Part 1: I’m a finalist for a Golden Quill Award!

Part 2: A friend from college just won a Pulitzer!

Lessee … On one hand, you have a nomination for one of the annual awards from the Press Association of Western Pennsylvania, in this case for a cool little story I did about alternative-fuel vehicles. On the other hand, you have an award coveted by newspaper journalists throughout the free world, in this case for a series outlining atrocities committed by an elite American recon unit in Vietnam and the Army’s failure to investigate the charges.

Yeah. I’d say we’re about even.

As I’ve stated before, I’m generally not going to name the folks who appear in these entries, mostly because I’m a bit too lazy to ask for their permission. And I’ve got some shit on all of them.

Not that they’d mind. Probably. Umm, maybe.

Here’s an exception: Joe Mahr. Sometime during the 1992-93 school year at Ohio University, I hired a new guy, Joe Mahr, for a newly created copy editing position at The Post, the student-run paper at OU. I hired him because he was enthusiastic, and despite being VERY young, he already knew by heart an alarmingly large portion of the Associated Press Stylebook, which is like the freakin’ Bible in any newsroom. He also got a sparkling recommendation by Dr. Dru Evarts, a professor at OU’s journalism school who definitely earned the mostly-affectionate nickname of “Conan the Grammarian.”

As we all did, Joe made some monumental mistakes at The Post. But it was also apparent, even then, that he was probably better than most of the rest of us.

I remember reading this Toledo Blade series about Tiger Force in Vietnam when it was re-printed in the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, the Blade’s sister paper, last fall. I read most of the series before I bothered to look at the byline, which included Joe’s name. I also remember checking out a recent issue of Editor and Publisher, stolen by The Wife from her newsroom, and seeing the full-page ad taken out by The Blade to tout the series. Not that I have a ton of experience in the Pulitzer process, but I recall thinking, “That’s the kind of thing a paper does when it’s bucking for a Pulitzer.”

And today, he won. In pictures The Blade posted of the newsroom celebration, Joe doesn’t have his arms raised in victory, and he doesn’t appear to be drinking anything even vaguely alcoholic. He just has this slightly goofy smile — like the achievement isn’t quite dawning on him yet.

Appropriate. There are times when you wonder how Joe gets through life. He is — as I am — capable of completely missing the obvious because he’s been caught up in other details. Joe’s wife Mindy can attest to how clueless Joe can be.

But he does well. Professionally, I think, he’s apparently got it figured out. And we got to watch him play with his two daughters at another friend’s wedding last fall — about two weeks before the Tiger Force series was published, by the way — and he handled them like he’d been a father for 40 years, instead of just four.

I’ve got plenty of shit on Joe, too. You could ask him about the Beta Theta Pi house ad that fucked up my life for about a week. You could ask him about flying bread, burned turkey and the most amazing feeling. And I may tell those stories, unless I hear back from Joe soon about my blackmail proposal … I’m going to need at least a couple pints of Guinness to keep quiet.

Meantime … way to go, Style.