Merv Aubespin: Keeping the faith

Related Story
Uncle Merv: You can do it

By Pam Platt
Public Editor
The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Ky.

Published Aug. 11, 2002

Merv Aubespin would be the first to say that the stories we tell as journalists are not supposed to be about ourselves. But this story will be.

After a 34-year run, which included stints as an artist, a reporter, an editor and a one-of-a-kind mentor, Merv has retired from The Courier-Journal.

We at the newspaper know that because he has cleared out of his fourth-floor office, the one that was stuffed with all manner of books, African art and cherished photographs.

You, the reader, also might know that because you no longer see his name and title (Mervin R. Aubespin, associate editor) on the masthead, which lists the leading editorial and news executives.

But his departure is about more than a cleared office and a vacated masthead position. It is about history and legacy and the indelible mark that one person can make.

If it is true that no one is indispensable, it is also true that some people are irreplaceable. Merv is one of those folks, and here's why:

In his most American of lives, he has known what it means to scrape by on next to nothing and he has known what it is like to walk among kings, or the next thing to kings. He views the lows and the highs with equanimity.

He sprang from a Cajun-Creole land rich in arcane cultures and cuisines. Opelousas, La., is where he learned to love hot sauce, home-cooking and story-telling. It is also where Merv first learned lifelong truths about reaching out and giving back, truths that have informed his adult and professional lives.

His father left the family home when Merv was just eight. So he made up "imaginary fathers," the kind and thoughtful daddies of friends who took him fishing, too; the blood uncles who were generous with time and attention; the family friends; the chance acquaintances who became mentors and role models.

And so it was that when he got to a place in life when he could do the same, Merv did that. Such has been his reach and influence among young journalists that across the country he is known as "Uncle Merv." Indeed, when he was honored this spring by the American Copy Editors Society, a group he helped found, several of those paying tribute were high-profile journalists at high-profile publications who had found a friend, sounding board and spring board in Uncle Merv earlier in their careers.

When Merv was 15 years old -- and already a high school graduate -- he went to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama to study industrial arts. The thought was that he would take that schooling and become a teacher at his stepfather's trade school in Louisville. So it was in Alabama that Merv's life changed again.

There are themes that thread through his life like sinew, and many of them took hold at the renowned college for blacks that was founded by Booker T. Washington.

Opportunity. Inclusiveness. Exploration. Horizons. Keeping the faith.

His teachers at Tuskegee were African-American, so were the supervisors, and the deans of the school. He learned of Socrates and Plato along with the words and works of Washington and Carver.

But there was more, and that, too, made all the difference.

On weekends, Merv and a roommate drove to Montgomery, just 30 miles from Tuskegee. The roommate's aunt, with whom they stayed, finally told the young men that all they did was waste time (actually, they liked to meet girls). Come to my church, she said. We're having a rally, and I want you to meet my new pastor.

The church was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The pastor was Martin Luther King Jr. And the rally was about organizing a bus boycott. Merv and his roommate were gathered into the fold. The roommate and his car were used to drive folks to their jobs. Merv was given a clipboard and assigned to arrange schedules of pick-ups and drop-offs. "I was just a little foot-soldier (in the movement)," he said.

That is the image of Merv that sticks with me: The foot-soldier with a clipboard.

He has headed organizations such as the National Association of Black Journalists. And he has traveled to Africa and met with people such as Nelson Mandela. But he is at heart the person who works the ground, advances the troops, strategizes on how to get to the next hill.

Through work, through thought, through example, that is what he has done in advancing the cause of diversity with the American Society of Newspaper Editors, in organizing a chorus of the unsung (helping copy editors, the true unsung heroes and heroines of journalism, help themselves), of pushing for better and truer journalism by expanding the stable of potential journalists.

After the Army, where he taught himself to be an artist in the cold months of his off-duty time, and after teaching school, where one of his students was a guy named Cassius Clay, and after reading newspaper stories that didn't reflect the world he lived in, Merv came to The Courier-Journal. There was an opening in the art department. He said he proposed a two-week tryout and was hired the second day he was here. In 1967, he said, he was a fly in a bowl of milk.

Because of him, that would change.

Being a journalist meant he couldn't participate in his civil rights marches, protests and sit-ins anymore. But he was able to take those experiences and utilize his contacts to help the newspaper present a more accurate account of what was happening in Louisville's communities. He made the transition from artist to reporter in 1968, when racial tensions boiled over into a riot and he phoned in reports for two days.

It is not easy to be a pioneer and Merv felt the weight of being the pebble in the shoe, the clapper in the bell, the fly in the bowl of milk. But perseverance and pluck saw him through trying times. Along the trail he blazed, he honed what he calls "survival techniques" that he passed on to people of other colors, cultures, creeds and gender who wanted to find a place in mostly white, mostly male newsrooms. Inch by inch, byline by byline, masthead by masthead, things started to change. But the fight is never done.

The author Gore Vidal has said that we live in the United States of Amnesia, that we do not remember who we are, where we've been and what we've come through.

Merv never fell into that trap. The best of his work in print serves as a reminder of brilliance and darkness in our past.

In a story about the legacy of Louisville's Walnut Street, he wrote, "It's 5 p.m. on a brisk Friday in October, and the street is alive. Workers headed for home pause to chat outside the Mammoth Life Insurance Building. Nat 'King' Cole will be here in a few weeks, says the marquee of the Lyric Theater. Down the street, the voice of Jackie Wilson singing 'Lonely Teardrops' drifts through the doorway of Davis' Record Shop. And still farther down -- past Cricket the shoeshine man and the Kool Breeze Ice Cream Shop and the Liberty Cab Co. -- is Ralph's, where youngsters press their noses to greasy windows to see platters of 'the best fried fish in town. This is Walnut Street in the 1950s -- before urban renewal, before integration. . . ."

In a story about visiting the House of the Slaves on Africa's Goree Island, he wrote, "I entered one of the dark, damp cells and sat alone on the stone floor for minutes that seemed like hours. And then it happened.

". . . Inside my head, I heard the screams, I heard the moaning, the cries of frightened little children snatched from their mother's arms. I heard the voices, the crack of the leather whips.

"I closed my eyes and ran my hands along the damp, flaking walls of the cell; the walls told me their secrets -- of the time my forefathers huddled, terrified, in this unholy place.

"I could feel the heat of the branding irons and smell the burning flesh.

"Stepping outside the cell, I looked down the long corridor that passes beneath the breeze-filled quarters of the slave traders upstairs. At the end of the corridor, I saw the door that opens to the sea and, at another time, to the ships waiting for their human cargo. A sign above said, 'The Doorway of No Return.' "

Merv honors the past, but he is all about the future. And so the best of Merv's work, period, has been about doorways, forcing them open when need be, and keeping them open to all who wish and work to enter them.

Fittingly enough, the door at The C-J stays open to him.

In retirement, Merv Aubespin will be a consultant to the newspaper, and he and his wife, Deborah, will stay in Louisville.

We will not see him every day as we once did. But like a riff from the jazz he loves, he'll pop in from time to time to remind us of the logic and loveliness that fullness of life, and fullness of the stories that reflect it, can bring.

© 2002 The Courier-Journal