Louis Graham and Jerome Wright worked together at The Commercial Appeal for decades. At the end of their time at the paper, Graham was the editor and Wright ran the editorial page.

“Every Monday, I would ask him what he did that weekend,” Graham said. “And every Monday, his answer was, ‘I went driving around.’”

Wright would just get in his car and head out to see things.

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What sort of things?

He never knew. That was the whole point.

“He had this extraordinary curiosity about Memphis,” Graham said. “He would drive all over everywhere. He loved going to Binghampton, where he grew up. But he loved driving to Germantown or DeSoto County, too. He wanted to know what was happening. He would call me and ask me if I knew that such-and-such was happening down the street from where I lived. He had this amazing love of the city and a curiosity about everything and everyone.”

Wright, 74, died Monday. He walked his dog, as usual. Then he told his wife, Gwen, that he was headed off to use the treadmill. She heard him fall.

“He was planning to go to work today,” Gwen Wright said.

Of course he was.

Jerome Wright retired from The Commercial Appeal in 2017, after working at the paper for — as he once phrased it— “45 years, seven months and 16 days.”

You would think that would be enough time covering a city, wouldn’t you?

But after a couple years as director of communications at LeMoyne-Owen College, Wright took a part-time job as an editor at the Tri-State Defender, where he was still working when he died.

“He said he was going to do it until the end of the year,” Gwen Wright said. “But then last year ended and a new one began, and he was still working and I never heard another thing about it. He just loved his job. He always did.”

Wright was hired by The Commercial Appeal in 1971, just a few years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

“Look at the historical context,” said Otis Sanford, who worked alongside Wright at the paper for decades. “Coming out of the King assassination, all of a sudden one day, the editors realized, ‘Hey, there aren’t any Black people at this newspaper.’ So they realized they had to change that. Jerome was one of the first people they hired. It wasn’t easy, believe me. But Jerome wasn’t bitter. He was the opposite. His whole life manifested kindness.”

Not long before Wright retired from The Commercial Appeal, he told his colleagues on the paper’s editorial board a small story. My friend David Waters later wrote about it in a column. The story bears repeating today.

Seems that before Wright got his newspaper job, he worked as an aide in a nursing home. It was a particularly sad nursing home. And Wright’s boss, Mr. Spencer, was particularly harsh.

So one day, Wright calmly asked Mr. Spencer what he had done to make him so mad.

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“I’m not mad at you,” Mr. Spencer replied. “I’m just mad. I never thought I’d end up in a place like this.”

The lesson, according to Wright?

“That day I realized that people are going through a lot, and it rarely has anything to do with you,” he said. “But you won’t know until you take the time to find out.”

So Wright always took the time to find out. He asked questions. He listened to the answers. He asked more questions. Then he listened to those answers, too.

“It’s not that Jerome didn’t have opinions about people or their politics, because he did,” Graham said. “But he had this belief that everybody deserved to be heard. Even if he thought they were full of it; they deserved to be heard. And he treated everybody with such respect that they loved him because he was genuinely kind. I’m sure you’re hearing that from everybody, right? Everybody loved Jerome.”

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Former Memphis police director Buddy Chapman told me Wright was “the most delightful person I ever worked with in my life.” Karanja Ajanaku, who hired Wright at the Tri-State Defender, said Wright was “one of those guys who went around doing nice things because he knew that was what you were supposed to do.” Sanford called Wright “the most kind-hearted person I have ever met.”

But it’s not just that Wright was kind. He was kind and passionate and fair and tough. He was deeply informed and he was relentlessly curious. He knew more than almost anyone else about Memphis — he was the person other reporters always went to when they wanted to learn more about a particular neighborhood — and he still went out driving every weekend, to learn even more.

Oh, and he did it all out of a spirit of concern and affection. Because he cared about the city he called home.

“I never knew Jerome’s schedule,” Graham said. “He would come and go, the way we always did. But I later learned that every Tuesday morning, when he was not around the office, it was because he was going to an elementary school to read to kids.”

It was that same spirit Wright carried into a long phone conversation with former Memphis City Council member TaJuan Stout-Mitchell Monday, just hours before he died.

“It’s not that Jerome didn’t have opinions about people or their politics, because he did. But he had this belief that everybody deserved to be heard. Even if he thought they were full of it; they deserved to be heard. And he treated everybody with such respect that they loved him because he was genuinely kind. I’m sure you’re hearing that from everybody, right? Everybody loved Jerome.”

Louis Graham

“We talked for about an hour and a half about loved ones, caring for aging parents, the promise of a new generation of leadership, how the mayor and the council chair could turn things around if they forge a way to work together,” Stout-Mitchell wrote me in a text.

At one point, after the two lamented how many friends had died recently, Stout-Mitchell wondered aloud who would write their tributes.

Wright responded: “I got yours, my friend.”

That was one of the last things Wright would ever say to Stout-Mitchell. When she learned he had died, she checked her email and found he had sent her a note.

“‘Enjoyed this morning’s conversation,” it began.

To which Stout-Mitchell said she silently responded: “I did too, my friend. I did, too.”