We’ve had lots of changes at the Courier during the last year or so, as columnists including Carmine Santa Maria and Stan Gershbein have moved on and, as always, reporters come and go, but no change is going to have a bigger effect than the retirement of columnist, writer, and all-around go-to person Shavana Abruzzo after nearly 30 years.
Along with the column she wrote every week, Shavana has knocked out every intro for our numerous special sections, every speech spoken at our special events, every obituary that had to be put together on short notice, and just about anything else that came up late and had to be done by deadline — whether that be in a day or an hour from now.
I met Shavana in 1996 when I was a reporter at Courier Life. So I should say I met her at Wheelers in Sheepshead Bay, the local watering hole where the editorial staff shot the breeze after another deadline run. Back then she had worked for the paper for about 10 years, and she was the pro I looked to when needing help with a story.
I quickly realized Shavana had a knack for writing powerful stories simply and concisely — a trait I tried to emulate.
So when I came back to the Courier in 2009 as editor, I knew Shavana was going to be a very important part of my leadership team.
I never doubted her ability to get the job done, but that didn’t mean it was going to be easy.
See, she writes an opinion column every week, and not everyone agrees with what she had to say — even me.
That fact led to many an argument — some heated — where Shavana and I went back and forth about this or that. But in the end we always made it work. Even If we couldn’t make all our readers agree, at least we could.
Then the deluge of letters came pouring in, and more than once we’ve had an entire letters page filled with complaints about Shavana.
Local newspaper like ours play an important role in the communities we cover. Sure, we write about block parties and great restaurants and 100th birthdays, but that is the easy part.
The hard part is when we put a mirror up to the people we cover, knowing full-well they will not like what they see. Shavana has lots of mirrors, and using them takes lots of guts.
Many colleagues and readers have asked me through the years how I could print what she writes. My answer was simple: You don’t know Shavana, but I do. You don’t know where she was born (Nairobi), or where her parents were from (Pakistan), or where she was educated (London) or that when she first went to grammar school, she did not speak a word of English.
You don’t know how or why she came to America, what she had to go through to stay here, and how proud she was almost 25 years later on her happiest day, when she raised her right hand, looked up at the flag, took an oath, and became an American citizen.
I had learned these things over drinks at Wheelers and during those arguments in my office. And I knew that my columnist’s life experience gave her an insight her contemporaries lacked. She had a point of view that, had I not met her and learned her story, would have been unimaginable to me.
So I could not let the voice of a strong immigrant woman who made her dreams come true in America be silenced.
Shavana always told me when she typed up the hate mail she received to run on our letters page, she only looked for a few key phrases — “once again” or “continually” or other words that proved it wasn’t the first time a letter-writer had read her column.
That, she said, let her know that people were looking in that mirror and that, whether they liked it or not, her words were being heard.
So I wish her the best in her retirement, I thank her for being a fantastic co-worker, writer, reporter, employee, and mentor.
But mostly I thank for having the guts, the strength, to write down what she felt every week for nearly 30 years, then let the chips fall where they may.
