Norm Julian and Al Anderson would have been great in a buddy movie.
Heck, the visuals alone would have gotten it.
There was Al, a kinetic Black man who sounded like a Stax 45 single on the jukebox when he talked.
Still does, in fact.
Maybe that’s because he once made a sizable living in music, on bandstands from Hollywood, Fla., to Hollywood, Calif. — that’s him you hear singing lead, on the Billy Ward and the Dominoes classic, “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”
Then, there was Norm: a rangy character with a Colonial beard, a dad who was born and raised in rural Italy and a mom who never forgot the opening salvos of World War I back in Austria when she was a little girl.
So the two would show up somewhere, and the females also in attendance would always manage to clamor around Mr. Anderson.
“Al, why is it that you get all the ladies?”
“‘Cause I can still hit those high notes, baby.”
Getting it on the page
Let it be understood that Mr. Julian was never known for his vocals, though he did coax a few notes out of the accordion from time to time.
Norm, instead, would make words on the page sing — simple, and direct.
Plainspoken elegies of place.
Unashamed symphonies of the old Stansbury Field House and WVU basketball’s glory runs in the late 1950s, with Hot Rod Hundley and Jerry West.
Love songs, unadorned, to spirited beagles and trusty Volkswagen Beetles.
Norm died Sept. 29 after battling leukemia for two decades.
He was 85 and donated his body to the Human Gift Registry at WVU. A private gathering will follow.
All told, he wrote nearly 3,000 columns for this newspaper, but just as many words before that, as a reporter who covered every beat out there.
He had been in newsrooms since 1957.
Newspapering was a contact sport back in that tailfin year, 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 next day.
Learning how to write, under deadline, one paragraph at a time, while giving one more quick read — upside down.
Because if your meeting ran long and everybody was waiting, that’s how your story was going to unfurl, from your typewriter to the copy desk to the pressroom, on its way to the morning edition.
Chronicler of place
He spent nearly 40 years at The Dominion Post, counting its earlier iterations in print.
Along the way, he wrote and self-published three books, two nonfiction and a novel, that were well-received regionally.
First-place awards for his newspaper work came from the West Virginia Press Association and Keystone Press Association, in Pennsylvania.
In his younger days, he lived in Detroit and attended Wayne State University.
Norm worked a delivery job in New Jersey before moving back to West Virginia, where he built his signature cabin on Snake Hill with his own hands and lived off the grid for several years.
He was a bachelor whose friends and colleagues went well past the newsroom.
There were the writer (but not for a newspaper) friends, aficionados of WVU sports friends and community-activist friends.
Gardening friends, too, which is how he made his acquaintance with Shirley Johnson, his neighbor in Star City, where he settled after coming down from Snake Hill.
They would meet at the fence to talk about organic gardening and soil preservation, she remembered.
The newspaper columnist was also a budding water colorist, gifting his neighbor with an original work for Christmas five years ago.
It was an autumn scene of two ducks on the water, framed by a calligraphy swirl of tree branches.
“I asked him if it was a real place. ‘Only in my memories,’ he said.”
Of voices and venues
The journeyman-journalist, in many ways, found his real voice in print at this newspaper in 1988.
That was when then-publisher Dave Raese and then-editor Ralph Brem asked him if he wouldn’t mind getting out of the newsroom — to write about whatever he wanted for a column that would go three days a week.
The answer was quicker than a Jerry West fast break at Stansbury.
He became known for his columns about Osage and other West Virginia places.
There were observations on the weather and firewood.
There was his profile of Rich Tate, a man-mountain with a gentle disposition felled too soon by a brain tumor.
Rich, who once famously ate a dozen or so buckwheat pancakes in one sitting at the Buckwheat Festival, worked in maintenance for The Dominion Post.
His annual Christmas column — “Ye holiday gift wish list from Jolly Ol’ Norm” — became a legend in print.
Ideas — and other things
Said columnist even wrote about the aforementioned Al Anderson.
Al’s hoping for an invitation to Norm’s service.
If that happens, he’ll say a few words and maybe sing: “Amazing Grace,” or “Goodnight, Sweetheart, it’s Time to Go.”
“When you have friends like Norm, you’re blessed,” he said. “Norm was a big somebody in my life, I can tell you that, man.”
Norm told his philosophy of what he called “the writing life,” to his readers on May 29, 2003, when his final, three-day-a-week column appeared in The Dominion Post.
He wasn’t going anywhere.
Not really.
He was just scaling back to make way for other projects — “While there is still some howl in this old writing dog,” as he put it.
Norm was grateful to The Dominion Post.
“Writing for newspapers is an ideal place to start, and sometimes finish,” he said in that column.
“It is a most democratic kind of writing, for it keeps you involved in the community and the lives and ideas of all kinds of people.”
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