One of Donald Trump's 'horrible' people

A man died last year who epitomized the profession that Donald Trump says is full of "horrible people" and "scum."
Jack Simms was 90. He was 17 when he signed up to join the Marine Corps in World War II. He needed his parents' consent. He was a private in a machine gun squad with an infantry company during the bloody Battle of Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945. His division received a Presidential Unit Citation.
He survived war to return home to Auburn, Alabama, where he had grown up. Jack had promised his mother he'd go to college if she'd sign his consent form, and he kept his promises.
The first time I saw Jack Simms was in 1974. He looked pretty much the same as he'd looked in photos in his Marine Corps uniform, a dapper, John Garfield kind of handsome. He stood in the doorway of my office, the editor's cubbyhole at the Auburn University campus newspaper, The Plainsman. He, too, had been editor of The Plainsman after the war ended.
This time Jack was back to head the journalism department, summoned by Auburn after his long career with the Associated Press in Atlanta, Kentucky and New England. He eventually became the AP's deputy general sports editor in New York.
That first meeting was typical. Jack had stopped by with a minor criticism, which he delivered with a smile and I ignored. I had finished all my journalism classes and so never had him as an instructor, but we became fast friends.
I left Auburn and tried to start a weekly newspaper on a Georgia island. The venture failed. Jack helped me find a newspaper job when I came back to Alabama, dragging a U-Haul behind me. With his AP contacts around the nation, he helped many of us struggling young reporters find work.
Jack Simms taught what he called a "weed-out" course to get rid of students who could not spell and didn't know grammar. He'd put a ticking alarm clock at the front of the room to illustrate the pressure of deadlines. He knew about those.
He taught by example. I've always thought the main thing journalism students should be taught is the proper disposition for a reporter. Jack Simms was the intellectually curious, tough, fair-minded, witty reporter we all wanted to become.
Jack and his wife Lassie Jo-he called her "The War Department," but with such tenderness it was not offensive-came to see me in Mississippi nearly 30 years after we'd first met. He sat on my front porch drinking, gossiping, reminiscing, until past midnight. I finally had to beg off and go to bed.
Always the careful editor, Jack occasionally would write me a note about some column I'd written. He didn't critique the content or my position so much as he did the delivery. "I'm not clear what you're saying here," or "Good job with this." Nobody was off the hook entirely when Jack Simms read.
Mark Winne, a mutual friend, once Jack's student and now a veteran investigative television reporter in Atlanta, named his son "Jack." Jack Simms inspired that kind of devotion.
The current contempt for the media may wane in the next four years, but I doubt it. Jack Simms taught us that if you do your job right you might not be popular. You might even be despised. But you'll be respected.

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