One day in 1982, Craig Lynch walked into the old Sun-Times building on Wabash Avenue and asked Taylor Bell for a job.

“He said some of his friends had heard that we were looking for [freelance writers] to cover high school sports,” said Bell, the now-retired Sun-Times prep sports editor.

Bell’s philosophy was to give virtually any potential writer a chance. Those who couldn’t file an exact copy under tight deadlines tended to be weeded out fairly quickly.

This was no problem for Lynch, even though he was different from most journalists: he was blind from birth.

But that didn’t stop him. Lynch spent more than 25 years covering prep sports for the Sun-Times, part of a career that saw him become one of the most well-known and beloved members of Chicago’s sports media scene.

Lynch died Tuesday shortly after suffering a stroke. He was 72 years old.

Tributes to Lynch have been popping up all week on social media from other members of the media and even the Cubs, who said on Twitter: “The Cubs mourn the passing of longtime radio journalist Craig Lynch, who covered the team for over 20 years Craig was a pleasure to work with and the press box at Wrigley Field will not be the same without him.

Lynch’s work spanned decades and media. In the 1980s and 1990s, in addition to his freelance work for the Sun-Times, he was a full-time employee of Triton College. As athletic director of the college radio station, he covered a Triton baseball team that included future MLB players Kirby Puckett and Lance Johnson.

Lynch also covered college sports at Northwestern and DePaul (he went to school with longtime Blue Demons women’s basketball coach Doug Bruno) and filed radio stories about the Cubs for the stations. from the south of the state.

But his coverage of high school sports is perhaps his most enduring legacy. After leaving the Sun-Times, Lynch continued to work for various suburban outlets.

“He did the job as well as anyone with sight,” Bell said. “He always got the interviews, always got the stats.”

Bell remembers occasional backsliding in the early years. “In its early days, some coaches [said], “What does a blind man do to cover my game?” “Said Bell. “We had to get out of this. We got away with it. »

“He didn’t want anyone to do him a favour,” Bell added. “[Coaches] soon realized he knew what he was doing.

Much like his colleagues in Chicago’s competitive media environment.

Chuck Garfien, a veteran reporter and anchor for NBC Sports Chicago, first crossed paths with Lynch at a DePaul men’s basketball game in 2005.

“It blew my mind,” Garfien said as he watched Lynch do his job. “I had to know him. He became a dear friend and someone who touched me deeply. …I wanted to live my life like him.

Garfien and other friends recalled Lynch’s infallible nature and quick wit.

It tells a story about Lynch going to a Cubs/Dodgers series in Los Angeles in 1979. A Dodgers fan heckled Chicagoans saying, “You’d have to be deaf, dumb and blind to be a Cubs fan”, to which Lynch replied, “Don’t hit the blind.”

Tim McKinney is another colleague who became good friends with Lynch after he continued to cross paths on the beat of prep sports. “He was one of the most unique people you know,” said McKinney, who was struck by Lynch’s “sincerity and kindness.”

McKinney has helped Lynch around Wrigley Field for the past few years and the pair have also gone to college games and MLB road trips, where Lynch seemed to know everyone.

One night at Northwestern, Michigan State coach Tom Izzo invited Lynch into the Spartans locker room for a chat. In Cincinnati, there was a shoutout from longtime Reds broadcaster Marty Brenneman.

“He was quick-witted,” McKinney said of Lynch. “We always had a lot of fun and we laughed a lot.”

I haven’t stopped dreaming of Our Women Under the Sea since I finished it. The award-winning author of short story collection Salt Slow tells the story of two wives, one of whom has just returned from a mission on the high seas gone wrong. Taking up some of her previous concerns (liminal spaces, the proximity between the body and nature, death), Julie Armfield’s first novel is sharp, atmospheric, dryly funny, sad, distinctive. If it doesn’t appear on many charts, I’ll eat my hat.

