Shy, kind and soft-spoken -- with the power to infuriate

We rarely, if ever, think of the people we work with as members of our extended family.

Or a newspaper we regularly read -- and more specifically the people who write in them -- as being akin to family. Not that we necessarily like everyone we read, any more than we like everyone we're related to.

Those thoughts came to mind because of the passing this week of my colleague and friend Tom Oleson.

The cause was multiple organ failure, but those who knew him believe the shutdown of his bodily functions was hastened by the recent and repeated blunt-force emotional trauma to his heart.

Over the last two years, Tom lost his son, Kristofer, to an accident, and then his wife, Laurie, to a stroke, both in the depths of March. Understandably, that brought on severe depression, although one wouldn't have known that by the columns that followed.

Most of you never really knew Tom. I'm not sure any of us truly did, anymore than most of us truly know ourselves.

To those who met him in person, rather than on the editorial page, what probably surprised most was his elf-like stature, his rumpled Columbo-style appearance, and his shy, soft-spoken and kind nature.

Tom was the sort of colleague who, from time to time, would leave the den-like corner of the Free Press editorial department and shuffle through the newsroom, stopping to offer praise to other writers, among them the gifted Melissa Martin, who elegantly crafted his obituary in Thursday's newspaper.

It was to that den-like editorial department I went to be with Tom's spirit and his editorial colleagues on Friday. I took a seat across from his newspaper-cluttered desk and the chair that still has his cardigan draped over it.

The same chair where he sat composing -- seemingly effortlessly -- his artful, often droll, always unflinchingly honest Saturday columns. The kind of columns that would infuriate liberal-minded Free Press readers because of their conservative bent, and intimidate Free Press colleagues with their learned literary storytelling style. Or at least one colleague I can speak for.

I had known Tom for 45 of his 66 years, since he joined the Free Press at a time when my father was both his boss and his drinking friend after work at downtown hotels and the Winnipeg Press Club.

Yet, for all the years I knew Tom, I didn't know him in that day-to-day way his editorial family knew him.

"Tom lived in a world of idea," editorial page editor Gerald Flood said.

And the idea, in Tom's mind, was either the right idea or the wrong idea. Of course, he always considered his idea to be the right one.

"He provoked people," Gerald said.

Including the colleagues he sat across from.

"We had some rip-snorting, knock-down battles here," editorial writer Catherine Mitchell recalled.

Tom wasn't quite so quiet and kind, much less shy, when it came to debating an issue.

"There were many times I knew I was right and he was wrong, but he was just so formidable," Catherine said, "that I frequently lost."

But she also won in a different way.

She said the verbal jousting with Tom, the way he made her examine her thinking and defend it, made her a better editorial writer.

"He was a very strong thinker," Catherine said.

To his other editorial colleague, David O'Brien, the people who could tell another side to Tom are the city's bus drivers. The ones he got to know if one of his colleagues couldn't give him a lift home.

But it wasn't just the bus drivers.

There were also the people he drank with in downtown beer parlours; the way he had shared a pint with my father decades ago.

"He was comfortable with them," David said. "They were the larger family of friends that I guess none of us really knew."

There was a story Tom loved to tell about that "other" family.

A man who appeared to be homeless stopped him on the street one day and asked Tom for some money.

Tom, who rarely carried cash, said he didn't have any. The homeless man seemed to take him at his word, but as the panhandler turned to walk away, he had some parting words for the little old man with the rumpled look: "I always read your column."

As I was suggesting, there's been a death in the Free Press family. But not just ours.

A celebration of Tom's life will be held at River Gate Inn, 186 West Gate, on Wednesday at 1 p.m.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 19, 2012 B1