taking some time to remember
jim thistle. professor thistle was head of the broadcast dept. at
bu and my adviser during my junior and senior years. He was the first person who really welcomed me in to the program after i had moved back to boston and transferred in to school there. He was also one of the only people in the department who i felt actually got 'it' and more importantly got me (if only just a little bit).
jim's talents as a journalist and his credentials as a leader in the newsroom gave him more than enough credibility as an academic but it was his personality, his swagger that made me want to put aside my youthful arrogance (okay, i know - i'm still arrogant) and try and learn something from someone else. he was smart, sarcastic, confident (maybe even a little bit cocky) and honest - we liked each other immediately. he was still young then but he carried that cool, classic charm of a reporter from some long ago era when the job was as much an art as a science learned in j-school.
even though he held several well deserved titles in academia, jim was a lot more about doing good journalism than he was about teaching it. he understood that only so much could be taught in a classroom, you had to go and learn the rest by being out in the world - that was the only way you'd ever be smart enough to know to really just make up the rules as you went along.
during my last year at school i convinced him to let me pursue a 'directed study' where i would work in a broadcast newsroom part-time in return for some much needed college credits. at the end of the study i was to provide a long write-up of everything i had learned and present it to him in some sort of abstract. when the semester ended, we met in his office and he asked how it had all gone. i answered him in my own smart, sarcastic, confident (little bit cocky) and honest way that i wouldn't have time for a presentations since i had accepted a full-time position as a producer with the station i had been studying at. jim smirked (with pride? can you smirk with pride?) and said, "well i guess that saves us both from wasting a lot of time". we shook hands that day and again at the podium at graduation - there's a photo of us from that day that still forces a smile from me, jim and i in our academic robes, sharing a look that says to me at least, "how did we ever end up here?"
we hadn't spoken in some years but i always thought of him as a friend... jim thistle was one of those people who was simply good at life and he helped make the lives of those who knew him better as well - he is missed
