MORGANTOWN — Heck yeah, I’ll talk to them, John Samsell told that sheriff’s deputy back in 1966.
“You might be interested,” the deputy said.
Samsell, the longtime editor and columnist at The Dominion Post died this weekend at the age of 84.
He had just started work as the editor at the Point Pleasant Register, the newspaper of record in the Mason County river town that would come to be defined by real-world tragedy with out-of-this-world implications.
After interviewing the young husband and wife, he came away with the first story ever about Mothman, the extra-terrestrial visitor (assumed) that UFO-watchers say may have foretold the catastrophic collapse of the town’s Silver Bridge a year later.
The large, winged creature with the glowing red eyes was first recorded as “a big bird” in the Register — “Because that’s what the man and wife who told me it was,” Samsell recalled in 2002.
Giving a respectful listen, then getting it down accurately, were Samsell’s hallmarks as a journalist, his friends and colleagues said, after learning of his passing.
Samsell grew up delivering copies the Dominion-News, an earlier incarnation of this newspaper.
As a high-schooler in the 1950s, he started work at the paper on football Friday nights.
Journalism school at WVU and a stint in the U.S. Navy followed.
A chance to return to the newsroom of his hometown paper came in 1973.
He and his wife, Perry Ann, raised their two kids here, as he put in close to 30 years at The Dominion Post.
That was when newspapering was a contact sport, with typewriters running like pistons: A rat-ta-tat-tat of clacks against the paper and the ding! of the carriage. A dirty look from the mayor or police chief, the following morning.
If your meeting went long, the unflappable Samsell would be waiting.
You would craft your story one paragraph at time, and Samsell would unroll it from the carriage the same way, so it could go to the typesetter.
Samsell was unabashedly nostalgic in the columns he would write for this newspaper.
Mallo cups. Your first car. Dick Tracy in the Comics section. WVU football games at Old Mountaineer Field.
Retired columnist Norm Julian was always amazed at his friend’s versatility and good humor, no matter how tense things got at deadline time.
“John’s example of doing made us all better,” Julian said.
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