Note: I’ve been finishing Circle Way, a book by my wife, Mary Ann Hogan, who died last year from lymphoma.
Here’s her John Lennon story:
As a feature writer, Mary Ann’s stories were what we called “an easy read.”
Live, they seemed to say. You never know what’s going to happen.
Early on, she took what was then the less-traveled road in newspaper writing, personal journalism, routinely including the people in her life — friends, family — into her stories. Starting with this one:
On a mild December evening in 1980, a religious, right-wing madman shoots John Lennon four times in the back with an American-made revolver.
Mary Ann mourns John on Page One of the Oakland Tribune.
An era has not ended, she says.
The ’60s live on.
And then her parents are in the story:
“When news flashed … I was visiting the home of my parents, two richly intelligent and poignantly gray-haired people who got gray when they suffered my brother and me — tendered us — through the 1960s.
“Two people who made it a habit to thank God and knock knuckles on wood and shake their heads with some form of Irish utterance signifying Grace, whenever … a former contemporary…
