DAVID HERRING
Special to The Leader
The Buffalo News columnist Sean Kirst does something unusual in newsrooms: he wears sandals. But Kirst didn’t realize his affinity for sandals like most would by trying them out. Kirst first wore sandals to make a point to school kids who insulted someone close to him.
The gesture was fitting because the point Kirst made with the sandals is the same idea he’s conveyed to so many Upstate New Yorkers for decades. His tales are about everyday folks, regardless of who they are. Tales about their victories as well as losses and how they persevere.
These “fundamental elements of humanity” captured by Kirst’s unique columns, “is the soul of a hometown,” he said in his book, “The Soul of Central New York.” Kirst views his columns as a way of providing Upstate camaraderie in the community. Or as he puts it, Upstate communion.
Kirst has been telling Upstate New Yorkers stories about their communities for the last half-century. In 2009, he received the prestigious Ernie Pyle Award for human interest in journalism. Since he was a boy listening to his mother’s tales, Kirst knew he wanted to strengthen his community with storytelling.
Kirst has an uncanny ability to form and maintain connections with people. He distinguishes himself as a journalist by empathizing, listening and earning his community’s trust. His ability to have compassion for the people he writes about is at “off-the-chart levels”, according to Kirst’s longtime colleague, Mike McAndrew.
The story behind one of the most revered storytellers of Upstate New York couldn’t be timelier and more inspiring, especially considering high mistrust among the public for news media, according to recent Pew Research data. But it ain’t all mudslinging in news writing these days, as evident by journalists like Kirst.
Kirst reminds readers of their shared experiences riding the rollercoaster that is life. Through narratives of average citizens, his columns provide a sense of communion to unite the community. “He’s very good at finding the small story that tells the larger story. Without being overly sentimental, his writing does tug on our heartstrings,” said Margaret Sullivan, former Buffalo News Editor and New York Times best-selling author.
Kirst’s journey in journalism traces back to Chautauqua county. It’s here where he was born and inspired as a writer for SUNY Fredonia’s student-run newspaper, The Leader.
Entering Biscotti Cafe in Syracuse, New York is a reprieve from this winter morning in February. The senses became overstimulated by the aroma of fresh coffee and the sight of delicious cannolis.
A man appeared in the periphery. He was away from the showcase of goodies to make evident he wasn’t waiting for or ordering something. The man was there to pick up a cake for his family and to share his story as a journalist with a student reporter. The man was Sean Kirst.
Kirst wore sweatpants, a hoodie with a thicker coat over it and a beanie. He looked like he was in his early fifties, about a decade younger than his actual age. He had distinguished-looking salt and pepper stubble on his face. He looked somewhat tired at first glance.
But the fatigue vanished when Kirst spotted me, the student reporter from his alma mater, SUNY Fredonia.
Kirst was born and raised in Dunkirk, NY. Kirst was the youngest of six children in his family. His parents experienced hardship when they were young. Kirst’s mother was an orphan and his father grew up in an orphanage. But Kirst saw a silver lining to his parent’s struggles. “It was a benefit though, man. Because all the biases or prejudices and all the other preconceptions that can go with coming out of the working family were stripped away from [his parents] them,” he said.
Kirst’s father often worked nights at the steam station transporting the coal that fueled Mohawk Electric. As Kirst described in his book, “The Soul of Central New York”, his mother could find “beauty almost anywhere.” She saw her neighborhoods as places of “communal warmth,” had passion and knowledge for the English language and was fond of birds, particularly robins.
Though neither of his parents went to college, they were avid readers. Kirst listened to his mother read classics such as “Black Beauty” and “Treasure Island” while he ate at the kitchen table. She would pass the time picking grapes for extra money by concocting wild tales about the fruit to entertain her son.
It was also at the kitchen table where Kirst would learn about his community from his mother. She drank coffee, ironed and gave her “homilies of life.” Later in life, Kirst delivered his own homilies to audiences at St. Lucy’s church in Syracuse and at TedX talks.