What is the book about? A failed relationship, perhaps. These women – Miri and Leah – love each other, but since Leah’s return, silence has crept “like a backbone” into their life together. Leah is like a shocked war veteran. She rarely eats and is constantly in the bath listening to a sound machine. Miri, not knowing what to do, spends hours on the phone trying in vain to reach Leah’s former employer.

It could be a book about the sea, about depression, illness, grief. It is organized into five sections, each corresponding to an ocean layer

Gothic elements are knitted throughout (“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place where things that shouldn’t be move in the dark” goes the tantalizing first sentence). Everything that happens on the surface has a symbolic and metaphorical meaning underneath. Take Leah’s observation that “things can thrive under unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right type of skin. It seems to refer to sea creatures, but the choice of word allows for a much broader meaning.

This mode of expression is omnipresent everywhere. Prose is looking for something, but what? It could be a book about the sea, about depression, illness, grief. It is organized into five sections, each corresponding to an ocean layer (Sunlight Zone, Twilight Zone, Midnight Zone, Abyssal Zone, Hadal Zone). We follow the trajectory down, down, down.

There are ecological undertones – one thinks of rising tides, even if the climate crisis is not explicitly mentioned. Facts abound (“almost everything you imagine when you imagine a jellyfish is actually just water”), as if we were reading an unexpectedly moving textbook. We gather information, but there is also the understanding that we can never “know enough to escape the panic of not knowing”.

Indeed, if the writing is of an implacable requirement, Our Wives Under the Sea tends towards the unknowable, which can also be synonymous with death or strangeness. There is an almost spiritual infinity in his quest. Like all good novels, it goes deep, and then deeper.

Dolly Parton’s next novel will take a “dark” autobiographical turn.

The country singer/actress/businesswoman – who teamed up with best-selling ‘Alex Cross’ writer James Patterson, 74, for their thriller, ‘Run, Rose, Run’ – recently teased that he it was a careful look at the shadows of the music industry.

“It shows a lot of the darker side of it – the people who were in it, like me, you know because you’ve been through it,” Parton, 76, told “CBS Sunday Morning” reporter Lee Cowan for a story airing this weekend.

The novel tells the story of a Rose, a young country singer/songwriter from Nashville who realizes that fame and fortune aren’t all they’re made out to be. She also exploits a deep secret that could destroy her career.

“Have you been through a lot of that? Are some of them in the book? Cowan asked the CEO of Dollywood Company about their new mystery thriller, which will be released on March 7.

“Oh, yeah,” Parton replied. “You see all this. All the managers who – people who are going to scam you, they’ll try to steal your songs, they’ll scam you, they’ll do anything. I have seen everything.”

The official book description dramatically states that Nashville is the city “where she came to claim her destiny. It’s also where the darkness she fled might find her. And destroy it.

Parton hinted that she would like to participate in a potential film adaptation of the tome, the subject of which was originally pitched by Patterson to Parson in 2019.

“I hope to be able to play this character when we make a movie of the book, which we hope to do, at some point,” she said.

The Country Music Hall of Famer will also release a new album of original songs based on the novel.

Parton will host the 57th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards with fellow country stars Jimmie Allen and Gabby Barrett on March 7. She’ll take the stage with Kelsea Ballerini to perform a song from the album “Run, Rose, Run,” the Grammy-winner recently told People.

Other A-list artists hitting the Las Vegas stage on Monday include Eric Church, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, Kane Brown, Thomas Rhett and Maren Morris.

PORTSMOUTH, NH (AP) — A rare version of a book believed to be the first novel published in the United States by a black woman has returned to its home state of New Hampshire.

An original first edition of “Our Nig; or Sketches From the Life of a Free Black” was recently given at New Hampshire’s Black Heritage Trail, WMUR-TV reports.

The book was hand-delivered to the organization by a retired librarian in California who found the novel in a family safe, according to the station.

The organization plans to display the book at its headquarters in Portsmouth after a minor restoration.

JerriAnne Boggis, the organization’s executive director, said the largely autobiographical work, which Wilson wrote while living in Boston in 1859, represents an act of courage.

The novel tells the story of Frado, a black girl who is abused and overworked as an indentured servant to a New England family.