Goodbye to a Smart Sweet Man
I just found out that I’ve lost a friend. Bob Paquette, of public radio station WFCR in Amherst died over the weekend of an apparent heart attack. I don’t think I'll ever be able to drive the long road to U Mass again without feeling a twinge in my heart.His was the voice that roused tens of thousands from their beds mornings. He told me once he stopped to give a ride to a hitchhiker on the Mass Poke, only to have the kid immediately say, “Hey I know you! I know your voice! You’re that guy on the radio!”He was that guy on the radio and more. I would tear out to Amherst from Boston, bouncing over those old roads to get to him on time, running up the stairs with my little sheaf of commentaries hugged tight to my chest. He would have just finished “Morning Edition” and would no doubt have much preferred to have a coffee and check his email but no. Instead back we would go into Studio A while I recorded and he corrected my recording as we went. "Take it from the top of that last paragraph" he would say from his spot on the other side of . (My favorite thing was when I'd look up and see his shoulder shaking with laughter at something I funny I had just said in my own best radio voice.) He was so welcoming always, the first news person ever to put me on the air and in the end I had done so many little oral essays for him and a few other Public Radio stations that I made an audio book of them. And before that when I recorded and wrote a How-to-Start- Journaling book, he had me come on the air to talk about it.It's funny: I never go back and listen to any of the pieces from these two books - You know how it is, your own voice just embarrasses you - but how many times have I gone to this link to listen to him making me laugh, helping me see things I never saw before the way he could always do. Take a minute if you can and go first here and then click on where it says 'journaling interview' and on that new page click on either of the two hyperlinks. Do this either to listen in on the two of us talking about what journaling does for a person, or to just hear that voice, the warm incomparable voice of one smart sweet man.
