David Osier, journalist and friend
August 6, 2007 at 2:17 pm by John F. Sugg in NewsIn 1968, I returned to the University of Florida after a gig with the Navy. While in the military, I’d become decidedly anti-war, and subsequently helped lead the peace movement at UF. But I also was thinking about how to break into journalism when I graduated. So, I went to the student-run Florida Alligator and told one of the editors that if he didn’t hire me, I was going to bring 200 chanting hippie demonstrators and have a sit-in in the office.
I was joking, sort of, but the editor at first took me seriously. Then he smiled, “Well, that would solve the problem of what to put on the front page tomorrow.”
That editor was David Osier, another veteran (he was Army), which gave us some common ground for dialogue even if, at first, he believed in the war. Ultimately, he came to agree with me on the Vietnam War, but beat me into accepting his position on many other issues.
Dave was my first mentor in this screwed-up profession. He thought I wrote passable opinion columns, and put me in charge of the editorial pages — with the caveat that I dig up a conservative columnist to balance my rants.
We both graduated in 1970. He went to the Palm Beach Post, and I moved to Atlanta to help organize national anti-war marches — and to eat, I worked as assistant sports editor in a two-man sports department at the Marietta Daily Journal. I earned the staggering sum of $115 a week (while paying for my own gas covering high school football all over North Georgia). One day Dave called and told me, “You gotta come down here to the Post. We’re raising hell.” Close to starvation, it sounded good to me.
For a few years after Cox Newspapers acquired the West Palm Beach paper in the late 1960s, the company dumped money into building the publication. Two of the nation’s star editors — Gregory Favre, who would retire as top editor at McClatchy Newspapers, and David Lawrence, who eventually became publisher of the Miami Herald — turned the Post from a sleepy little rag into the hottest paper in Florida. Dave and I reported to John Schaffner, who would later become managing editor at the Atlanta Constitution and who recently retired as editor of the Story, which is owned by Creative Loafing founder Debbie Eason. Small world.
After I worked for the Post for a few years, I went to Europe as a freelancer, returning to Florida to work for the Miami Herald. Dave called me while I was on a special assignment in Columbus, and told me about his latest job at the Atlanta Constitution. That was before the days when the Atlanta newspapers had acquired their current description (along with so many other American newspapers) of “formerly great.” In the late 1970s, the Constitution and Journal, despite common ownership, were fiercely competitive. Competition always makes better newspapers. I followed Dave again, and worked as the news editor at the Constitution — it was a great time with the paper enjoying a tight relationship with Jimmy Carter’s White House. Dave eventually became an assistant managing editor.
Dave — David Rollan Osier, 62 — died Aug. 5 of cancer.
After the Constitution, Osier was publisher and editor of the Georgia Journal, a magazine that explored the history and natural wonders of the state. The last time I talked to him, he was enthusiastic about a book project involving the Okefenokee Swamp, and we planned a trek to Gainesville, Fla., to watch a Gator football game. One of his two daughters, Elizabeth Anne Osier, will complete the Okefenokee book.
The other daughter, Sarah Suzanne Osier, told me today, “We’re learning as word gets out about my father’s death just how many people’s lives he had influenced.”
I’m one of those people. The sad thing is that I was going to call him this week. There’s a reunion of Florida Alligator alums in October in Gainesville. I’d already rehearsed what I was going to tell Dave: “If you don’t agree to go, I’m going to come to your home with 200 chanting hippie demonstrators.”
Dave’s friend and former colleague, Beau Cutts, wrote this about Dave:
The moon offered only dim light across the vast Okefenokee Swamp, and the canoeists paddled quietly, listening to persistent grunts of bullfrogs and the occasional call of a barred owl. Then, David Osier experienced why the Okefenokee is called “land of the trembling earth.”
Voices of fellow canoeists spoke in the darkness, encouraging him to remove his shoes and socks, to roll up his pants and step out onto a small floating island of grass, roots and bushes.
David was trembling with excitement but soon became steady, standing tall there on a wet mass of vegetation — he enjoyed every jittery second. This and other experiences in the swamp caused David to begin a natural history and canoe guide of the Okefenokee.
Friends are invited to a remembrance Tuesday, Aug. 7, 7 p.m., at Manuel’s Tavern.
Rather than flowers, the family has requested donations be made to Hospice Atlanta, 1244 Park Vista Drive, Atlanta, GA 30319. The body will be cremated by the Cremation Society of the South in Marietta.
August 7th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
A great tribute. What amazed me most about it is how little changed in the intervening years, because Osier — as we called him — was my friend and mentor some thirty years later. He had no tolerance for sloppiness, and he believed — and taught — that what we were doing mattered. That it was worth doing well, and doing it casrelessly or lazily or at the behest of a sponsor was something close to a mortal sin.
He would have been a great professor, but he probably reached more students in the newsroom than he ever could have in the classroom. And like a journalistic Johnny Appleseed, there’s no telling how many little orchards he left behind.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:59 am
John: You have written a great tribute to a great journalist. David was the best. Thanks for your good words.Bill Shipp
August 10th, 2007 at 1:04 am
I, too, was provileged to work with Dave Osier (and with you, John) on the staff of The Florida Alligator in the turbulent two years that brought the decade of the 60s to a close. Three words come to mind when I think of Dave’s steady leadership and quest for excellence: one is “aplomb”, which served to anchor the rest of us when the rocking got a little wild. Another is “responsibility”, which defined the sense of what Dave thought needed to characterize everything we offered to our readers. The third is “thoughtfulness”, which he brought to everything he did.
Thank you, John, for sharing with us your memory of this remarkable man.