Jeff Simon Offers Tribute to “MBL”

(On Sept. 19, Murray B. Light, Editor of The Buffalo News, retired from a 50-year career with the newspaper. The Guild recognizes this momentous event by reprinting excerpts of the speech given by Jeff Simon at Light’s Sept. 13 retirement party. In the 1960s, Light served as the Guild’s unit chairman for The Buffalo News.)

It occurred to me a couple months ago that, except for a handful of people, I’ve known Murray Light longer than anyone else on the current editorial staff. It turns out, after consultation with some other old building alumni, that it’s about two handfuls of people – about 10, give or take a veteran.

So let me be tribal historian here. Here’s a scene from the early life of Murray Light. He’s the assistant news editor to a tempestuous man known to everyone as “The Colonel,” and for good reasons too. This is a prehistoric era so let me set the stage a little.

The corridor that connected the editorial office to the engraving room was immediately met with a bank of very low, overhanging fluorescent lights. Very low hanging fluorescent lights.

Now picture a wooden pointer with an eraser tied to the end. The slotman used such makeshift paperhandling to push pieces of copy to copy editors sitting around the rim. The rim guys used them to push them back when the heads were written. At the end of this one other room, Murray, as was his wont when The Colonel wasn’t around, drifted back into the composing room to watch page one go in, to kibitz and to make life stressful for anyone he could find. He took a pointer with him. As he crashed through the corridor, he yelled “en garde” and started wielding it like some demented combination of Errol Flynn and Mighty Mouse. It immediately took a whole bank of fluorescent lights with it.

Like I said, they hung very, very low.

Two things occurred to me at the time. One, a colorful fellow, that. He isn’t entirely sure what to do with it all, but colorful. Two, it’s best not to get in this guy’s way when he’s wielding something. You could wind up like those lights.

What can I tell you? I’ve worked with him for 35 years and I got in his way once. Big time. I wound up like the lights. Temporarily, anyway.

You shouldn’t presume to talk to this many journalists without having some news. For a lot of you, I have some. As an eccentric but reasonably good citizen of the newsroom, I’ve been an avid observer of its personalities.

I’ve learned a about Murray Light, close-up and in the middle distance.

The trick page deadline story about Murray Light is this: his first reaction to almost everything isn’t a grumble or a scowl or a hand impatiently waved in dismissal; it is, in fact, usually tender-hearted, generous, even indulgent. But then, instantly, the override switch kicks in and he does his impersonation of a blustering Navy admiral during the Korean War.

It’s the admiral that most of you are familiar with. It’s useful to him. It keeps people away -- about the length of a pointer with an eraser tip.

Thank God, there’s another Murray besides the admiral who makes decisions. After being Bull Halsey in front of everyone, he’ll ask around, talk to the wisest advisors and coolest heads he knows and take the time to think things through – all the way through.

When he did all of that, he came out on the side of the angels 95 percent of the time.

So what is the legacy of Murray B. Light, son of Rose and Paul of Brooklyn?

And now the front-page news. His legacy was, in fact, probably the last thing he’d ever want to be remembered for.

I know too that there are people in this room who won’t believe it but the biggest and last thing Murray Light brought to Buffalo, besides survival, was, quite simply, freedom.

You can see it everywhere – when Janice Okun points out that the waiter’s finger is in the Mulligatawney, when Donn Esmonde tells a major politician, or worse, a major advertiser he’s a garden variety racist, when I write about Jorge Luis Borges or say that an anchorwoman acts like a patronizing sixth grade teacher or even when a new reporter in the stall for just a few weeks covers a local sacred cow and reports accurately that it gives sour milk.

You found out how good Murray was – how really good – when you made some trouble and found hordes all around you howling for your head. If your facts were accurate, if your heart was reasonable pure, he was willing to deflect every bit of the heat.

Murray, bless him, knew how to take care of his own. Mind you, he wasn’t always in a hurry for you to get it right – many of you will recognize understatement when you hear it – but I don’t know of a single case of Murray blaming anyone who did.

He was, and many of you won’t believe this, one of the great liberators. Imagine then a wall of pictures: Washington, Simon Bolivar, Abraham Lincoln and our great newsroom emancipator, Murray Light, smirking at the camera with contempt for everyone who has ever enjoyed getting his picture taken.

The thought of his true legacy may now depress him to no end. He not only kept this paper alive when one Buffalo paper had to die, he brought freedom to its newsroom. He’s still doing it. It’s no accident that the woman he named his managing editor – the extraordinary woman who is his successor – is the woman whose local columns he sometimes killed or shoved into a lower corner so small that they could only be read by Schnauzer puppies who were piddling all over them.

When it came time to pass the torch, he was, as usual, on the side of the angels.

What I know for sure about Murray is this:

He wasn’t the tallest man for the job. He wasn’t the wisest or warmest or handsomest or most pedigreed. He was, more often than not, quite simply, the best man for the job he held for 30 years. And this room is full of people who are deeply grateful for that - more perhaps, than some of them even know right now.

Well, I’m someone who knows.

Something else I know is this – no one in this room is ever likely to forget him. We won’t all remember him in the same way but that’s his great legacy – that we would all be free enough to piss him off regularly.

It’s a legacy, Murray, you can be deeply proud of. God knows the rest of us are.