Paul Colford

From New Jersey comes news that one of my all-time best buddies has left us. Paul Colford died this week. He had Parkinson's disease, and it finally got him. He was a few months older than I am.

Paul and I attended the same high school and college, in Jersey City. That was his hometown; I was commuting in from nearby Newark, and later from the town of Kearny (where they later filmed The Sopranos, hey). Paul started out a year behind me, and I didn't know him all that well in high school, but as my educational career stretched out, we got in sync. He and I spent his whole four college years (the last four of my five) side by side. To say we had a lot in common would be an extreme understatement.

For the first couple of years, we had work-study jobs in the same office at the college, the registrar's office. Our boss was the legendary Robert P. Howard, and a better boss you couldn't ask for. The office felt like family. A big, wacky family. And the dad was a force of nature.

Both Paul and I were studying classical literature, translating old war horses from Latin, and in my case, Greek. We were both writers, and tenacious followers of the news of the day. And the best part, we were both on the campus radio. It was just a closed-circuit cable deal pumped into a few of the campus buildings, but we took it seriously and tried ever so hard to emulate the deejays of the day.

After a while, we came up with a plan to have a show together. It would be different from the others, in that we would try to appeal not only to to the students but also to the faculty and staff. We presented the idea to whoever was running the station at the time, and they agreed. It would be the morning show, every day Monday through Friday. An hour and a half per program. Two days a week it would be me, two days a week it would be Paul, and on Friday morning it would be both of us. This meant squeezing two guys into a small space, sorting out our musical tastes, and working up some banter that somebody would want to listen to. 

Doing that show was an absolute blast, especially the Fridays. We did it for several years, I want to say three or four. It never got old. At least not to us. Rarely have I had that good a time.

Through our shifts behind the counter at the registrar's office, our time in the radio booth, and many hours we spent in the local gin joints (the legal drinking age was 18 in those days), Colford and I became tight partners. It reached that point where you know what the other person is thinking, about 90 percent of the time.

I remember laughing, a lot. Working for Mr. Howard, you couldn't help it. The guy was a nonstop comedy factory. And we both took a bunch of classes from Dr. John C. Benson, a man who generated enormous goodwill through kindness and humor. The tone those gentlemen set was perfect for Paul and me. We howled with laughter on the regular.

We were both writing. School newspaper stuff at first, and then the professional ranks. I got a job at the Jersey Journal halfway through college, and Paul was chomping at the bit to join the trade as soon as he graduated.

But once we had our diplomas, I changed gears. I gave up journalism—temporarily, I thought—while Paul started climbing the ladder in the news biz. Next thing I knew, tax law gobbled me up while he did what we had both originally set out to do.

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Now, I'm probably not going to get the chronology exactly right, but soon after we graduated, Paul's byline started appearing in the New York Times. He was a freelancer, a "stringer," covering news of New Jersey. He moved "down the shore" to Belmar, a summer haunt for all of us North Jersey kids but an all-year home for him for a time. At another early stage, he was a reporter, and then the night editor, at a paper called the Courier-News, which I must confess I have never opened except for clippings that Paul would send me. It was in Somerset County, a place I couldn't show you on a map.

But when you grew up where we did, you spent your days staring at the Manhattan skyline like it was Oz, and the goal of the locals was always to make it in the Apple. Eventually Colford did indeed make it there. A Long Island daily, Newsday, was starting up a New York City edition. They'd need writers on the ground in the Big City. Paul was one of them.

Newsday's experiment lasted a while, but finally it failed, and Colford moved over to the Daily News, which had seen every day what he was capable of producing. He was assigned to cover media, of which New York claimed to be the world capital. There was lots to do and write about. Many celebrities were involved, but you couldn't pick a more level-headed guy to look right through all the hype, unimpressed, and get to what was really happening.

In addition to cranking out the news and reviews, Paul put in the endless solitary months, years even, that it takes to write books. His two best-known were biographies of the radio legends Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. Back to radio! But on the opposite end of the spectrum from our efforts behind the board in college.

Like me, Paul did make it to the real broadcast airwaves. During his Belmar period, he was a fixture on a radio station in some seaside locale. A staff announcer, I think, very professional. I pictured him reading the news and the weather, maybe a surf report now and then.

There was at least one other book project, and it won't make the official obituary. I am the proud owner of this fine 1981 paperback:

After a long stint at the Daily News, the time came for one final career move, and Paul wound up with his last gig, as the spokesperson for the Associated Press. They were, and are, the good guys of 21st Century journalism, and if you're going to be a flack, that's who you want to be doing it for.

Then came retirement, but the writer inside rarely retires fully. And Paul had a demon that needed to be called out and dealt with. Between high school and college, he and a few of his friends had experienced an unspeakable tragedy that would have paralyzed many of us for life. Colford produced a gripping essay that explained the whole thing and reflected on it with the wisdom of an old man. It's here. He and I never talked about it, but when I read that piece, I could just feel weight being lifted off the author, and many others.

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After I moved out west for law school, Paul and I were only in the same room together once. He and his wife Jane had us over for dinner one holiday season in the '80s, when I was back in New Jersey visiting family. They lived in Roselle Park. 

But despite the lack of face-to-face time, we never lost touch. There wasn't much phone conversation. Instead, there were newspaper clippings. There were mixtapes. There were radio "airchecks." And there were letters. Oh, the letters.

It was always a fine moment when one of these showed up at the door in the mailman's hand. You were reminded that there was a guy on the other side of the continent who really knew who you used to be, and also knew pretty well the parts of you that would always be the same.

One of the last pieces of mail I got fom Paul, last year, was a large envelope containing about a dozen letters I had written to him in the late '70s and early '80s. How strange and wonderful it was to read them. It was like the younger me writing to myself now.

And so very Paul Colford to send them. He was a journalist, a historian, a chronicler, a collector, a storyteller. He curated all manner of stuff, and with a purpose: to have the material do some good in the world. Above all, he didn't let a good friendship lapse, no matter how ancient or distant.

When I finished looking through the letters, I wrote back an email message, and that's where our trail ended. But Paul left a lasting mark on me, as I'm sure he did on all sorts of people. His huge Irish family and many friends, including his old radio co-host, will be a lot poorer without him.

UPDATE, 9/4: The AP, taking care of its own, produced a nice obituary, which appeared in many outlets. It can be found here.