Winter 2007 Issue
Nieman Notes
Classmates Remember Peg Finucane It went like this: Peg came to Harvard with one course in mind, The news that Peg had died of complications from pancreatic cancer on November 18th at the age of 57 shocked and saddened all of us. In flashing back to our Nieman year, many of us conjured the same picture of Peg. She had braces on her teeth, an electric smile, a halo of curly brown hair, a wry sense of humor, and romance in her heart.
By Mike Pride for the Class of '85
For the Nieman class of 1985’s last event together, a beery backyard pig-out on a lovely evening in late May, the self-anointed class bard mounted the steps to the deck. He caught the crowd’s attention and began to read his sheets of doggerel. To each classmate, he devoted a four-line stanza immortalizing such high points of the year as Ed Chen’s backward tumble into the bushes in front of Sever Hall and Bernard Edinger’s three parts per question and twelve strokes per hole. For the stanza about our classmate Peg Finucane and her beau, Bob Heisler, there was only one possible subject.
Marriage 101, with the good parts underlined,
For a honeymoon, she and Bob plan to get lost on
The midnight shuttle from New York to Boston.
Peg went on to marry Bob in a lovely outdoor wedding on the Connecticut shore. Nineteen years ago, they had a daughter. When Sarah was born, Peg, in typically good form in the last days of the pre-PC era, cheerfully wrote to us that she’d been taken hostage by a dwarf.
Peg was a Midwesterner, born in Chicago. She wanted to be a journalist from a young age. After 20 years as an editor at Newsday, she found a second calling in 2001 and became a full-time journalism professor at Hofstra University.
She and Bob, also an editor, were a great fit, as we had all seen years ago. Peg became a proud mother, finding great pleasure in Sarah’s successes.
Our class recollections of Peg go mainly to warm conversations in the Lippmann House kitchen and a welcoming presence for all occasions. Jeri Eddings summed up the essence of Peg: “She had a knack for finding what made her happy.”
As an editor, Peg loved helping reporters get the most from their talent. Then, when Jeri saw Peg at our last reunion, “her face actually lit up when she talked about teaching.”
Last year, Peg wrote a piece for Nieman Reports about teaching journalism at a time when the future of the craft seems so dark and shaky. In the essay, she characterized herself as “a dinosaur who has learned to use tools.” She and her fellow educators, she wrote, were trying to teach the next generation of journalists “how to evolve quickly while retaining the best parts of our dinosaur tools.”
Unsurprisingly, Peg spoke up for the bedrock principles of journalists of our generation:
“Good journalism—good writing and editing—is just as important as ever. Good journalism works in all media—the delivery methods might change, but the content must be informative, interesting and reliable.”
Journalist, teacher, wife, mother—Peg knew what she wanted, and she succeeded in every role she chose. We will all miss her ready smile and her good heart.
Class notes
End note: David Turnley and Peter Turnley
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