2015 Christmas Letter

Friends and family,
Yes ... the letter at Christmas carries on. Kind of.
Taking a cue from the McClatchy Corporation, which just shuttered the Enquirer-Herald of York/Clover, not because it wasn't making money but because it wasn't making enough, we have decided to go with the times and shutter the print version of our Christmas letter.
The current market forces are such that print has an ever-decreasing shelf life, and we are nothing if not hip and up with the latest trends. So we are introducing our first "Digital-only" Christmas letter.

The Guilfoyles of Fort Mill frankly are looking forward to the end of 2015. It has been a year of ups and downs, but the downs, while outnumbered by ups, have been low, low downs.
On the downside, I am still missing my Dad. Particularly around the holidays, or any week with a “day” in it. He was the bright center of the Guilfoyle family, always one with a joke.
And we are still missing my best furry friend. Harry, my first dog, who died a couple of months after Dad. Annie, our other dog, had become the most surprising gentle girl. She was hyper-competitive with Harry, it turns out, but now she just wants to be around us.
But now Annie is not with us any more.
She was a remarkable dog. She survived eating a whole bar of dark chocolate and getting her stomach pumped one New Year's Eve. She had her side slashed open one time when we visited Spartanburg, though we have no idea on what she caught her skin.
She slowed down a bit after being viciously attacked and bitten by another dog last year. She suffered about eight nasty bites. It was scary, but she has recovered.
But she came down, very suddenly, with a cancer that cost her her appetite at times and made it hard for her to even sleep. We said goodbye right after Thanksgiving.
I remain a copy editor and page designer working in Hickory, N.C., designing newspaper pages (sports right now) since October of 2010.  I am primarily working on the Dothan Eagle.
The people I work with are terrific, but it’s a LONG commute with terrible  hours. My car now has more than 280,000 miles, so that's 30,000 plus since last year.
Patricia remains ensconced in the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C., where she is editor of the Catholic News Herald.
She put together a project for us to work together on, and we went on pilgrimage to Philadelphia when Pope Francis visited the United States in Septmber. We had a really good time but were exhausted after. The days were filled with pilgrimage stuff and covering the pilgrims, but when they came back to the hotel at night to rest up for the next day, we had to post our videos and file our stories.
Patricia said she liked watching me interact with people. It's a side she doesn't get to see often. I just like watching her be her organized self.
It has been a good year for our son, Stephen Christopher. He is now 9 and a third-grader.
We are still with Pack 9 at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
There's a new program for all Cub Scouts and we are a little behind where we were a year ago. We are working on a new Pinewood Derby car with help from Uncle Johnny.
I am Pack 9’s assistant cubmaster, God help the children, and still the interim Tiger Den leader.
Stephen has also taken up Tae Kwan Do. He is already a Green Belt. He got a year's lessons as a present from his Aunt Caca. Thanks, sis.
We know we haven’t been around as much as we could. We are doing well, but our life is just non-stop hectic most days, so that when we get some free time together, we just generally want to do something quick and easy and together. But never doubt our affection.
Have a merry Christmas.
(Email is still the best way to reach me. I check it every day.)
“We love you anyway.”

Stephen, Patricia, Stephen Christopher
sguilfoyle@comporium.net

Dec. 24, 2014

#MissingBud

#MissingHarry

#MissingAnnie

My Philly pilgrimage to the pope, with my wife

Here's the first article I wrote on the trip.

Families embark on pilgrimage to Philadelphia, hope to see Pope Francis

Here's another preview article.

Merry seeks Pope Francis, and St. Katharine Drexel, in Philly

This is where you can find all our reporting while on the trip.

Faith, family and Mission: Pilgrimage to Philly

 http://www.phillyandfrancis.tumblr.com/

This is the article at the end, co-written with my lovely bride.

Family, Faith & Mission: Pilgrims journey to Philadelphia to experience Pope Francis

A good trip.

