Recalling the great John William Sample, 15 years after his death

Yesterday marked 15 years since my friend and former co-worker John William Sample passed away. I drank a couple of beers in his memory.

Sample, known to almost everyone as “John William,” was 88 when he died. He worked at the Eastern Shore News for 61 years, missing only five days of work.

One of the problems with newspapers these days is there is no place for John William Sample. Years ago, he was one of the most important people in the office.

For decades, Sample put together the paper, going back to the days of hot metal typesetting.

By the time I came along, he was cutting out paper stories and headlines, running them through a wax machine and pasting them on newspaper pages destined for the press.

Then computers took over, and the sage advice and institutional memory of people like Sample were gone from newspapers forever. It shows.

He died July 22, 2005. I know this because when the News moved out of its Onancock office late last year, some of the old stuff was headed for the trash bin.

I happened to be in Onancock at the time. The kind man cleaning it out let me have some of the relics, including a letter to the News from Sample’s family at the time of his death, and his funeral bulletin, together in a frame.

The kind man said the more stuff I took, the less he had to throw away.

Sample's framed funeral bulletin hung in the News office until the News closed its office. To have thrown it away would have been a crime.

Today, it hangs on a wall in my office.

“To not have missed but five days out of 61 years meant that he enjoyed his work and his fellow coworkers,” his family wrote in the framed note.

Many people remember Sample by his part-time job. He was a top-flight bartender for weddings, events and soirées of the day.

He also had a sense of humor. Sample told a friend of mine, newly hired at the News, to go ask for the “paper stretcher” on deadline because not everything would fit on the page.

When the new hire went asking for the “paper stretcher” — there is no such thing, of course — everyone knew Sample had struck again.

Early on during my career at the News, he told me, “The more you hear, the more you see, the less you say, the more you know.”

That seems like good guidance for our times.

He’s been gone for 15 years, but I still follow Sample’s advice on that.