Kirst’s level of public speaking ability is unbeknownst to many. Yet, those closest to him, both Father Jim Mathews of St. Lucy’s and McAndrew, rave about Kirst’s homilies.
Kirst appreciated his mother’s concern about their region. When he was a child, his mother showed him a World Book Encyclopedia from the 1950s. According to the Encyclopedia, Buffalo was the 12th largest city in the country.
But those population numbers were plummeting, as was the economy in the region, Kirst’s mother would often point out: “Rather than lamenting what used to be, you’ve got to take the strengths of a community that comes out of it and [ask], ‘where are you going?’” Kirst said.
As a boomer, Kirst grew up during the civil rights movement. During this time, many whites were more explicit in expressing their racial prejudice toward blacks. But diminishing other people was not a practice Kirst’s parents taught their children.
Kirst recognized from an early age that certain people got their stories told and others didn’t. He realized this depended on their civic direction and status.
It’s 11:30 now at Biscotti’s and more customers start filing in. Kirst sips his black coffee. No sweets for him. He bought me a cannoli and a cup of coffee. He would later offer to buy me more sweets for my wife and children, waiting in the van outside of the cafe. Generous and kind, like McAndrew, Matthews and Sullivan all said admiringly about Kirst.
Kirst and I sit at a booth against the window. You can see North Salina Street, Syracuse’s Little Italy region.
An important lesson from the kitchen homilies was the principle of universal suffering. Kirst’s mother empathized with the African American community. “One of the things I think that was extraordinary about my mother is that she plugged in very early [to the oppression of African Americans],” Kirst said. “She understood they were people. She went through hell. She saw that they went through hell.”
The egalitarian perspective of the household fostered Kirst’s worldview. “When you actually [go out and] meet [different types of] people, there is far more shared than unshared experience,” Kirst said. This enabled him to see his region’s full range of stories by “leveling them out.”
The kitchen homilies also inspired the cornerstone of Kirst’s columns. That is, columns rich with descriptive narratives and personal essays. He doesn’t take the common approach of putting his spin on the key issues of the day. His columns are based on thorough reporting with carefully constructed, engaging plots.
Sullivan summed up Kirst’s approach as “characterized by a deep sense of place, and a remarkable ability to emphasize with all kinds of people. He has a special feel for ‘salt of the earth’ individuals: working-class citizens who haven’t had all the breaks but exhibit the best of the human spirit.”
As we talk, Kirst asks questions about the iPad program I’m using to transcribe the interview. He even says he’s learning things from me—a journalism student with about one-hundred-fold less experience (6 months compared to 600 months).
Kirst picks right back up where we were in the interview. Kirst talked about the shaping of his journalistic lens. He spoke passionately about his craft, as he did in his Ted talks.
Besides growing up around egalitarians, two experiences, in particular, enabled Kirst to realize his career path: his college years at SUNY Fredonia and an unexpected professional opportunity at the Post-Standard.
I look down at my index cards with various topics I wished to discuss with Kirst. Not a ton of time left. The most obvious topic wasn’t discussed yet: Kirst’s experience as a student writer for The Leader. There is an excerpt from Kirst’s book, “The Soul of Central New York”, that I jotted next to this topic on one of my index cards:
“My awakening as a writer came at the State University of New York at Fredonia, where I worked for The Leader, the student newspaper, and learned from a passionate faculty,” Kirst wrote. Kirst looked at me with a smirk after nodding while listening to me quote him. It was one of those looks that said, “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking me that.”
Kirst wrote for the Leader between 1977 and 1981. Former faculty Richard Klein was the supervisor for The Leader, and he reined in Kirst to do some work on Samuel Clemens (aka Mark Twain). Kirst enjoyed exploring the history of Twain’s life in Fredonia. Kirst credits Klein for helping instill the “sense that revelation mattered” in him.
