STEVE LOVELADY 1943-2010

My friend Steve Lovelady died on January 15. He and I worked together at Time in 1997 and 1998, and although I didn’t have a lot of interaction with him, I found him to smart, decent, tough but low-key, enormously effective, a top-notch editor. And in fact, he was the one who sent me along to Ann Kolson, an editor at the Times who just so happened to be his wife, for whom I wrote about 40 stories. The Philadelphia Inquirer, where Steve worked for 23 years and where he edited stories that won six Pulitzer Prizes (and among the articles he midwifed at Time, two won National magazine Awards), offered him an excellent obituary, which included a sort of toast, if you will. Headlining this “The Lovelady Style”, it quoted the lead that Steve wrote for an installment of the Pulitzer Prize-winning series “The Great Tax Giveaway” by then-Inquirer staff writers Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a tall, bald father of three living in a Northeast Philadelphia rowhouse and selling aluminum siding door-to-door for a living.
Imagine that you go to your congressman and ask him to insert a provision in the federal tax code that exempts tall, bald fathers of three living in Northeast Philadelphia and selling aluminum siding for a living from paying taxes on income from door-to-door sales.
Imagine further that your congressman cooperates, writes that exemption and inserts it into pending legislation. And that Congress then actually passes it into law.
Lots of luck.
The more than 80 million low- and middle-income individuals and families who pay federal taxes just don’t get that kind of personal break. Nor for that matter do most upper-middle-class and affluent Americans.
But some people do.

A terrific intro, colloquial and light, the perfect way to ease a reader into a complicated and important subject, an excellent example of the editor’s art. Here’s to you, Big Fella.