Resources
Every two months here as CJR went to press, we got get a welcome visit from Evan Jenkins, our consulting editor. He would find an empty desk, chat us up, consider aloud the status of the New York Mets and a world issue or two, and then, over two or three days, read the entire issue on large sheets of paper that he’d festoon with yellow Post-it notes. One Post-it was a simple query; two meant the equivalent of an arched eyebrow; three or more and an editor knew he would soon hear from Evan in person, especially if the Post-it included capital letters. He guarded the reader like a bulldog. He wrote our Language Corner column for our magazine, too, and the last one he put together appears in our January 2008 edition. It’s about attribution, though if you read carefully you will see it is also a nuanced jab against fussiness and pretention in the world of rules about language.
Evan died of cancer on November 30, 2007 in his home, at age seventy-two. At a party in his honor a few days later, his son John spoke of that event and first used the words “passed away” instead of “died,” then stopped and corrected himself, having heard his father’s gentle voice in his head. The party was a nice affair at a bar in Long Island, populated by friends and former colleagues, many from Newsday and The New York Times, the two places he spent most of his career (after the Worcester Telegram and before Racing Times, where he worked as a senior editor before coming to CJR).
Somebody from the Times told a story about Evan standing up to a bigwig foreign editor over attribution standards on a major Vietnam piece, and about how history had proved Evan right. Somebody else told one about how Evan had a drink or two one night in Manhattan and then sang show tunes all the way home—on the Long Island Railroad. The twist is that he had such a lovely singing voice that nobody in the rail car seemed to mind. He loved music and words. Evan also served as writing coach to a few struggling students here at Columbia, and one former student cried at the party as she described how Evan had tossed her a life raft a few years ago. A professor here had told the student that she should consider getting out of journalism. She relayed this to Evan Jenkins, whose response was, “Who the hell is he? Let’s get to work.” She’s a working journalist today.
We intend to keep Evan’s collected Language Corner columns on the Resources page of our Web site, because it’s so clear and useful to anyone who writes or edits. Also, it reminds us of him.
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