But it was Dr. Hoffman who turned Kirst on to John Dos Passos. Dos Passos was a 20th-century writer best known for his USA Trilogy political novels. “Dos Passos wrote about working people and the meaning of their lives,” Kirst said. “Here I am, a guy from a working background. At that point, a big part of me believed I was going to wind up working in factories.”
Before reading Dos Passos’ work, Kirst didn’t think his skill set would make much of a difference. He was also unsure of his strength to leave Western New York if an opportunity presented itself.
Eureka! Dos Passos’ work helped Kirst see the important value of his own working-class background and experiences. This opened up “an incredible landscape” of storytelling.
By his own admission, Kirst’s best work as a student writer for The Leader was his last piece, shortly before graduating in May, entitled “Gradations of Graduations”.
Kirst wrote about his favorite thinking spot in Dunkirk by the steel plant, as folks in the neighborhood called it. The Hills was a bunch of raised dirt with thick, tall grass where kids from the area would hang out.
Kirst adopted what would later be his signature narrative style for news columns. He reflected on the multitude of graduation in everyday life, drawing a parallel between all the graduation in and around the “Hills” with graduating college:
“… maybe, just maybe, there was a little hint in Fenton Hall and down the path a bit in the tall grass [of “The Hills”] that everything is graduation.”
This newfound sense of purpose and value in storytelling made exploring career opportunities away from his hometown possible. There was also a strong motivation to reunite with his college sweetheart and future wife, Nora, in Rochester.
But after all this time, Kirst hasn’t forgotten his roots at Fredonia: “I’ll say it forever, that place [SUNY Fredonia] played a gigantic role in my life.”
Kirst began his career at Rochester’s City paper and took a pitstop at the Niagara Gazette before taking an opportunity with the Post-Standard bureau in Oswego. Then he took another opportunity with the Post-Standard in Syracuse. It was in Syracuse where Kirst would hit his stride and distinguish himself. It’s also where he met his longtime friend and colleague, McAndrew.
McAndrew started working for the Post-Standard around the same time as Kirst. He remembers Kirst’s unusual approach to crime reporting given the times. Decent and common-sense reporting such as going into the community to get many perspectives. That is, he didn’t rely solely on the perspectives of the police. “He would let people have their say,” McAndrew said.
Kirst has always been deliberate about making connections with underrepresented voices. He’s earned the trust and respect of all kinds of people over the years, including Native and African American communities.
McAndrew hadn’t seen other white reporters at the Post-Standard go out of their way as Kirst did. It was important for him to form relationships with all types of communities. “He treated people no matter what the economic situation they were in or what race they were as he would like to be treated,” McAndrew said.
A turning point in Kirst’s career was when he was offered a sports column after working the evening shift as a general assignment reporter for a few years. He was flattered. But he wasn’t sure he was the right person for the column. He considered himself a “news guy.”
Kirst turned to his older brother, John, for advice. “Sometimes you get on the train or it leaves you behind,” John said. Kirst got on the train, which was a stepping stone to having a news column later on like he wanted.
McAndrew has been reading Kirst’s work for about 35 years, but his favorite piece of Kirst’s is the Lockerbie one about Pan Am Flight 103. The piece, “Fire in the sky and ‘folk’ in the field”, was published Dec. 12, 1998, in the Post-Standard. The piece came a decade after Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Many bodies landing in Lockerbie were on the Temple family’s farmland.
“Man, and every time I read that [Lockerbie] column, I tear up.”, McAndrew said. There was a slight change in the sound of his voice. “This [choking up reading the piece] is 30 years later. It’s just unbelievable.” McAndrew said. There was some nervous laughter or possibly a mixed bag of emotions.
It’s the sort of response when you re-experience an emotion in front of someone who lacks the knowledge and experience to understand what you’re truly feeling at that moment. They might get it’s a significant experience for you. But it’s mere words to them.
Thus, you nip the feeling in the bud as quickly as you can and suppress it to avoid the uneasiness or vulnerability you just showed someone who is completely oblivious to the physiological thunder that nearly struck right in front of them.
