On the Sunday before Memorial Day, the St. Petersburg Times ran “A Story for Jake.” As it turns out, the story, an epic of heroism and heartbreak, is really for all of us. It’s for those of us who have lost someone to the war in Iraq, those of us who know someone still fighting there and even those of us who are simply trying to understand how terribly close that faraway place really is.
It’s a Memorial Day story that truly memorializes, telling the heart-rending story of one man, his wife and their infant child, Jake.
Set aside a few minutes to read it. Once you start it, you’ll want to finish it. And it isn’t short — about 8,250 words.
It was written by Times sports columnist John Romano. He answered a few of our questions by e-mail the other day. Here are his responses.
(Have a question you don’t see here? We’ve asked Romano to field your questions from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday — we’ll post the answers here live. Click here to submit a question.)
How did you find out about this story, and how did you know it was one worth writing?
I was the University of Florida beat writer for the Times in the early to mid-1990s when Michelle Thresher was a [University of Florida] undergrad. She was working at the school newspaper and, for about 18 months, was my correspondent in Gainesville.
I literally had not heard from her in more than 10 years when I got an e-mail in October while I was at the World Series. In about three paragraphs, she explained the entire story and finished by saying: “I really want Dave’s story told.”
I contacted my bosses, and they were very high on the idea. They had been looking for a story that, amidst all the political rhetoric, could personalize the war.
I sent Michelle a couple of e-mails and waited to hear back. It took some time (she was in North Carolina for Dave’s funeral) but she finally responded. And she apologized. She said she no longer felt strong enough to sit down and talk about this story.
Obviously, I was not going to press her at such a painful time in her life. So we kept corresponding casually for a couple of months until she was ready to talk.
How long did you spend on this project?
Off and on for nearly four months. My editors were great about not pushing me to get it finished by a certain date. I still had my normal duties (in between reporting the story I was still doing three columns a week and did a ton of traveling for various sporting events) but AME/Sports Jack Sheppard allowed me to skip several columns whenever conflicts came up, and he gave me a week off in April to do the bulk of the writing.
What surprised you about the project?
Mostly the richness in detail you can bring to a story when given the time to do it right. I did a ton of interviews on the phone and got e-mail addresses from everyone I talked to. That way, when I interviewed Person X and learned something new, I could go back to Person Y and ask them about what I had just learned. It’s not a luxury you often get when working a beat or writing three or four columns a week.
I’m also continually amazed that anyone was able to do this job before the Internet. Just by continually sticking my nose into various parts of cyberspace, I was able to find wonderful sources. On Legacy.com, I found Cpl. Brian Taylor who was the driver of the Humvee when Dave was killed. I sent a blind e-mail to the site, and he responded a few days later with his cell phone number.
Someone posted a copy of the eulogy Dave’s brother had delivered at the funeral. Although I had already interviewed him and we had talked about the eulogy, he had not told me about the wonderful closing quote about Jesus Christ and the American GI as the only people who have offered to die for us.
What did you find most challenging?
Figuring out what the story was about. And I don’t mean that facetiously. I had done so many interviews (including at least five with Michelle) that I was overloaded with information. I wasn’t sure if it was a love story, a war story, a story of regret, a story of honor. I wasn’t sure if it should be written from Michelle’s point of view, or Dave’s or Jake’s. I wasn’t sure if I should have a parallel construction between the liberal (Michelle) and conservative (Dave) views of the war. I wasn’t sure of anything.
Two things really helped. No. 1, metro editor Pat Farnan, who worked with me from beginning to end, made me write an outline and suggested the story be told as a narrative. Both ideas helped me focus on how it should be written. No. 2, I gave the outline to cohort Gary Shelton and asked what he thought. He sent me an e-mail that eloquently expressed the story’s real meaning. I showed the e-mail to my wife and she said Gary summed the story up in three minutes better than I had in three weeks.
What did you learn from working on the project?
Again, two things. No. 1, I once watched an interview with filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and he said he learned that you have to be prepared to cut your favorite scene from a movie if it didn’t work. The same is true for a story.
There were two scenes that I thought would play big roles in the finished product. Early in Michelle and Dave’s courtship there was a moment where she was coming to his base at Fort Benning to take part in an anti-war protest, and he was horrified at the idea. He eventually talked her out of it. That scene was one of the last things to get cut.
There was also an anecdote that, at one point, the entire lead was built around. When Dave was returning to Iraq, Michelle dropped him off at the airport without Jake. His flight was delayed and he called her and asked if she would come back and have lunch with him.
This time she brought Jake with her. So they sat in a parking lot at [Tampa International Airport] and ate Cuban sandwiches while Jake slept in the backseat. They had no idea this would be the last hour they would ever spend together (even writing it now, I’m getting pissed that I didn’t get this in the story). The problem is, with the way the story was constructed as a narrative, the reader did not understand the importance of this final hour so early in the story. It was decided it slowed the narrative down too much and was edited out. And it still pains me.
No. 2, I learned how wonderful it is to work with good people. As I said before, Farnan and Shelton were instrumental in helping me through. Sheppard also did an early read and found a section where I veered from storyteller to columnist and suggested the tone was off. Executive editor Neil Brown had one request — to hear more of Dave’s own words. And he was right, Dave’s journals and e-mails were what made the story unique and so I went back and found a few more places to fit those passages in. Designer Amy Hollyfield helped with suggestions and photographer Melissa Lyttle would call me to tell me things she had learned while spending time with Michelle. I sound like Robert DeNiro playing Capone in the Untouchables. “What makes baseball great? The team. Teamwork.”
How did you (and your editors) decide to run it so long?
Are you saying it was too long? I’m joking, but I’m also curious. Looking back, I would not cut a line, but I also worry that it was too long. I’m afraid I lost a lot of readers just because they were turned off by the length of the story. (Just as I’m doing with this interview.)
For the longest time, we were thinking it would be a two-day project, running the Sunday-Monday of Memorial Day. But the way I wrote it, bouncing between Oct. 22 and the backstory, made it very difficult to cut in half. If I wanted to run it as a wraparound on a single day, I would have had to cut about 25 percent. I didn’t like that idea. If I wanted all 225 inches to run, it would have to publish over two days. I didn’t like that idea, either. God bless Patty Cox. The deputy managing editor for presentation suggested in a meeting what I was afraid to ask for — that it run as a six-page special section.
I’m not sure how many newspapers would print 500,000 copies of a special section with zero advertising, but I’m glad I work for one.
What has the response (from readers, colleagues and subjects) been like?
Can I skip this question? I can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t come out sounding self-congratulatory.
The only other thing I’d say, and I mean this with all sincerity, is that I got very lucky. I got lucky Michelle was willing to open up her heart to me. I got lucky Dave was such a unique individual and his own words in the journal were so poignant. I got lucky all of Dave’s friends and family were so willing to talk about him. I even got lucky that President Bush chose this family to meet with, because it gave the story a perfect finish.
In the end, this story belongs to Michelle and Dave. If it works on any level, it is because they were such a remarkable, and likable, couple.
