Holding Fast: In Honor of Dori Maynard

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
- from “Dreams,” by Langston Hughes

I lost a close friend yesterday. Dori Maynard, head of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, lost her battle with lung cancer and passed away at the age of 56. We had drinks last October, during one of her frequent visits to New York City, a place she could call home as much as Oakland. This was several months after our previous get-together, when her severe cough made me think that she had been running herself more ragged than usual. She seemed better in October, and said as much, as if to reassure me, but her resigned fatigue, the wan smile in place of the beaming mischievous expression I knew so well, spoke volumes that I chose not to engage.

She was more than a sister, but I’ll start there, because we had that type of connection. Her father, Robert Maynard, was Barbadian-American, like my father. Both men pulled themselves up out of a Brooklyn that gave no quarter to anyone, let alone black intellectuals. Bob Maynard became the first African-American editor of a major daily newspaper, the Oakland Tribune. He was a Nieman Fellow, an honor later bestowed on his daughter as well.

Dori was ten years younger than me, and went to Middlebury College in a different time than my turbulent days at Columbia. Had we been contemporaries, we might have dated, or something…whatever our insouciant hormones would have permitted.

Beyond the sibling fantasy, our reality centered on words: articles in newspapers, audited for demographic coverage. Dori hired me as a consultant to the Institute in 2002, to convert a manual content audit process into a web application. I had just come off a great run in Silicon Valley: several years at Cisco during the late-Nineties heyday, followed by three glamorous startups in LA. But then, the dot-com bust took everyone down, and I had to spend my winnings to support my family. The part-time gig at the Maynard Institute was a lifesaver, and though I struggled to admit it, a welcome change from the lockstep Valley mentality that had proven strangely inequitable in difficult times.

After commuting from my home in San Carlos, a fairy-tale town with no sense of hardship, down to Beverly Hills, or back east to Manhattan, I took BART every day out to Oakland, coming up out of the 12th Street station and dodging the human traffic in front of the Tribune Building where the Institute had its offices. In those days, the street commerce was so fierce that a pair of Oakland’s finest were continuous fixtures on the corner. I like to think that this was one of many lessons Dori taught me: “You might have been all that, but here you are now, so make the best of it.”

She was always supportive, and firm. Whatever my accomplishment, she would be gracious with her remarks, not effusive, but appreciative. Over the years, we grew together, taking the Institute into the digital age, to the extent that her resources permitted. She was constantly raising money, as if shoveling coal in a locomotive cab. No foundation, or donor, was too distant. Frequent flier miles were her staple, and she enjoyed the travel that in the end must have been such a challenge.

Above all, Dori was humble, and tolerant, except when it came to the dignity of all ethnic groups. On the rare, inevitably drunken occasion when I might make a politically incorrect joke, she would recoil in horror, knowing my inherently liberal nature, but abhorring even superficial slights to others. And yet, she was one tough cookie in the trenches. When her good friend Chauncey Bailey was murdered on an Oakland street in 2007, Dori spearheaded the Chauncey Bailey Project, as if daring evil to show its head again: “We cannot stand for a reporter to be murdered while working on behalf of the public,” she said. “Chauncey’s death is a threat to democracy…We will not be bullied.” This took courage, because the threat was real, local to Oaktown.

She and I used to have the greatest conversations, skewering everyone from George W. Bush to more challenging targets. We talked about books, politics, anything and everything that came to mind. She listened with a gimlet eye when I whined about this or that, the challenge of writing fiction and software at the same time, the lack of respect in the Valley, and she kept me on as a consultant past the time when she could afford to, sensing the importance of whatever she could pay me.

Generosity, along with championing journalistic diversity, will be Dori’s legacy. Her work is too important to end with her passing. I aspire to the audacity of her efforts, and miss the pleasure of her company. RIP.