I asked Kirst about his Lockerbie piece about the Temples. “There are just certain experiences in life…”, Kirst said and paused. The wheels were spinning. He was gathering decades of information and thinking about how to express such a profound experience.
There were 35 college students studying abroad from Syracuse University on Pan Am Flight 103. Kirst has told stories about families of the students who died from the bombing over the past 35 years. He stays in touch with many of them, such as the Philipps family, who lost their daughter Sarah to the 1988 terrorist bombing.
Several years after the bombing, Kirst received word from a family from Hamburg, NY who also lost a daughter. The parent knew about a farmer in Lockerbie, Scotland who lived next to Richard Temple. Temple, who at the time had taken over much of the family farming business for his elderly father, found many bodies including “folk from Syracuse” scattered on his family’s land. Kirst heard the Temples had this “incredibly beautiful and difficult Lockerbie story”.
Kirst recalled his interaction with Temple when he made it to Lockerbie. “And the thing I’ll never forget about it was…”. Kirst got even more animated and passionate in explaining this story. That’s saying a lot because the guy gives the impression of a five-a-day red bull drinker. But he’s actually someone with a natural “motor” so to speak.
At 7:30 in the morning in the kitchen of the Temple’s farmhouse, he and Temple were conversing. Or it was more like Kirst was defending a doctoral dissertation and getting grilled by one of his committee members.
“He’s a really sharp guy and he challenged everything,” Kirst said.
Temple asked why Kirst would want to write about the plane crash on his land. He quizzed Kirst on whether he read a recent Pulitzer-winning book, “The Farm”. Temple asked this question as a way of saying to Kirst and his colleague “I’m not an idiot here!” Kirst said. Temple asked, “What good is going to come from this kind of grief?”
Kirst expected to get kicked out of the farmhouse 25 minutes into pitching his idea for the story to Temple. He figured he’d have to go back to Syracuse empty-handed. “And he [Richard Temple] just stands up and said ‘Okay, let’s go,’” Kirst said.
Many cairns—little stone memorials—were on the Temple’s land, left by surviving families. Temple didn’t like seeing the cairns at first. He wanted to knock them down and not think about any of it. Kirst’s piece was about how Temple came to peace with his land being a memorial site. He also began healing from the trauma he suffered from seeing all the bodies.
Kirst leaves the reader of his Temple piece an unforgettable image: when Kirst and the photographer finally got to the top of a hill on the Temple’s land, Temple was smoking a cigarette and looking up into the sky as a plane flew by.
The photographer with Kirst actually captured this experience. The photograph of Temple was in Kirst’s original Lockerbie piece.
I asked Kirst if he considered himself an “off the chart” compassionate person, as his buddy McAndrew described him. Kirst said, “For me to agree to that would mean I didn’t have it.”, then we burst out laughing. Touché, Kirst.
“It’s more like this. I’m always trying to attain it” [compassion], Kirst said.
“I’ve been dying to ask you, what’s up with the sandals?”, I said. Kirst smiled and said, “No one has ever asked me that.”
Kirst wore sandals to school after older kids trash-talked his older brother, John. John wasn’t at the playground to hear them talk smack, but Kirst was. That was for the best. John’s a big, tough guy.
The kids were mocking John for his haircut and for wearing sandals to church. “So, my response to that was simply to start wearing sandals,” Kirst said.
Kirst became immediately fond of wearing sandals and appreciated how they didn’t make his feet stink. He wears them most of the year, to almost every occasion; although, his wife, Nora, has prevented him from wearing them to weddings.
Maybe Kirst wanted to show those punks what he thought about diminishing a person. In this case, his older brother, for looking different. Through symbolism: “If you’re going to make fun of John behind his back, then you’ll have to make fun of me too. Good luck keeping that trash talk a secret from badass brother, John.”
Or perhaps there isn’t any special meaning to Kirst wearing sandals at all. Maybe it was just his way of giving those punks the finger for smack-talking his brother.
“In between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
-Origin unknown, but often attributed to Steven Covey or Viktor Frankl