Death of a colourful newsman
John Myers, editor of The Bomb weekly newspaper, was the last of a vanishing breed of great newspapermen.
Myers, 72, who passed away at the Mount Hope Hospital on Sunday night after collapsing at his Tacarigua home, was the Hollywood stereotype of the hard drinking, hard driving newspaperman.
He was a dedicated, workaholic journalist who probably had equal quantities of black printers’ ink and Old Oak White rum in his bloodstream. He spent 51 years in newspapers and his credo was attention to his craft mixed with wine, women and song.
Myers, the son of English anthropologist Dr John Myers who vanished while doing research in Africa during World War II, grew up in St James in the 1940s and 1950s and was an acquaintance of Nobel laureate Sir Vidia Naipaul whom he remembered watching “B” movies in pit in Rialto Cinema.
He had a better opinion of legendary panman Anthony Williams, leader of the renowned Pan Am North Stars. He considered the modest, innovative Williams as easily the greatest panman ever.
He began his career at the Trinidad Guardian in 1958, training as a sub-editor: he also attended a journalism training course at the Thomson Foundation training facility at Cardiff, Wales.
Myers entered the business in an era of great craftsmen and journalists such as Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Owen Baptiste, J.S. Barker, Courtenay Hitchins, Sidney Espinet, Lennox Raphael, Lenn Chong Sing, Carl Blackman, Compton Delph and others.
Those were days when literacy standards were higher. The Guardian had a giant Crabtree letterpress and type was set not by computers but by huge, noisy, linotype machines which were fed molten lead.
Type was proofread backwards by subeditors and proofreaders!
Myers learnt his craft under these archaic but exacting conditions and rose in the ranks to become editor of the defunct Evening News and afterwards the Sunday Guardian. He retired from this newspaper in 1994 and was invited to edit the less sedate Bomb.
Myers was never a beat reporter but a backroom technician, designing pages, “tasting copy”, writing headlines, specifying type and was an excellent practitioner of the English language.
He was horrified at the damage done to the language nowadays, in the daily newspapers.
A tall, handsome barrel-chested man, he considered himself as God’s gift to women, having numerous romantic liaisons but married twice; his last wife, Ivol, an educator, died of cancer three years ago.
He had five children.
His principal hobby was collecting snakes and keeping large numbers of them at his home, even having them sleep on his bed!
Myers was a decent, generous individual and a loyal friend and growing up in the rough and tumble St James and journalism of the 1950s was always prepared to demonstrate that his bare fists were more powerful than the pen.
However, he never let his colourful lifestyle get in the way of his job and hated to miss work. This was demonstrated when he broke a leg and was on the job every day on crutches.
He will be missed by his colleagues.
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2 Responses to “Death of a colourful newsman”
[...]John Myers’ obituary was published in the TNT Insider on March 10th, [...]
excellent depiction of john, although the salacious reference could have been left out..but i am sure he enojoyed that part, too.