10 years later: Remembering a brassy, bawdy bud

Published originally in The News & Reporter, Dec. 2 , 2005

I once boasted I never suffered writer's block.

I was young then, and I know the truth now.

Sometimes the words don't come.

Words define reality and allow it to be shared by others who don't experience it. So if you write down some real thing you lived but tried to block out, you can't hide from it. You think to share it, hoping to ease your pain, but you also know, when it is there, printed in ink, in your own words, you won't be able to hide from it anymore.

It's been almost a month since I heard, and on this topic, the words just wouldn't come.

A few months back, I wrote about my first real boss in this business, Mardy Jackson, as part of a column boasting about how wonderful a profession journalism is.

Mardy Jackson gave me my first reporting job. She took a chance hiring me, because my freelance work at the time meant I was struggling, not having gotten a full-time gig at a "real" paper.

Through me, she showed the people who ran that newspaper company the truth of an aphorism much quoted but not always followed -- "Take care of the news, and the ads will take care of themselves."

She hired me to be a professional writer for her, to take care of the news.

As I got better at doing that for her, the ads started taking care of themselves.

She was always, always, always trying to teach me. She'd teach me with a tale of her hard life, a brutal job evaluation, a lede paragraph so slashed up it looked like Freddy Krueger got to it, or even a dirty joke.

When I first got on board the paper in Cheraw, she was involved in a debate with others in the company. She was publisher of the paper, but she didn't join the Rotary Club or the Chamber of Commerce board. She felt it would be a conflict. If she heard something one of those civic groups didn't want out yet, she would, hypothetically, be torn between her oath to the group and her duty to the readers.

But she was all about her readers, first and always, so she would never really have been torn. Instead of being a hypocrite, instead of pledging to work with a group that might ask her to keep a secret she knew she wouldn't, shouldn't keep, she didn't join.

She'd heard all the "get involved in the community" arguments from the people in such groups. Some, she knew, sincerely believed their groups were the best things for the community, and she respectfully disagreed, for herself.

She also knew others wanted to co-opt her, to join the groups as a way to muzzle her. She was on to them from the get-go.

She told those leaders, told others in our company and told me, privately, that you don't need to get involved in those groups to be involved.

Like me, she was raised a Catholic and knew all about guilt. But she wouldn't let anyone make her feel guilty because she wasn't involved the way they expected her to be involved.

She taught me that working for a paper, one that brings real news, is the ultimate community involvement. It is perhaps the best way to improve your community.

You hold up a mirror to your community, let it see itself for what it is. If there is a blemish here, the community can fix it. If there's a bright spot here, the paper can shine a light on it for others outside to see. The good and the bad, both are in a community newspaper.

Mardy had resigned before I moved from Cheraw to Barnwell. But we stayed in touch and I got to apply her teachings.

In Barnwell, I was challenged by several to "get involved" in civic groups or serve on this or that board. One mean little fellow tried to trip me up as those others had tried to trip up Mardy.

Get involved, he said. What he meant was don't ask critical questions until you get involved the way he defined involvement. Don't fret being asked to keep a secret from your reader if necessary, he said.

My answer was at the ready because of Mardy.

I told him I couldn't serve because I would be asked to keep secrets from my readers. That, I told him, would break the promise I made — I don't keep secrets from my readers.

He didn't get it. I went further, and said if he was a real community leader, he ought to make the same promise. Don't keep secrets from your constituents.

He didn't like that, but Mardy would have roared with laughter, loving it

She taught me another lesson recently, a hard one for me to take.

She quit the Cheraw paper years ago, but she didn't move away. She wrote a novel or two, tried to get them published, freelanced here and there, farmed, did some records checking and private investigations.

She lived a pretty interesting life from a place where those afraid of the truth had called her an outsider just because she had refused to join "those" groups as publisher of the paper.

She was involved in her community in the way she chose. As publisher, she did it by providing information. After journalism, she was as involved as ever.

When the need arose, she took a leading role.

