Thanks, Rosie

Ten years ago a rather assertive lady walked through the door of the News Leader. She was bold and confident and being astute, I put her in charge. Frankly, I didn’t have much choice, for she is a take charge kind of gal.
Rosie Colvin has run things since then in our Fremont office, and she has run things her way.
We’ve had many good people manage our Fremont office over the years. The job responsibilities have changed and no one before her was expected to do the things that Rosie has been doing. Still, nobody did it like Rosie, either.
This is a better paper today because Rosie came our way.
A few months ago, Rosie announced that she and her husband, Bob, would be traveling back to Illinois and would likely be gone for at least a month. She added that there were some other events on the horizon for them, and she wasn’t sure if or when she would be back, and I needed to find someone to fill in just in case.
I got a call from her a few weeks ago that she was back from Illinois but would be going to Georgia to see her son and grandchildren there.
In my heart, I have held out some hope that Rosie might get back and say she's ready to go back to work, but I know she and Bob have some other priorities now. I certainly am not closing that door, but I don’t want the time to pass before I say how much I appreciate all she has done for us.
From a business and professional standpoint, I could not ask for anyone to care more about doing it right. Rosie is a detail person. Just ask the stat people at Aycock and Rosewood High School, where she kept football statistics. She developed statistics for us on our newspaper rack sales and mail distribution, too.
If you came to work for Rosie at the News Leader, you were going to work. Some of the people who came in weren’t there to work, and weren’t around for very long. Even those of us who have been around longer than Rosie know that when we are over in Fremont, we do it Rosie’s way. And that was fine with us.
While there is a serious business side to Rosie, over time we have all realized that there's more to her than that.
About the time Rosie came to work for us, we had sold the Johnstonian Sun, the Selma newspaper at that time. Until we sold it, as that was the largest paper with the largest office, it was the base for our production and distribution for that paper, along with our Fremont and Princeton papers.
When we sold that paper, we moved the production to our Princeton office, and the distribution to our Fremont office, and we put Rosie in charge of that.
We had two retired gentlemen, one from Pine Level and one from Selma, who had been helping us by transporting the papers from the printer and addressing the papers. As part of the terms of our sale, they stayed with the new owners to help them with the Selma paper.
Well, as happens, the new owners had their way of doing things, and the old employees who stayed with them didn’t fit. A few months later, they asked if they could come back to work with us.
Jack and Bob continued with us for some time in Fremont, despite it being a bit of a drive, until their health situations forced them to quit. They didn’t stop being Rosie’s (and our) friends, however. She still has lunch or dinner with them from time to time.
For many of the years that Rosie ran the office, we had two reporters, John Feely and the late Greg Tobolski, both bachelors. I know they had a surrogate mom in Pikeville.
Both of them rented trailers while they were living in the area. When hurricanes came through the area, both were over in Rosie’s home.
Greg’s parents visited Rosie just a few weeks ago.
We have had retired folk help in our office, usually just for some part-time hours, who sometimes want a reason to get out for a while. One time in particular, Rosie chose to let one of those workers pick up the slack, making her own job more difficult, but Rosie felt it was the right decision to make.
In the last few years, Rosie’s grandson, Travis Milligan, and his friends would often help with processing the paper after school. Some of those kids Rosie and Bob had worked with in Little Falcons, and often they would be at Rosie and Bob’s house evenings and on weekends. They were her boys, as well.
The Cotton Museum, the Pikeville 4th Celebration, Little Falcons, Aycock Football, and the News Leader, among many others, are better because a lady from Pikeville cared about them.
Thanks, Rosie. We care about you!