During my college days, I spent the academic year working at The Daily Athenaeum and my summers working at The Intelligencer and News-Register in Wheeling. My formal education as a journalist was happening in Morgantown, but my real-world education as a newspaper person was happening in a noisy newsroom in the Northern Panhandle.

Among my earliest assignments was to go speak with a candidate named David McKinley who, if I remember correctly, was running for governor at the time, and was making a stop in the Wheeling area during which he was going to have some time to talk to a reporter.

I was terrified. Until that time, I had taken obituaries, retyped press releases and done a feature story on a man who said he had been abducted by aliens.

This was a well-known politician, and I was still young enough to get nervous around mayors and city council members in the same way one might with a celebrity. My city editor at the time told me not to worry, she was sending a veteran photographer with me. Thank goodness she did, because he coached me through the entire experience.

What I remember about what happened next is a bit of a blur except for two impressions.

“Oh, that wasn’t so bad,” and “initiative, referendum and recall.”

Those are the only three words I remember McKinley saying, all those years ago. But I also remember him being very patient with me. I hadn’t yet honed my questioning skills, and I have the feeling I came across somewhat like a toddler who kept asking “Why?”

I got hung up on understanding initiative, referendum and recall (tools to empower voters to suggest or repeal legislation, or remove elected officials); and he got hung up on explaining it because that was the kind of mind he had.

McKinley was an analyzer, but that made him a good teacher and, I suspect, a better communicator with his colleagues in Charleston and Washington, D.C.

Many years later, I had long-since lost any nerves about dealing with politicians; and he had made a name for himself in Congress as a person willing to work across the aisle and to dive as deeply as he needed into a matter to figure out how to best serve West Virginians.

He called one day asking my opinion on a subject he admitted he had already brought up to my dad. Tempting as it might have been to just parrot what I believed my dad would have said, I understood McKinley was looking for another perspective to help him understand fully.

He was an intelligent public servant whose decency and sense of responsibility kept him from falling into the swamp.

Political tactics got nastier, but he never thought so little of Mountain State residents that he tried to cater to the lowest in us to win an election; nor would he compromise his own values when he believed he was doing what was right for the people he understood he served.

I remember being disappointed to learn he would no longer be representing West Virginia in Washington and thinking Congress had lost not just one of its two engineers, but a voice of reason.

Dad’s been gone for more than five years. But when I was given the news of McKinley’s passing I got a fresh zing thinking West Virginia had lost one of the very few people who could (and did) match wits with my dad. I briefly wished it was possible to record whatever conversation they’re having about solving the state’s problems now.

It’s not, of course. But the rest of us can hold on to the idea that someone of McKinley’s caliber thought those problems WERE solvable and worth dedicating his political career to the effort. Here’s hoping elected officials today are inspired by his example.

Christina Myer is executive editor of The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. She can be reached via e-mail at cmyer@newsandsentinel.com.