Saturday, July 05, 2003

Almost 30 years ago, when we were young men scrabbling for news on the mountainsides in Blair and Cambria counties, Tom Gibb would come to my apartment for a visit.

He stenciled in all the names in my first wedding album, drew cartoons on the kitchen table, drank my wine and shared my youth.

Gibber had gone to Penn State and worked then for the Altoona Mirror. Two years running he'd won the national Sigma Delta Chi Award for college cartooning, but became a reporter because cartooning seemed too little like work to him. It also kept him in his own world, which was, to put it gently, a bit different from the rest of ours.

One night, as we covered a school board meeting in some lost corner of Cambria County, Gibb remarked on my chain smoking. He was equally amused by my smoking and the fact that I wore a trench coat and fedora.

When I returned from a trip to the men's room, there was an elaborate cartoon of me, oversize eyeglasses, trench coat and hat with a press card in it and cigarettes coming out of my mouth and ears.

"I'd have added another cigarette, but the back of the paper was already written on," he grinned.

He had his own theory of animation.

"When I was little, I always thought that if I drew a perfect enough picture, it would move," he said one night. Then he told the story about the time he believed he was about to be sold.

His parents had made an appointment at a photo studio in Johnstown, dressed him up and drove him the 20 miles from home for the big date. The studio happened to be at Penn Traffic, the city's biggest department store.

"For some reason I thought that after I was photographed, they were going to sell me," he said.

Gibb was not a man to be bought and sold. He was born in Ebensburg, the seat of Cambria County, and, after college, went to work for the Mirror. He worked day and night for that paper, covering school boards and murders with equal ardor, adding his cartoons to its editorial pages. Eventually he became city editor, and when the paper was sold to a lesser chain that assigned a lesser person to run it, he was callously forced out.

He did not whine about this nor did he plead. Instead, Gibb sold his articles one-by-one to this paper and to The Patriot-News in Harrisburg.

He became so prolific here that it would have been economically irrational not to hire him. In his first months, a new colleague said he wished he knew who these three or four people all writing under the name Tom Gibb were, because they all did excellent work.

Gibb found stories that would otherwise be lost, and told of the lives of people in the far orbits of the region who might otherwise go unrecorded. He did his cartoons on the side because he thought they were funny and hilarity was to him as necessary as air.

It was little wonder to me that Tom's heart gave out yesterday at the age of 49, because it beat so hard and raced with him to so many fires, so many interviews, stood in so many hallways at so many municipal meetings, and climbed so many staircases, and swelled with laughter at the cartoons that simply came out of him as a function of everyday life, so easily that Tom thought he needed a real job.

Tom believed there were no unimportant people and no unimportant stories. He believed that, like some mystical cartoon he thought would somehow begin to move if perfectly drawn, words well spoken and stories well told would give life.

I would like to imagine him somewhere where everything he now draws speaks to him and makes him laugh. Tom knew instinctively that was the noblest sound a man could make.