TRIBUTE: Finally Saying Goodbye to Bill Winn Nearly Six Months Later

I met Billy Winn in 1982, back in the old Ledger-Enquirer days, when newspapers still smelled like newspapers, and new ink and cheaper newsprint stuck to your fingers when you picked up a copy.

I was threadbare and young enough to believe there would always be another edition, another deadline, another conversation with Jack, or Mary Margaret or Priscilla or even Jeff Davis, or Ed 'what's his face' in the sports section, Dusty, Tim Chitwood - who barely spoke to me but was friendly when he did; Pat, 'The Other Pat', Miss Mary, Josiah, SandraOh, and even Becky at the Bayonet--downstairs in "the dungeon", and even my boss, Sandra Kinney; and last but not least, another outstanding duo of cheerleaders in my corner like Liza or Kaffie or even Claire and sometimes Louise, whom I hated at first-but came to love later after she stopped nitpicking me about 'every lil' ol' thing'.

My Hero? Baxter Omohundro, of course, who left the lights on for me. But when I met Billy ... well he was already "Billy Winn". He do what he do.

Exquisitely smart. Curious. Sometimes wonderfully contrary, and not half as funny as Mick Walsh, who always had something smart and wise@ to say, things like "What's the best view of Columbus?" We'd all just look at him, waiting for the punchline because he always had one. "Out your rear view mirror."

That one got us good, but he never failed to deliver.

But back to Bill Winn, he was a man who stayed in character even with death threats looming over his head for telling the truth. He could reach backward into history, pull something forward that the rest of us had overlooked--defined and well-preserved, and make you wonder why nobody had bothered to tell you about it before Bill did.

Years passed. Life kept lifing. but Billy remained one of those people permanently attached to a time and place in my memory: Columbus, the old L-E when the morning and afternoon papers joined hands and became one in money-crunching matrimonial bliss, old school journalism where you would be fired for daring to print something untrue or unvetted; also, history, questions, stories he never finished about Carlton Gary—and conversations that could wander considerably farther than anyone intended.

[Sideboard: When it came to vetting news, Bax had a banner over his office door: "IF YOUR MOTHER SAYS SHE LOVES YOU, CHECK IT OUT." He wasn't kidding, but I'll never forget the day I made a typo on the Stock Reports and he nearly had a heart attack, running to my desk red-faced and out of breath like he was going to go insane. I was scared I was fired, and he thought he'd lost a fortune, but fortunateLY, I had gotten distracted and touched a wrong key, and it went past the copy editor's desk and nearly got printed. LOL. Godspeed to you, too, Bax.]

Anyway ... Decades later, I'm digging through my own family's local and regional history, and there he was again. Bill (William Waddell) Winn.

His work, "The Triumph of the Ecunnau-Nuxulgee" brought me out of my family research long enough to show up at a book signing.

I told him I remembered him from the L-E and he did the Namaste thing, the sign off for Rest in Peace, Traditional Homegrown News. (Notably, I told Jack, before he passed, that print was going to go away one day, but he always ignored me.)

I ended up at this book signing telling Bill my own family's story as Native Americans, and all he did was listen for 15 minutes and nodded at every word I said. He knew because he had written about the very things I discovered.

It became one of the memories sitting on my research table as I tried to understand the Afro-Asiatic and Native histories beneath the places where both of us had lived, loved, and worked. There is something fitting and comforting about that moment now that I remember it.

The young woman I was when I met Billy could not have known that more than forty years later I would be chasing ancestors through Wewoka OK, Seminole County, Fort Mitchell and Seale, Muskogee/Muscogee counties, Yuchi Hills and the Chattahoochee River as well as the North Canadian—or that something Billy had written back then would be waiting for the older woman I became.

That is one of the gifts writers leave each other. We leave breadcrumbs. We leave unanswered questions for the future to answer, because even if we don't know or are unsure, someone else does.

We leave sentences somebody may not need until thirty years after they are written. And sometimes we simply leave a good memory.

A newsroom, a laugh (quite a few laughs), an argument, an old colleague's writhing face, and the peculiar comfort of remembering that once upon a time, we were there together in that old historic building on the corner of 12th & Front, and they inspired me so much that I never quit writing, and I still do.

Billy closed that conversation with "beautiful complexion, by the way", as if he recognized the worlds and rivers and people that had managed to cross over my soul and meet when they never met one another in the real world, from the Southeastern to the Southwestern side.

"NAMASTE" was a word so thoroughly associated with him in my memory that there really isn't another proper way for me to close this tribute. One word and it was perfectly crafted in space and time.

Divine Light meet Divine Light, and the road before me got long, old and tired, old friend. Yet, you walked your part of it like a champ. I respect that.

Not like some old narcissistic hedonistic creep who dreams of coal and steam engines when the rest of the world is building flying cars and high tech public transportation, but Bill left some futuristic breadcrumbs behind for the rest of us.

Namaste, William Waddell "Billy" Winn.

I honor the light you carried. And I am grateful that, for a little while along the road, your pathway crossed mine.

I couldn't have been more blessed even if I had magically wished for it.

-30-

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