Editor’s note: I shared an office with J.B. McKinley at the News & Citizen for two years. Every good word written about him in Tommy Gardner’s news story below is true, in my experience. And I would add that J.B. displayed his humor, kindness, encouragement, gentleness and humility with perhaps the best grasp of the English language, and especially its vocabulary, that I have ever met face-to-face. He was never a pedantic show-off, as so many others are. He just loved it and lived it.

His secret is that he didn’t own a television. He loved and watched movies incessantly, but his favorite pasttime was reading – always, always reading, for awareness of the world around him as it was, is, and could be, and just plain fun.