This article by Tommy Gardner was first published April 6 in the News & Citizen of Morrisville.
J.B. McKinley saw countless obituaries come across his desk during his quarter-century with the News & Citizen, but it’s unlikely he came across a sentence in any of them as fitting as the one shared this week by his son, Quentin.
“He was outside, reading a book, and he fell asleep in the sun,” Quentin said.
McKinley — bibliophile, journalist, movie theater owner — died March 16, a few days before the first day of spring, at his winter home in Ozark, Alabama.
“That was normal for him,” his wife, June, said this week. “He didn’t go very far without a book in his hand.”
McKinley was born June 27, 1953, in Ashtabula County, Ohio, but moved to Vermont as a child, growing up on McKinstry Hill in Hyde Park, where his grandfather, Howard “Mac” McKinley, owned an old farmhouse.
When he was in his 20s, McKinley worked as a typesetter at the Lamoille County Weekly in Johnson, a paper that was published from 1971 to 1982. He also worked as a projectionist at the Bijou movie theater in downtown Morrisville, which is where he met his future wife.
“Of course, if you lived in Morrisville, and I did, you went to the movies,” June said.
She and J.B. got together with a little help from a mutual friend who needed a fourth player for their regular pinochle game — June was the fourth player and she and J.B. continued their partnership well beyond the card table, and the two married in the fall of 1982.
They didn’t take their honeymoon right away, but when they did, they went to upstate New York on J.B.’s motorcycle.
“My dad had a fit, because here’s his daughter on the back of this motorcycle with this kind of wild guy,” June said. “He was kind of a wild boy, and I was not at all wild. But, like they say, opposites attract.”
Newspaper editor
Brad Limoge, former News & Citizen publisher, said he and McKinley worked together for 25 years between McKinley’s work as a reporter and then as editor.
“In the 25 years we worked together, he and I never passed a cross word,” Limoge said.
Limoge said he trusted McKinley to run the newspaper, which had been in the Limoge family back to the early 1940s — Brad’s father, Clyde, ran it before him, and his grandfather Arthur ran it before that.
“I left him alone to do his job and I did not need to micromanage him,” Limoge said of McKinley. “He knew what he was doing, and I gave him the latitude to do what he wanted to do.”
He said McKinley was a good mentor to new reporters, too. That includes Andrew Martin, who came on board part time in 2010 and stayed at the paper through its purchase by the Stowe Reporter and well into the pandemic — picking up a nod as Reporter of the Year from the New England Newspaper and Press Association.
“To me, it really seemed like J.B. put a lot of stock in serving as the historical record for Lamoille County,” Martin said. “He always wanted a good lede and a good story, but he pretty clearly also thought it was important that we documented what was going on.”
Amy Noyes was a reporter at the News & Citizen in the 1990s and 2000s. She came on board “pretty fresh out of J school,” with a stringer job at the Hardwick Gazette to her credit and found the local news scene eye-opening.
“I really came to appreciate the level of involvement of everyday folks running their towns and running the county and just making things work,” she said. “J.B. really was one of the first people to give me a full appreciation of that.”
McKinley was well known for his big laugh, a laugh so loud that Noyes said one could hear it from several rooms away.
“You could hear it sometimes with the press running, which was impressive,” she said, laughing herself.
On the big screen
The McKinleys’ love story didn’t just start at the Bijou; it was a key part of their first decade or so together. The couple bought the theater in 1985 from then-owner Blanche Emmons — “the most wonderful lady in the whole wide world,” June recalls.
“We bought it with the understanding that Blanche, who had sat in the ticket booth from age 18 to age 80-something, was still allowed to come down and sell tickets whenever she would like, which she did right to the end of her life,” June said.
The couple tried to make it to the movies once a week, and when they sold it in 1996 to current owner Bill Jarvis, he gave them emeritus status, which meant continued free movies.
Quentin McKinley was practically born in the theater, getting toted there in his car seat at the ripe old age of two weeks. The Bijou was known for featuring a piano player, Seth Briggs, who would play before the early show, and Quentin used to sit on the bench next to him.
“They owned the Bijou when I was born, so they put my name on the marquee,” he said.
McKinley’s love of movies may have come second to his love of books, and he had a vast personal library. He also had a personal interest in making sure the Morristown Centennial Library was impressive. As a library trustee for 23 years, he was a big cheerleader for a major expansion of the library that finished in 2013.
“That was one of his great accomplishments,” Quentin said.
Politics is local
Quentin said it was clear early on that his dad knew pretty much everyone in town.
“We’d walk in to have breakfast somewhere and everybody’d be, ‘Hey, J.B.,’” Quentin said. “He had big shoes in the community.”
McKinley was a conservative, but as a newspaper editor he had to interact with people of all political stripes.
Shap Smith, present Morristown moderator and former Vermont Speaker of the House, spent most of his political career with McKinley as the editor of his local newspaper, penning a regular legislative column for the paper called “Shap Talk.” He said he and McKinley didn’t agree on a lot of issues.
“But that didn’t matter. When I would go into his office to chat, the conversation was always enjoyable,” Smith said in an email this week. “Our discussion might be robust, but it was always friendly — no shouting, just an exchange of ideas. That’s because we cared about the same thing. We both wanted a strong, vibrant and lively community. That we thought there were different ways to get to the goal didn’t matter as long as we were headed to the same destination.”
McKinley even endorsed Democratic Rep. Dan Noyes — Amy’s husband — in Noyes’s first bid for the House. And he did it in a 2016 letter to the editor in his old paper, calling Noyes a “a party-line guy of neither party.”
“He would say there’s no reason you can’t have a conversation about whatever is in front of you and try to come up with some kind of solution or just have a real conversation, even if it is about politics, which seems to be this thing that no one can talk about now without being right kind of crazy about it,” Quentin said.
The family plans on printing an obituary and having a celebration of life this summer, likely in July. June plans to make available a pile of books and hopes everyone who comes by takes one home.
“He really instilled that you could be whatever you wanted to be,” Quentin said. “Just to have a voice and not to be afraid to use your voice and be heard, and not be afraid to take that next step.”