Remembering My Fallen Colleague, John McNamara

Screenshot from The Capital Gazette Facebook page

As I sit here, staring at a blank computer screen, it’s so incredibly difficult to find the right words to adequately describe how I feel. I will not lie to all of you and say that I was really close friends with John McNamara, one of the five people killed on June 28 at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis.

I’d known him for about, or more than, 30 years. I didn’t really understand his sarcastic sense of humor at first, until I realized that he didn’t get me right away either.

Then, we meshed and became friendly. He worked hard at his craft, and he was damn good at it. I enjoyed seeing him at a Maryland game or an Orioles game or somewhere, and chewing the fat with him for a few minutes.

Mac was someone who most sports journalists in this area either knew and or had dealt with in some capacity. How could you not? He always was around somewhere, at some time, and willing to help you or answer questions, or simply do the little things that helped you do your job better.

Helping with one small fact would often give me such a lift when trying to put something together on a tight deadline, and Mac would do it.

But now he’s gone. It seems doubtful that the “let’s-hate-the-media” campaign being waged now in this country by many of those in power had anything to do with this tragic episode. The man who committed this atrocity just had a vendetta against the newspaper due to a story he didn’t like a few years ago.

Most publications run into things like that. People don’t always like everything that’s written about them. But you don’t pick up a gun and walk into a building and kill people to even the score. That’s not the answer. It just adds to the complexities of the problem.

Mac is gone now, along with the four other victims, because someone decided to do just this. I’ll miss Mac’s devilish smile, his sarcastic sense of humor that I finally came to understand, and being able to talk to him.

However, I’m so glad that people who work there at the Capital Gazette did put out a paper on Friday. What a great tribute to those who lost their lives. The paper came out, and with an editorial page you must see and be impressed by.

These people paid their fallen colleagues and comrades the finest tribute.

RIP to all of them.

Jeff Seidel is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and veteran sports journalist.

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