Helen Gifford, who died last week, was never the public face of The Salem News. Others assumed those duties and did them well. She sometimes had to speak in public or be a debate panelist, but she was never comfortable in those roles. At heart, she was shy.
Helen had titles like news editor and managing editor, but eschewed the trappings that went along with the titles. She didn’t want an office and instead had a desk out in the newsroom with the reporters, many of whom she had hand-picked.
An English major at what was then Salem State College, Helen was a good writer who, after becoming editor of the Salem News in 1994, seldom got to do what she did so well. Instead, she went out and found writers. She brought a few with her from a weekly newspaper she ran, recruited some from other papers, and once hired a novelist with limited newspaper experience, but only after reading one of his novels.
She was small in frame, but full of fire. The first flame was lit when she was in a class at Salem State and a dean abruptly entered to remove a student who had not paid tuition, or was behind in payments. Enraged at how the situation was handled, Helen marched over to the student newspaper and volunteered to write an article about the incident. She didn’t know it at the time, but she had just begun her career in journalism.
When she later became editor of The Log, the student newspaper at Salem State, she defied the college president when she printed an obscenity-laced and sexually explicit article by Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the Black Panther Party. She did it not to shock, but in support of the First Amendment and of another state college newspaper that had been shut down for attempting to print the article. It was, to her, a matter of principle.
That’s a good word for Helen. She was principled, had a strong moral center, and, while encouraging investigative and hard-hitting reporting, strived for fairness. She would tell a reporter when she felt a story was not fair or balanced.
For more than two decades, Helen was The Salem News. Her fingerprints were on every story that ran on the front page of virtually every edition. Those articles, in truth, were more collaborations than assignments, a reflection of an editor who was more democratic than authoritarian. Every morning Helen moved about the newsroom, sitting and chatting with each reporter to find out what they were working on and, if needed, to discuss ways to make their story better.
During her tenure, she encouraged numerous investigative pieces, coordinated weeks of reporting on the 2006 Danversport chemical explosion, which damaged more than 100 homes and buildings, and oversaw coverage of national stories with local impact from the priest sex abuse scandal to North Shore residents who died in the 9/11 terrorist attack.
Helen was perhaps happiest when she started at The Salem News and worked out of a satellite office on the second floor of the newspaper’s abandoned plant in downtown Salem, above what is now the Adriatic Restaurant. It didn’t matter that there were mousetraps on the office floor and that a section of the sprawling, largely vacant building had to be padlocked so the homeless wouldn’t break in at night. She was in Salem, her adopted home, and loved every minute of it. A few times, being so close to her actual home, she hosted breakfasts at her house under the guise of staff meetings.
She may have loved it even more when the newspaper’s small office moved to Derby Square in Salem, where Caffe Graziani, a regular Friday lunch spot, was just out the back door, and where, on summer nights, with the windows open, the sounds of the Paul Madore Chorale, practicing just yards away in Old Town Hall, drifted across the brick courtyard.
Helen was strong-willed, but easy going. She was tolerant of things that would annoy other bosses, especially quirkiness. She once let a reporter set up his model train set on a large table in the conference meeting room. She offered neither apology nor explanation when one of the paper’s executives arrived for a meeting and was forced to discuss important newspaper business in front of toy locomotives and cabooses.
Helen certainly had her struggles. She became managing editor of The Salem News at a transitional and, eventually, difficult time for small metropolitan dailies. The paper changed owners almost as often as professional athletes change uniforms. And, rather than award reporters with raises, she had to apologize for unpaid, one-month furloughs.
But Helen loved her job, her staff, and, if forced to confess, the city of Salem best of all the North Shore communities the newspaper covered. It was understandable. She discovered herself at Salem State, met her beloved husband Tom on the campus, resided in a two-family house just off Salem Common, and raised a family in the city.
Helen Gifford could have been an editor at any newspaper in the country. She was that good. Instead, she stayed here, at her desk in the newsroom, content to remain behind the scenes. But, make no mistake, for more than two decades she was the heart and soul of The Salem News.
Tom Dalton is a retired Salem News reporter who worked with Helen Gifford for nearly 20 years at the newspaper.