I first connected with James Gill, the longtime New Orleans columnist who died last month, as a college student who read his work in the 1980s. It was a decade when industry executives had launched USA Today as the bold future of journalism, giving readers a publication known for its bright graphics, arresting pictures and snappy content meant to be read anywhere in the country.
In this vision of things, the media of tomorrow would be colorful, brisk and also rather generic, with stories that carried no regional flavor or local point of view.
Against that model of storytelling stood James Gill, whose columns I devoured within the pages of The Times-Picayune. James was many things — clever, funny, merrily pugnacious — but no one ever called him generic. His background as a native Englishman transplanted to Louisiana gave his columns a patois that defied category. It’s safe to say that no readership consultant or focus group could have embraced the oddity of a Brit living here and chronicling the foibles of Cajuns, clerics, con artists, politicians and assorted Crescent City characters.
But Gill’s presence as a singular voice for a singular region didn’t grow from some concept cooked up in a boardroom to anticipate the whims of the marketplace. His career was touched less by design than happy accident, which is what made his prose spark with such winking vitality. The columns Gill wrote charmed us because they seemed so much like life in this part of the world — gaudy, wry, unpredictable.
I won’t quote deeply from those columns here; they’re easily available online and best read at full length. But opening my paper last autumn to find a James Gill disquisition on cricket, that quintessentially English pastime, was a tonic for what ailed me. “But what good,” Gill asked, “is sport? It is said to be a substitute for war, and most of us would regard it as a preferable option, with maybe a few soccer hooligans in dissent.”
Though Gill was acerbic on the page, he was affable in person. I learned this firsthand when I worked with him on the editorial page, then discovered it again when my wife and I visited London in 2019.
James and his wife Gail happened to be there, too, and they offered to meet us at a local pub. James suggested that we order fish and chips, the national delicacy, and halfway through the meal, he nodded toward the condiments. “It’s best enjoyed with a little vinegar,” James told me, smiling.
For James, life was best enjoyed with a little vinegar, too. On the flight home, I remembered my early days in a rival newsroom, where an editor was fond of saying that our paper would do well if we had our own James Gill.
But we never found another one. His gift, which is now our loss, is that there was only one James Gill.