Learning to Listen to the Answers to How and Why and What

A Monday in mid-May, 1976. I walked into the Mobridge Tribune, considered the best weekly in South Dakota, to begin what was at the time considered the best combination scholarship/summer internship South Dakota State University’s journalism program had to offer. I stopped at the reception counter and smiled brightly toward the seemingly ancient woman seated about fifteen feet away who took one glance at me and turned back to her typewriter. Given where she was sitting, I figured she was probably an ad saleswoman, though she certainly didn’t seem friendly.

“Hi!” I chirped. “I’m Melanie Rigney, the summer intern. I’m looking for Jo Hall.” Jo was the Tribune’s news editor and would be my boss for the next twelve weeks.

The woman looked over the top of her glasses at me and gave a sigh and a grimace.

“I’m Jo Hall,” she said, turning back toward her typewriter. “You can sit right across from me.”

And so it began.

Jo was known even then as a fantastic feature and obituary writer in addition to her skill as a news reporter, battling to get into improperly closed City Council meetings and the like. Given that, I’d expected a kind of female Woodward and Bernstein–it was 1976, after all–hard charging, take no prisoners attitude. Or maybe a deceptively sweet and ditsy chatterbox, who drew great quotes and off-the-record insights out of people with her charm.

But that wasn’t Jo. Jo was quiet a lot of the time. She listened. When she did ask questions, they started with “How” or “Why” or “What,” questions people couldn’t answer with “Yes” or “No.”

Earlier this month, the South Dakota Newspaper Association named Jo to its Hall of Fame. She was to be inducted in April. But Jo died on Saturday. I was surprised to read that she would have been ninety this July; that means that when we met, she was just a few months shy of her fifty-fifth birthday… the same age I am now.

I learned a lot that summer in Mobridge. I learned that you can have a lot of fun in a place with fewer than 6,000 people, a place where you had to drive 100 miles to get to a Taco John’s. I learned about rodeos and how amazing it is to peer over the side of a stall where a professional cowboy is wrapping his bullrope around his hand and smell the cowboy and the bull and hear a mix of praying and swearing. I learned about a farmer’s desperate, pleading look to the sky for some rain, even just a little, and about his wife’s look of pride at the way her new hand-pieced quilt turned out.

But mostly, I learned that whether you’re a journalist or a coworker or a friend or acquaintance, people will tell you their secrets if you listen. And if you ask “How” and “Why” and “What.” And if you treat them and their stories with dignity and respect. I learned those things from Jo.