‘Six regular readers’
can save a community

Her words last graced what at the time was a separate Peabody version of this page nine years ago, when she bade farewell to her “six regular readers” by offering a final column of well-grounded personal advice.

Her death this week leaves a void that desperately needs to be filled.

Susan Marshall joined our team in 2001 for what she thought would be just a few months — until, in her words, we could find a “real” journalist to take over as editor of the Peabody Gazette-Bulletin.

Despite her protestations, she established herself as a very real journalist of the first order, becoming the heart and soul not only of the newspaper she edited but also of the community it served.

Her beautiful writing, commonsense advice, and continual urging of citizens to become more involved in their community may be even more needed today than they were from 2001 to 2016.

Nearly every editorial Susan wrote ended with a plea for readers to become more engaged with their community — as donors, volunteers, voters, even candidates for office. To her, citizenship meant speaking up and speaking out, not cocooning and carping.

In recent years, Susan’s beloved Peabody has been buffeted. Her “six regular readers” cannot help but wonder whether missteps and divisiveness might have been avoided if at least a few of them had accepted her eloquent advice beyond her retirement.

Newspapers function best as consciences for their communities. Like any conscience, they may seem at times antagonistic to those plowing ahead without taking time to listen and reflect. But they always come back to the commonsense advice Susan routinely offered in her heroic 15 years of dedicated service.

Anytime any of us are tempted to blame others for whatever plight our communities might face, we have to — as Susan often suggested — accept much of the blame ourselves. Abusive or incompetent officials don’t rise to power on their own. They rise to power because we elect them or don’t provide alternatives for voters to select instead.

Whenever you point a finger at someone in power, your cupped hand is pointing four fingers back at yourself. Opening your hand to offer whatever you can to your community is what Susan continually advocated in a message even more relevant today than it was when she served as editor.

Susan will be missed. The best way to honor her memory is to at long last do as she suggested, keep ourselves regularly apprised of truth, not gossip, in our communities, and do everything we can to make sure they move forward and achieve the greatness we believe they are capable of.

— ERIC MEYER