The Gadfly Mourns Loss Of Mentor, Friend

Ed Montgomery died Tuesday in Norman at age 91. My longtime mentor and friend was an icon in Oklahoma journalism, given the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalist's Lifetime Achievement Award for 2008. I first met Ed in 1961 when I returned from military service and joined The Daily Oklahoman-Oklahoma City Times in its Norman bureau as I attended classes at OU. When I joined the newspapers as a fulltime reporter in 1962, Ed and our friend the late Jack Bickham, and others, took me under their professional wings. By 1963, Ed and Jack and I were playing golf together and commuting together from Norman, where we all lived, to Oklahoma City. Ed and Jack were both launching careers outside their journalistic duties, with Ed writing hilarious stories for The Saturday Evening Post and Argosy and Jack writing the first in a book store full of novels for Doubleday. I left the newspapers and after stints at the Del City News, The Oklahoma Journal, The Tulsa Tribune and The Norman Transcript, reunited with the two of them when, in 1966, Jack hired me as a reporter at The Oklahoma Courier, the Catholic Diocese newspaper, where he had been named editor, and once again, the three of us shared commuter driving duties. In the following years, Ed's reportorial skills became legendary, as did his marvelous penchant for connecting with people; he had that aw-shucks persona that made him an everyman, and those of us who knew him were blessed by his presence. I mourn his passing, but revel in the memory of him. ~ Mike McCarville

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