Adieu, Santa

Roger Verdon, the burly Irishman from New York who found love and home in Little Sweden, died Sunday, Oct. 6, at his home in Lindsborg.

He had struggled for two years with heart disease. He was 75.

Verdon was born in New York City, grew up in Queens, ventured to Long Island for college, joined the Army, was sent to Vietnam and when he came home alive, joined a few buddies for a drive across America. They stopped in Lindsborg, where one of his pals knew a girl, and where Roger Verdon met Norma Lundberg. They fell in love and off they went, holding hands. They were always holding hands.

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Verdon’s long and distinguished career with newspapers began with reporting assignments at Newsday on Long Island, New York, took him to writing and editing at Kansas newspapers and later to Texas as a writer and editor for 13 years before he and Norma returned to Lindsborg ten years ago.

They came back for a reason. As Roger told it, especially in their annual Christmas letters to friends, life in the Houston suburbs was a grind ‒ the traffic, a dreadful climate, the odd neighbor across the street, the ceaseless crush of Texas superiority.

“There’s a popular bumper sticker here that says ‘If You Ain’t Texas, You Ain’t S**t’, Roger once said. “I’m so glad I’m not.”

He and Norma were at the swimming pool in their back yard in Houston when Norma said, “I don’t want to die in Texas.”

“I don’t want to live in Texas,” Roger said.

Verdon was born April 26, 1949, in New York City to Laura Mary Campbell, who was divorced at the time. She married Thomas J. O’Neill, and they raised Roger and his sister Donna (Verdon) Meidenbauer, now of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Verdon is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of Southampton College in New York and a U.S. Army veteran. He served three years, including in Vietnam as a gunner on a 105-mm Howitzer for the 199th Light Infantry Brigade.

He and Norma were married July 21, 1973, in the living room of Norma’s childhood home. After work in New York, they moved to Lindsborg in 1976 and Verdon joined The Hutchinson News as a reporter, commuting daily. In early 1977 daughter Amy was born in Lindsborg.

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Verdon’s reporting carried a ravenous energy, rolling and seductive accounts of characters and their run-ins with life and living. He told stories that captured readers, stories that unwound in crisp words and seductive paragraphs, one after another:

Here was a priest in southwest Kansas, blizzard-bound, his lonely Mass on Christmas Eve. Then along the back alleys of the State Fairgrounds to find Fat Albert (“the World’s Largest Man”) in a trailer home with his friend, a dwarf who lived under Albert’s bed. Then to a murder scene at a muddy creek bed, and the man who confessed the crime to Roger while detectives roamed about.

He discussed scenes of earlier work at New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal, where workers in lost and found went through the luggage looking for valuables.

One late afternoon in Hutchinson, Roger convinced a man and a woman to sit for an interview at the newspaper, then grilled them until they admitted to

selling phony smoke detectors to unsuspecting elderly homeowners. He wrote about this.

Verdon moved up in the ranks, ultimately to become managing editor of The News in 1985 and put the standards he set for himself to the reporters and photographers he supervised: fact and more facts, tell them carefully and with respect. “Everyone has a story,” he would say, “It’s our job to write them.” His work earned a citation from the Kansas Press Association as Columnist of the Year.

In 1994 he resigned, then joined the Lawrence Journal-World as managing editor. Then he was hired by the Menninger Clinic in Topeka as lead writer and editor of “Perspective”, the Menninger magazine about mental health.

In June 2003, the Menninger Clinic and Foundation moved to Houston, and the Verdons moved with them. They stayed until Roger retired in 2014, when they returned to Lindsborg.

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The date for a celebration of Roger Verdon’s life will be announced later. The body was cremated, the ashes spread in a private ceremony at Coronado Heights, the location Norma had selected for her ashes when she died last year, on October 5. Survivors include daughter Amy, of Chicago, and a sister, Donna (Verdon) Meidenbauer, of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.

Verdon had been a member of Lindsborg Kiwanis for nine years, an active member until his illness, serving as vice-president and then president in 2017-18, and as a member of the board. He led several Club projects including adoption of a new Kiwanis logo, and sponsorship of a Lindsborg downtown sidewalk bench. In early 2020, Verdon accepted the Club’s high award for “Kiwanian of the Year”.

Verdon published two novels, “Fort Nowhere” and “Earth Work”. He was a drummer and he loved Janis Joplin.

Four years ago Roger and Norma published a small illustrated book entitled “Falling in Love, Word by Word,” correspondence from more than 200 letters over four years (1924-28) between Raymond Lundberg, and Maud Andes, the young man and woman who would become Norma’s parents. The letters had been found, tied in a bow, in the bottom of a cedar chest.

“These letters reflected the stages of their friendship,” Roger wrote, “from pals, to friends, to loves, each letter another brick in the foundation that supported their lives together.”

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This bearded Irishman was built like Santa Claus. Each year he slipped into the role at a Hutchinson News Christmas party for 100-plus employees and their children. At a certain moment the din of the hotel ballroom fell away, the distant sound of sleigh bells growing louder until Santa in full dress, white beard covering blonde, burst through the door with an avalanche of wrapped gifts, one for every child. Verdon thrilled to it all. No Santa said “Merrr-yyy Chrisssttt-masss!” like this one.

When the retired and beloved coach and teacher Gary Sandbo died a year ago, Roger said, “Whenever I saw him, I lit up a bit because he was such a positive force in the universe.”

Santa, too.

‒ John Marshall