At some point in the last couple of years, some nameless bureaucrat made a decision to move a line on a map. Suddenly, Mardy didn't live in a fire district anymore.

We'd both written about rural fire protection, and she knew the dangers immediately. Even if she never had a fire in her little trailer, she knew her insurance was going to skyrocket.

The problem didn't just affect her. It changed things for a whole bunch of her neighbors, so she helped those neighbors organize and take action. She wrote grants that helped them form a new volunteer fire department, buying land, building a station and most importantly, paying for a new fire truck.

They had a barbecue a few weeks back at the department. They put her name on the truck.

The barbecue was held in her memory. Early in the summer, she was diagnosed with cancer. Before I heard, I noticed she wasn't responding to the infrequent but regular e-mails I sent her.

I later learned she was having such a hard time of it she stopped seeing all but her immediate family.

A few weeks back, I went to Cheraw to do a job for a newspaper group, but didn't take the time to see her. She died a few days after my trip.

I had no idea it was as bad as that.

I am perplexed by many things in her passing. She was a health nut who never smoked, yet somehow got lung cancer that killed her just a few months after her diagnosis. She was just in her 50s. It's unfathomable.

Perplexed by those facts, I am sure of others.

She gave me a chance when no one else would. I thanked her many times for that chance, but never enough.

I am also sure that she has taught me that final lesson, again one about community involvement.

She's now shown me that, if I ever decide to give this profession up, I can still be involved. You don't have to be in the steady group, or even at a newspaper, to make a difference, Mardy's final involvement, helping create a fire department, is going to save people's lives.

I am proud of being a journalist and being involved in a community by informing it. I truly can't imagine not working at a newspaper.

But when I remember that it took me almost a month to write about Mardy Jackson, my mentor, my friend, my bawdy, brassy Madonna of information, I see that maybe, someday, I might have to leave the profession.

Because sometimes, the words don't come.

"That flag" and this shooting

Make no mistake about it. I believe that the Confederate battle jack flying at the State House does not belong where it is and needs to come down.

But for the response to the shooting of nine people in an historic Charleston, S.C., church, the Mother Emanuel AME Church, to so quickly and heavily become a call for the flag's removal by many just seems shocking to me.

Again, it needs to come down, sooner rather than later.

But it is such a distraction for these calls to come less than 24 hours after the deaths of the church, much of its leadership, which includes its senior pastor, a S.C. state senator.

Those who defend the flag say it is a symbol of their heritage. Some even say it is a symbol of our joined heritage. Nonsense.

Even if we grant that it is a symbol of the shared history of South Carolina and all South Carolinians, why just THAT flag? Why just THAT period of our our history?

South Carolina had more military engagements during the Revolutionary War than any other state, perhaps more than all the other states combined. The defeat of the British that ended the war was of a general who had been kicked out of South Carolina by assorted small-time skirmishes and a few key battles.

Why doesn't the "heritage" crowd fly any flag of that period of our past? Why isn't a "Don't Tread ON Me" flag flying at the State House?

The heritage crowd that is such a force in South Carolina politics makes a deliberate choice, all the time, to "honor" and remember that struggle and that period of time, when South Carolina separated from the United States of America, became it's own nation again, briefly, and joined the Confederate States of America, all in an effort to preserve its institution of slavery.

It wasn't about states' rights. It was about the state of South Carolina's right to continue owning slaves. Just read the South Carolina Declaration of Secession. It is vile, and the words slaves and slavery are used repeatedly in all of its arguments.

Again, I believe the flag should come down. I am from the North originally, and ALL my people were in Ireland being repressed by the English at the time of the Civil War, so it's not my heritage.

But the shooting in Charleston, I think, makes a more compelling argument for the flag staying right where it is.

Because it is a symbol, but we really do not realize what it symbollizes.

I think most good, honest, God-fearing South Carolinians do not support it and are horrified by the shootings. Almost all would say they could never condone such a thing, nor excuse it, nor try to say it was something it wasn't. I think they do not support the flag, or do not care one way or another about it.

