As a writer, I look at other writers closely, and askance.

Especially the way they accept good fortune, and praise. Disaster, writers greet like old friends: “Rejection seeks me out and finds me,” a writer pal frequently laments. But triumph is a distrusted impostor to whom writers dare not tell the truth.

Happy occasions: The newly published writer takes the obligatory “unboxing” pictures—or worse, video. Of course we only see Christmas morning. Never the immediate and inevitable Christmas afternoon, when the writer asks, like even the most gift-showered child in a sea of wrapping paper: Is this all there is? And just an undefinable weirdness that makes a writer forget how to smile, or something.

Media attention: “Thanks so much for having me!” the writer shrieks at the end of the interview. Gratitude is good. Pathetic gratitude is sad. The line is fine. Terry Gross didn’t have you on because you needed an ego boost. She had you on because she thought you might have something interesting to say. That’s also why people listened to the interview. So don’t lose your breath thanking her as if she stopped to change your tire on the side of the road. Thank her graciously, and tell her it was a pleasure, if it was.

Critical praise: These folks have been writing a book for however long, searching for an agent or a publisher however doggedly and behaving however egregiously, as I put it in my first “Sales Mode” piece last year, “like an ever-more rabid, psychotic, hungry, horny wolverine, whose raging compulsions can only be sated by sales of a book, for $14.95.”

But now, every time they share a new endorsement, they’re suddenly amazed and humbled. None of them, after decades of writing, hints at what’s also on their heart: “It’s about goddamn time.”

I know it’s ungracious to say how you really feel. Except you’re a writer, in which case you’re supposed to be paid for saying how you really feel. Would Scotty Fitzgerald have asked Zelda to film his unboxing of This Side of Paradise for Insta? Oh, I guess he probably would have, and would have grumbled to Hem that Scribner’s put him up to it.

All to say:

A recent endorsement for my forthcoming book Soccer Dad did actually make me feel amazed and humbled. Well, not me, exactly. My inner seventh-grader, who believed (and still does) that some of the very best American literature in the late 20th century appeared in articles in Sports Illustrated, by Frank Deford, Dan Jenkins, Gary Smith … and Alexander Wolff, who was a staff writer there for 36 years.

“A gem of a book,” Wolff went on to call it.

Amazed. Humbled.

And about goddamn time.

(And amazed and humbled!)

(And about goddamn time!)

One of the unhappy consequences of there being shite trade news coverage anymore in the world of corporate communications is that we don’t hear when our heroes die.

In 2011, public relations pioneer Chet Burger died nine months before I found out, which was a shame because I considered him a mentor. Communications strategy guru Les Potter died last April, and a protege of his didn’t find out until this month. Legendary corporate journalism teacher Don Ranly died November 10 and nobody in this business heard about it until a couple weeks ago.

And I just learned yesterday from a few communication colleagues that Wilma Mathews died the day after Ranly did, on November 11.

There is no published obituary, only her bio, on the website of Arizona State University, where she was a faculty associate until she retired in 2008. Luckily the bio isn’t bad, and it was probably written by Wilma herself. After mentioning her big corporate career at AT&T and her teaching and her authorship of a media relations standard text, On Deadline, the bio concludes with a graph labeled, “Now, for the real stuff:

Wilma is an avid mystery, biography and history reader. She enjoys travel and is the consummate tourist, tramping through zoos and old houses with equal aplomb. She is an unabashed fan for the University of North Carolina basketball team. She likes backgammon and Jeopardy and uses knitting, needlework and reading in lieu of tranquilizers. Her greatest moments in life include being a sponsor for a young boy in Indonesia. Among her greatest adventures is being attacked by a one-armed gibbon at an elephant camp in Thailand.

Not mentioned is a cruise Wilma took in the Bering Strait—as a deckhand on a freighter—sometime in her 50s, as I remember. Not mentioned is what Wilma and her generation of ambitious women executives endured in the 1970s in order to ascend through what was then called “the velvet ghetto” of corporate communications—one of few corporate departments that would hire women. Or “girls,” as they were still called by a lot of the men. Not mentioned is how Wilma came out of all that with her humanity not only intact, but accentuated—and expressed, as a mentor to many younger women and men coming up.

And also not mentioned is the very first of many conversations I had with Wilma, over the first 20 years of my career. This was in 1992, and I was only a few months into my first job, at a weekly PR trade newsletter called The Ragan Report, and doing a story on Wilma’s work at AT&T then. In the trailing fallout of the Ma Bell breakup, the company was closing plants and other facilities, one after another. It was Wilma’s job to parachute in and orchestrate those closings in an elaborate procedure that involved the site manager learning at the very last minute. It was humane, Wilma explained, because the alternative was the guy knowing, and trying to go about his work for even an hour among his crew, as if everything was normal.

After Wilma’s forty-something self walked my twenty-four-year-old self through the process that she was executing at leasts several times a year, I thought to ask her how she was affected by that gut-wrenching work. Without hesitating, she told me she flies home on a Friday night and “I curl up for the weekend, with my best friend. Jack Daniel’s.”

Could I actually quote her on that?

“Sure!” she said with a laugh—and I had my first good quote, my first good source, my first good story—”The Angel of Downsizing,” was the title, I think—and my first real friend in the communication business. And real was what Wilma Mathews was. Tough, funny, salty, vulnerable, prideful, humble, decent and above all, honest.

Her kind never grew on trees. Sometimes, it seems in this Land of LinkedIn Logrolling, her kind doesn’t grow at all anymore.

Anyway, Wilma: Say hi to Lou. And see about getting a bigger table, because the crowd never gets smaller.