Good Evening.  I am Tim Colburn, an academic.  I work at UMD, which has established the Larry Oakes Journalism Scholarship.  More important, I was Larry’s backpacking partner, friend, and secret admirer.  

Growing up, I fancied myself becoming a writer, and in my career as a professor I have written a couple of books that a handful of scholars around the world have actually read.  As I now pass from middle age into whatever lies ahead, I find that the years bring both wisdom and a need to record the legacy of what one has lost.  Much of my writing now eulogizes those who have passed, Larry among them.  But it is easy to write impressively about impressive people.  

Larry’s job, on a daily basis, was to shine a light through words on not only impressive people, but on events of the day (both ordinary and profound), on discovered knowledge (both historical and scientific), and on the impact that events, information, and policy have on ordinary people’s lives.  Larry did this, seemingly effortlessly, and I admired him immensely, though he probably didn’t know it.  I also envied his position and ability to affect so many people, routinely, with his words.

Larry was more than a reporter.  He was a searcher after the truth with the methods of an engineer, the mind of a scientist, the compassionate ear of a counselor, and the moral governor of a judge.  There is no better role model for an aspiring student journalist.

When I met Larry 16 years ago he was both building an addition to his house and building a bridge to his past.  He had a longing desire to know more about his Swedish roots, and he approached the meticulous reconstruction of his family’s history like he approached his construction project, with an engineer’s eye for design and authenticity.  The result in both cases was beautifully rendered, and with his Swedish heritage stories he succeeded in making a personal genealogy quest meaningful for hundreds if not thousands of readers.

To be a successful engineer requires mastery of underlying knowledge, and such knowledge is delivered by science.  Larry had an intense desire to learn not only the “what?,” but the “why?” and the “how?” surrounding all that he investigated.  Before he wrote about the U of M’s Soudan Underground Laboratory, he learned all he could about neutrinos, dark matter, and particle accelerators.  When reporting on a high-profile illegal file-sharing trial, he wanted to know about digital compression techniques.  He wrote compelling stories about North Dakota’s oil boom and its economic effects, but he made sure he understood both the engineering and the physics supporting multi-stage hydraulic fracturing.  He had an endless appetite for both pure science and applied knowledge, and he used it in all aspects of his life, both personal and professional.

Many of us, particularly in the academy, spend our lives in the pursuit of knowledge and its applications, and in the course of our careers we encounter and experience episodes of personal sorrow and loss that are the birthright of being human.  Larry’s career, however, brought him regularly in the audience of such suffering that I often wondered how he could bear it.  Some 23 years ago, he covered the funeral of a slain Twin Ports police officer, met another officer there who was deeply grieving, and fell in love with her on the spot.  He of course would later marry Patty, and the same sense of human empathy that motivated him would later be responsible for some of his most compelling stories.

When you spoke to Larry, you knew you had his ear, and that by listening to you he was sharing your experience.  It is a quality that all too few of us have, but that is essential if a journalist wants to do more than report news.  Unless one is a hopeless news junkie, one consumes news not as an end in itself, but as an instrument to understand, and perhaps improve, the human condition.  Larry understood this.  Much of what he wrote celebrated the human condition by describing its journeys and achievements — its beauty.  But of course the human condition has an ugly side, and Larry was extremely sensitive to a public perception that the media are all too quick to capitalize on stories that depict the breakdown of morals and the human suffering that can result.

Larry rendered mute any claims of sensationalism in his own work through a practice of empathy that he carried throughout his life and work.  It is why he married Patty.  It is how he once gained the trust of grieving parents, shattered by the abduction and murder of their daughter, through a grinding trial.  It is how he gained access to the prison cells of reservation youth accused of murdering a blind man, and a culturally misplaced and bullied hunter gone berserk in the woods.  Accused criminals could look Larry in the eye and somehow know that they trusted him.  The parents of a workplace mass murderer chose him to tell their tortured story of a family struggling with mental illness.  

These are only the stories that I can remember.  I had the good fortune of being able to read them and then put the pain associated with them out of my mind.  I sometimes wonder what the cumulative effect of absorbing the dark side of the human condition and writing about it had on my friend.  But even if he did pay a price he would have found the cost worth it by exposing the truth.  And if the truth led to justice, even in small measure, so much the better.

Newspapers have long been lauded for their bringing to the public eye acts, decisions, or policies that we would regard as unjust.  As I see it, a moral governor provides our sense of justice, and empathy is the foundation for morality.  Because Larry was so empathetic, he could see injustice where it occurred and felt an obligation to report on it in a balanced way.  His powerful stories on the lost youth of Leech Lake were a direct result of his growing up in a place where the inequalities of race and class were right in front of him but largely ignored.  

His investigation into the scourge of synthetic drugs arose because he simply could not square the deaths of young people who used substances marketed as bath salts with the purveyors of these substances making enormous amounts of money while claiming to be within the law.  Larry knew the difference between legality and morality, and he had no patience for those who would benefit from their ignorance of it.

It didn’t take a tragedy to engage Larry’s sense of justice.  While he dutifully noted the profound positive economic effects of North Dakota’s oil boom, he balanced that with the attendant social problems the new oil would cost established communities and the environmental problems it would cost future generations.  When a north shore internet provider cried foul at attempts by a rural and underserved county to implement broadband itself through federal stimulus funds, Larry described the plight of those harmed by the inability of the free market to serve their needs.

Larry’s sense of justice was complete, nuanced and inclusive.  It didn’t always take a downtrodden little guy, or even a sympathetic character, to engage it.  When it came to exposing injustice, he didn’t always go after a storyline that was easy to agree with.  His story on the rights of sex offenders, for example, did not make him many friends.  

On the other hand, he would not avoid an obvious winner for fear of sappiness.  One of my favorites is the Bemidji grocery store owner who after 46 years decided to retire.  Instead of taking a windfall by selling to a large corporate chain, he transferred ownership to his 400 workers through an employee stock ownership plan.  This was more than just a feel-good story for Larry — it appealed to his own powerful sense of obligation.

Larry’s passion for writing transcended his professional work.  In 2009 we hiked the rugged Kekekabic Trail together for a week in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, and afterward we recovered at my cabin that was nearby.  My wife and I have a tradition that anyone staying at the cabin must contribute to a journal we have faithfully kept there for 27 years.  Some write an innocuous sentence or two, some write goofy poems.  Larry understood how important this record was to us, and it shows in the care, attention to detail, and lyricism he put into his entry.  I can still see him laboring for hours at a picnic table on a sun-soaked day in September, filling page after page with a chronicle that will outlive me and my memory of that great experience.  The following winter the paper did run a popular story of his about our Kek hike, but I will always cherish his cabin journal entry, for it captures even more the grit and poetry of the trip.

Larry’s passing was an enormous loss for me, for his family, for those he worked with, and for those who will never get to know him.  But this scholarship goes a long way toward both establishing his legacy and ensuring that future generations will benefit from the kind of journalism he championed.  

If I were awarding this scholarship, I would make it a condition that the recipient read and internalize stories of Larry’s like those I have mentioned tonight.  For then maybe, just maybe, the world will gain a journalist with the qualities of the one we have lost: a brilliant engineer of the story, a passionate consumer of knowledge, an empathetic listener, and a believer in justice.

Thank you for supporting the Larry Oakes Journalism Scholarship.

Timothy Colburn

February 2014

Hovland and Duluth, MN