But the flag should be there, a symbol, and a warning, that this kind of evil exists. Evil is here, and is among us.

Leave it up, as a warning.

The flag, not just what it symbolizes, but what is actually is, is some words.

"Through me is the way into the woeful city; through me is the way into eternal woe; through me is the way among the lost people," as the words on the Gate of Hell in Dante's Inferno say, so says the Confederate flag.

Now is the time to learn about and mourn the dead, slaughtered like lambs in an act of evil.

We need to learn a little about this thing that committed the act. He wasn't born wanting to do this.

We live either in a society that teaches it, or he had some instructors in his hate.

We need to put him behind bars and hope he never sees the light of day again. I think his life should be forfeit, certainly, but in a long time.

It should be long, because I think that we should find a way to come together as a people, to be one, and to not only deny him the race war he sought, but show that he did what he did for nothing nothing that he wanted.

But that will take time, I am sure. So I think the calls for the removal of the flag should be put on hold, at least for a while.

Because that flag, while it flies, says more succinctly than anything else, one simple fact.

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

ADDENDUM: I had yesterday read a column in The State newspaper about "what we can learn from the shooting" in terms of the relations amongst S.C. legislators. The suspect had barely been identified at the time and not yet arrested, and I thought, man, we already have lessons learned? The writer made a good point or two, but I thought it was just too early.
And I might come across as a bit hypocritical with my post here, except part of my point is that it is not yet a day after this tragedy, but we are already turning their deaths into a call to remove a piece of cloth.
So my post comes from the same place as my objection to that column.
Another addition, I might say that I should have known Sen. Clementa Pinckney better. I knew of him. But I never met him. He was the state representative for Allendale County when I was the editor of the late Allendale County Citizen Leader newspaper. And he was elected to the Senate while I was still in Barnwell/Allendale. We just never crossed paths.
My great former reporter Chrissy Edgemon got to know him at the paper then at Allendale County ALIVE and USC-Salkehatchie. She attests to his character and that's all I need to know.
We've lost a good man.
As for the other eight, what I know is they died in church, praying and learning about their faith.
I don't think they were targeted for their faith, but dying in the act of their faith makes them martyrs.
"Truly, this day (they) shall be with me in Paradise."

S.C. Press Association awards, 2014

I won some design awards in the 2014 S.C. Press Association contest for designs done for the Morning News of Florence, S.C.
First off, I won this award for best single sports page. I had a great photo from Florence Assistant Sports Editor Mark Haselden, and he let me play around with it a bit.

(Click on all pictures for a bigger version.)

Also in the category of Best Single Sports Page, I also got a third place in that category, for this design:

Lastly, I placed second in best Sports Design Portfolio. The portfolio included the "Evrik the Great" page above, and these two designs.

Karen Hatton, a designer who works with me in the Consolidated Editing Center in Hickory, N.C., also received two awards.

Sam Bundy, the sports editor in Florence, got a first-place award for some stories he wrote on new basketball league, and one team kind of falling out of it over the course of a few weeks. Neat stuff. I remember working most of those stories onto pages, but because it was happening so fast, nothing really compelling presented itself visually for me to work with.

From my extended journalist family, my old college buddy Hal Millard got an award or two.

The Fort Mill Times won the Public Service award with a host of others. My wife, the former publisher of the Times, thinks the Public Service award is the best thing a paper can get.

And The News & Reporter in Chester brought home a whole stack of awards again, including a first place writing award for Nancy Parsons.

I have been at the Hickory CEC since October, 2010, so four full years and some change. I have been entered in three contests in those years, and won each time, with a first place in each of those years, and two first places two years ago.

In my career, which really got kick started in 1994, I have received many other awards, including design, writing, photography, graphic design and in 2006, non-daily journalist of the year.
The papers for which I worked have received multiple awards as well, including public service, general excellence and multiple citations for protecting Freedom of Information.