Remembering Marshall Coggin
(September 2009) - The first Wednesday Mr. Coggin stopped by the Northern Neck News to yell at me, I was sitting at his desk. In his office. At his paper. I don’t remember what exactly it was I’d screwed up, but he let me know about it.
I’d been the editor for a few weeks. If I stayed another 115 years or so, I’d have the same tenure that Marshall Coggin’s family had with the paper, which started in 1879 in Warsaw, Virginia.
He’d have come by sooner, he said, to let me know a few things, but wanted to give me some time to settle in. Time to make my own mistakes. Now it was time to explain some things to me.
In 1992, Mr. Coggin sold the paper to Chesapeake Publishing. Before I got there, a few editors had tried to take over where he’d left off. No one could. No one can. For the next eight years or so, every so often he’d stop by on his way back from the post office in the morning to talk about local history, small planes or Louisiana. Especially Louisiana.
Mr. Coggin and I were joined by the Northern Neck News, but also by that state. He’d been there many years ago, in some military service. I’d grown up there. He’d ask questions about Louisiana, wanting to know what I thought of gumbo, of the gators and testing me on my knowledge of Cajun politics.
His favorite story involved landing a plane on a dirt road in the south Louisiana swamps. Most of the times he told me the story, he’d say a friend of his had done that. Once or twice he might have said he did it. He’d stand in the doorway to my office, a few feet from what was, for decades, his desk. His dark blue baseball cap was pulled down tight to his aviator sunglasses, and he’d lean against the wall.
In the story he told, the pilot got out and started walking along the dirt road, surrounded by sugar cane and whispers in the wind. Along the dirt road comes a truck, lights ghosting through the dust. The truck stops next to the pilot and a Cajun speaks, saying he was looking for his lost friend. His friend had maybe had too much to drink and had been bumbling his way along the bayou in a little boat. Year after year the basics of the story remained the same, involving a Cajun canoe called a pirogue (pronounced “pea-row”) and some swamp dialect Mr. Coggin loved to mimic. The tale he would tell was a short story only in the literary sense that it would take up at least 10 written pages. But it was never the same twice. Sometimes he’d get sidetracked and tell me why you had to have the pressmen check their guns at the door 50 years ago. Turns out they drank when they worked and would end up shooting each other. Or he’d talk about local history, family backgrounds and minor scandals.
I’ve forgotten many of the details in his Cajun story, but this story wasn’t in the details. It was a story about being lost, about friendship, about Louisiana. It was a story he shared with me, that we shared together. It became a cup of coffee we sat over when he knew I wasn’t pushing deadline, when he wanted someone to talk to. In the story, the Cajun would be looking for his lost friend. Maybe in this version there wouldn’t be a pilot at all, just one Cajun lost and one looking. His favorite line, and the words that became a sort of secret handshake between us, was what the one Cajun told the pilot before he drove off leaving him stranded: “You see my friend, you push him home.” Then he’d wrinkle up his face, cock his head a little and wag his finger at me.
And he would tell me stories of his family, how things weren’t always easy, but how proud he was of them, what a proud father and grandfather he was, and how I needed to remember that everyone we wrote about in the paper was someone’s family.
I think about those stories and Mr. Coggin’s horrific Cajun accent today, following news of his death this morning. And as I think of Mr. Coggin on his way to Heaven, I think of that pirogue, travelling along the Louisiana bayou he had so romanticized these years, that lost soul in the water, in the swamp with his Cajun friend looking for him. And I think of Mr. Coggin when I say this: “You see my friend, you push him home.”
