When staff writer Ida Kay Jordan prepared to depart Portsmouth a decade or so ago for a reporting stint in our North Carolina offices, the two of us chatted for nearly an hour about her beloved adopted city, its history and its future.
I was fairly new as Portsmouth editor and was fascinated — and a bit awed — by Ida Kay’s breath of knowledge of the city and its inhabitants: the movers and shakers as well as ordinary Joes and Marys, although Ida Kay would never characterize anyone as ordinary.
Our conversation evolved into a debriefing of sorts. By the time Ida Kay left my office, I had compiled a list of nearly 20 solid stories from her “To Do” list.
Ida Kay Jordan knows and loves Portsmouth. And Portsmouth, judging from letters, telephone calls and accolades that have been bestowed on her, knows and loves her. Indeed, a former Portsmouth city manager once dubbed her “the eighth member of (City) Council,” an honor that stirred mixed feelings in Ida Kay.
Dennis Hartig, the paper’s managing editor, calls Ida Kay “the classic community journalist, equal parts good citizen and good reporter.”
“In writing about Portsmouth, she’s always made it clear that she hopes for the best,” Hartig says. “Most of her stories reflect positively on Portsmouth because that’s the city she knows. But from time to time — as with some recent columns on education — she has been unafraid to be candid about civic shortcomings.
“From someone else that criticism might be dismissed. But not from Ida Kay. That’s what people expect from a good neighbor, someone who’s looking out for the best interest of the community, but who tells it straight.”
That explains, Hartig says, why so many people have come to trust her.
Why all this on Ida Kay Jordan?
Because the longtime writer — whose “Ida Kay’s Portmouth” column has for years anchored Currents, the tabloid serving Portsmouth readers — is retiring. Effective Friday, she’s outta here. Kinda/sorta.
She’ll be off the the full-time payroll at The Virginian-Pilot, settled into “a fabulous condo overlooking the downtown (Portsmouth) waterfront” (Ida Kay’s words).
But she’ll continue, on a free-lance basis, to share her wit and wisdom with Currents readers through her column and occasional stories.
That’s because Ida Kay “knows Portsmouth better than anyone,” says investigative reporter Bill Burke, who was her boss for about 10 months in the early ’80s when he was Portsmouth-Chesapeake city editor for the now-defunct evening paper, The Ledger-Star. He recalled that Currents was published almost daily back then and it was a constant struggle to fill the publication.
“She was a workhorse,” Burke says of Ida Kay. “We’d say, `OK. We need some copy. Where’s Ida Kay?’
“Even in more recent years when someone had a question about Portsmouth or needed information about Portsmouth, I’d say, `Call Ida Kay.’ Almost without fail, she’d provide the answer.”
Ida Kay, an Edenton, N.C., native who grew up in Elizabeth City, is 22 years into her second stint at the newspaper. She was a reporter at The Virginian-Pilot for about two years in the mid-’60s. For about 10 years, she worked at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., six of them in the paper’s editorial department. While in North Carolina, she also founded and co-owned a weekly newspaper. She returned to us in 1979 and has been here since.
I asked Ida Kay if Portsmouth has been an easy assignment.
“People in Portsmouth are easy to deal with if they think you’re fair and honest,” she says. “Frequently, I have been told by some of them that they don’t always agree with me, but that they think I’m fair.”
She said: “People generally know where I stand because of the column and also because I did the editorial page in The Currents when we had one.”
Ida Kay thinks that her stories about Portsmouth may sometimes be “fairer than most” because, she says, “I try hard to walk the middle line.”
She admittedly feels “protective” of the city. “But I think I’m a newspaper person first,” she adds. “After all, I’ve been doing this stuff in one form or another for 55 years! One of my real goals always has been to help the readers understand that the chips fall hard in all cities. I’ve never felt guilty about printing the truth.”
Ida Kay hasn’t been a major journalism prize winner during her career at the paper. But that doesn’t bother her.
“The real ego trip,” she said, “is when somebody you’ve never seen in your life comes up to you in the grocery store and says, `We read everything you write,’ or a stranger stops you in the car repair shop and reports, `We talk about you every Sunday morning at church before we start the lesson.’ ”
When you think about it, such recognition is a prize in a category all by itself.
