his willingness to insert himself and his viewpoint into the work. This may be hard to believe to those familiar with the column as it has appeared over the years, but the reluctance was real and only overcome bit by bit.
In the end, the result, as is now said, exceeded expectations. Besides giving voice to the voiceless, the column also called to account powerful individuals, agencies and institutions that were unused to close scrutiny. Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable is a traditional journalistic mission that sometimes gets lost amid all the other things news organizations are pressed to do, but Kenyon embraced it completely. Not surprisingly, he thus became a lightning rod for much stormy criticism. That’s never easy, but he proved over time that he could take it as well as dish it out. He has a thick hide, and my advice to young reporters is if you don’t, you had better develop one.
Several other traits contributed to making the column what it was. One was Kenyon’s unusual ability to be at ease talking with anyone, whether it was a homeless person, a prison inmate, a recovering addict, a cop or a governor or the head of a prestigious institution. He built trust with his sources in part because he could speak their language, whatever that language was.
Along with that, he got out of the office and went where the story was, in person. He was not afraid to confront people face to face who were trying to evade questions that deserved answers. It’s an uncomfortable but necessary tool of the trade.
Kenyon also burned few if any bridges. Some of his sources ended up being officials with whom he had clashed at one time or another but who came to see the value in what he was doing. These relationships were sometimes personal as well as professional. I recall for instance that Kenyon visited one of them several times when that person was in a lonely place, and near death.
For all that, Kenyon never took himself too seriously, understanding all too well that daily journalism is a perishable commodity.
His influence extended to many of the younger reporters he worked with and with whom he shared hard-won reporting wisdom. One of them was Frances Mize, a Dartmouth graduate now doing graduate work at Oxford, who spent two years as a reporter with the Valley News. She recalls him going through draft after draft of stories with her — “amateur attempts at the real thing” — and learning much from the process. “But,” she adds, “I got just as much, if not more, from Jim’s own writing and how he conducts himself out in the world and the community he has been writing about and for” over so many years.
So he departs, but the work goes on. His heirs may be at the Valley News even now, if not yet apparent. My hope for them is that when they retire, they can truly say, as Jim and I often do, we raised some hell and had some fun, and maybe did a little good along the way.
Jim Fox was the longtime editor of the Valley News. He lives in Hartford.