Farewell to an old friend and journalist

We first heard on Friday but couldn’t confirm until Saturday that a longtime friend of the Frontiersman had died.

Tom Mitchell, better known here by his byline of T.C. Mitchell, or his trademark canvas high-top Converse sneakers, was 60 when he died.

He left behind a brother, two daughters he was so very proud of, and a long and storied career as an Alaska journalist.

That career included not one, but two stints as editor of the Frontiersman, first in the 1980s and then again just a few years ago. And he worked as a reporter for the Frontiersman off an on throughout his long career.

To describe Mitchell, as many have, as a curmudgeon is accurate. He was gruff. His opinion pieces often took the form of extended gripes. An epic piece he wrote in his Anchorage Daily News days about the Alaska State Fair comes to mind.

But that word “curmudgeon” is imprecise for what it leaves unsaid, too. Mitchell will be remembered as a man who enjoyed a good laugh and could often be found chuckling in the newsroom as he recounted some tale from the old days.

A colleague once asked him what the “T.C.” in his “T.C. Mitchell” byline stood for.

“Take charge!” he said, before explaining that he had once said that to a man who had asked the same question as he sat on a bull waiting for his turn in a rodeo.

He was fun-loving, but he also was a pretty good mentor. His copy-editing skills were sharp, and he had a way of gently pointing out your mistakes in grammar or style with grace and humor. Like his joke about the trouble with the word “busing,” meaning to transport students, and “bussing,” meaning to kiss them.

He also knew what good journalism looked like, and believed it was possible even with a small staff. We’d like to point out here that he was the true genesis of the Jim White series of stories that culminated in a new house being built for a paraplegic man in Knik.

We also knew him as a loving father. Actually, we never met his family, never knew his daughters. But we heard plenty of stories about them and remember clearly how his eyes would light up every time he spoke of them.

We thought for a time today about where in these pages we should eulogize our friend. The editorial isn’t the easiest place to do this. It’s hard to talk in the third person about someone we knew as a friend and colleague. But somehow it seemed appropriate, and not just because we knew him as an editor. Frontiersman readers may recall Mitchell’s love-hate relationship with this column. It caused him no end of grief, but he was an opinionated man with a lot to say. Sometimes that got him in trouble, but it never dimmed our opinion of him.

So to Tom, wherever he is, we say farewell. Thanks for sharing yourself with us here. Both times.