A family, large circle of friends and journalism world as a whole lost a wonderful, wonderful man yesterday when John Curran passed away at his home in Vermont. Here’s a link to an AP story that ran in the Press of Atlantic City that covers all the details.
When I wrote for the Press from 1996-2000, John sat within earshot. He was the AP guy, but had a desk in the newsroom. It was not a competitive issue. John was part of the family.
Among the many memories that I hold dearly of John are these two. One is professional, one is personal, and both speak to the type of man he was.
We were out covering the same story on many occasions, me being on the AC crime beat, and the AC crime beat often offering stories that the AP wanted to pick up. On this particular day, a body was found stuffed under a motel-room bed. A German couple had slept over it unknowingly for, I believe, two days before the odor prompted them to alert the front desk and the maid lifted the bed off its frame and, voila, body.
Crime coverage necessitates a certain numbness. A dark humor. Otherwise — and I think police, fire and medics will attest to this — the horrors of what you see would become unbearable. So of course, we were cracking wise standing across the street. Helmut, vat did you do vith ze sauerkraut? Vhy does eet smell so bad?!
I had balls as a crime reporter. I’d ask a lot of questions in places most wouldn’t. John had bigger balls. As the city and county investigators were still combing the motel for evidence, I acted as a lookout at the stairwell. And John, he went up to the room to see what he could find out. What he found were the sheets from the bed sitting in the hallway waiting to be transported off to county homicide. So what did he do? He smelled the fucking sheets for a detail that neither he nor I (when he described it to me) could use in our stories.
But it had to be done, if only to satisfy a journalistic curiosity.
That taught me to never leave a detail unobserved or, in that case, unsmelled.
He made me a better reporter that day.
Onto the personal recollection: John saw that I was living the sort of lifestyle that any 23-28 year old would live in a shore town with very little responsibilities at home other than making sure you didn’t spend the rent on Jager.
So what did he do? He invited me over to his home to have dinner with his family on a couple occasions. It wasn’t to lecture me about standing up and flying right. He knew better. But he wanted to show me that family life, the one I’d have before long, was not something to fear. It was something to embrace. It was something in which you could be a fun, hard-working, hard-laughing, always-joking man.
It worked. I remember, to this day, vividly, walking down with the kids to the nearby playground, seeing the pride in his eyes about his family, embracing the family guy life for all the wonders that it offered.
When I heard that he died this afternoon, those are the two things I thought of.
I laughed through tears.
That’s exactly how John would have wanted it.