Conversations with Melvin

Putting out a newspaper every week can be a grind, but it truly is a labor of love. But there are good days and bad. And there are downsides — one of those being when we have to publish bad or sad news.

This summer, we’ve had a nasty run of such news. While we would love nothing more than to fill our front page with human interest stories, business openings and fun features, that’s not the world we live in. We all know this.

Our run of dire news continued last week when we learned of the grain bin fatality. And we followed that up this week with a tribute story on the victim, Melvin Welu.

Chances are good that if you’re reading this, you know the name. Many of you know the person as well. The silver lining — if you can even call it that — for me is putting together stories like the one on this week’s front page. Writing those stories requires interviews with people who knew the deceased, and hearing good stories and anecdotes kind of makes me feel good, allbeit in a weird way.

I didn’t know Melvin very well, but then again, if you ever carried on just one conversation with the man, you felt like you knew him intimately. For those of you who don’t know, Melvin was a talker and, in a gentleman-like fashion, also rarely pulled punches.

My first interaction with Melvin was in a ditch of a field north of Milroy one spring when he invited his farming friends to get their tractors out in the field. His fellow farmers weren’t planting anything, but this was Melvin’s way of being neighborly and promoting fellowship among the farming community.

In the years after our first encounter, Melvin would stop me every time he saw me — usually at an amateur baseball game. Most recently, he politely asked me who writes the weather stories that appear in the paper.

I told him that I do. One weather story in particular caught his eye — and his ire. I had written about how “perfect” the recent weather had been. It was perfect in my eyes, because we were in the middle of a sunny and dry stretch of weather.

Sounds perfect, right?

Wrong, Melvin told me. “You used the word ‘perfect,’” he said. “Why do you think it was perfect?”

Knowing Melvin is heavily invested in the world of agriculture, I had a good idea of where he was going.

“We need rain!” he exclaimed with a chortle. “It wasn’t perfect for me.”

While it might sound like he was upset over what I wrote, he wasn’t. Not really. It was just Melvin’s way of getting his point across. And he did so with a smile, which made me feel better, as if I didn’t make some kind of egregious mistake in my weather story.

Then he talked to me for another 10-15 minutes, asking a plethora of questions and offering up story ideas. I remember thinking to myself, “Why does he keep talking?” At the time, I really didn’t comprehend Melvin’s penchant for small talk. But that was fine. It’s just how Melvin was, and we should all respect people who feel face-to-face dialogue is still important these days.

Being outgoing comes natural to some people. Some, like Melvin, found a way to perfect the art of one-on-one discussion, no matter the topic or situation. We know it as the “gift of gab.” It was one of Melvin’s many, many gifts.

I have to admit, I wasn’t always excited to see Melvin and know that he saw me, because it usually meant a long conversation was in my future (and he didn’t care if I had time to chat). However, looking back now that he’s gone, I realize I sincerely enjoyed my interactions with him. And I will lament the ones that will never happen.

Obviously, he had an impact on me. And I’m certainly not alone.

• Anyone who went to Tracy High School in 1960 surely knows the name Art Prouty. During his senior year of wrestling, Prouty surrendered just three points in the regular season. He finished that year with a 23-1 record with 16 pins and a third-place finish at state. Prouty died on June 25 at his home in Burnsville. He will go down in school history as one of the best wrestlers ever.