Letter: Imagine the Northwest Herald without Joe Stevenson

When Joe Stevenson walked into the Northwest Herald offices in December 1988 hoping to get a job on the sports staff, his timing – and ours – couldn’t have been better.

Joe and his wife, Beckie, were in town from the Quad Cities, visiting her family in Crystal Lake. He called 459-4040, and I picked up. “Hey,” he said in that hard-to-place/impossible-to-miss drawl. “I sent you a resume and some clips recently. Wondering if you have any openings and if maybe I can stop in and chat while I’m in town?”

The Herald would be launching a Sunday edition a few months later, and the newsroom team would be expanding – including adding a spot to its quartet of sports reporters: Phil English, Sam Natrop, Jeff Vorva, and me.

“Uh, sure,” I said, checking my watch and the long list of to-dos in front of me. “Uh, yeah. Come on over.”

The Joe who won me over that day is the same guy I had dinner with last month, more than 35 (!) years later: Honest, straightforward, caring, eager, cheerful, pleasant, chatty, engaged, brimming with personality and willing to do what it took to get the story done quickly, right, and fairly.

He made the sports section better immediately, and he fit in seamlessly and quickly with our quirky but tight-knit group. In his first week on the job, I took him along as I covered a Johnsburg basketball game, and later we had pizza at the Foxhole in McHenry, and I learned two things: 1) I should have let him cover the game because he would have done it better. 2) Joe loves pizza.

That Joe – who retired this month – has been at the Herald ever since and is leaving a legacy few before him could match, and none after him ever will. That isn’t at all surprising to those of us who knew him then. The unique combination of personality and talent he carried to the NWH, and brought to the job over the years, has never diminished.

He’s been as consistent as clockwork, truly caring about the people he covered, the readers he served, and the employer he appreciated for allowing him to do a job he loved. No story was ever too small for Joe – he found a hook on every assignment, wrote the heck out of it, and marveled about it long after it was a distant memory for the rest of us.

We sometimes too loosely toss words around – words that overstate reality and stretch our sensibilities. I promise I do not use this word in any way but a real one: Joe Stevenson is a legend.

Imagine him not calling us. Imagine me not picking up. Imagine us not having an opening. Imagine the Northwest Herald without Joe Stevenson.

Nope. Me neither.

Chris Juzwik

Former Northwest Herald sports editor

Madison, Wisconsin