Eulogy for Norman Schorr

This eulogy was delivered Sunday, March 27 at  the Society for the Advancement of Judaism Synagogue, 15 West 86 Street, by OPC member and Freedom of the Press Committee Co-Chairman Kevin McDermott

First may I say what an honor it is to have been asked by this family to speak about Norman Schorr and his years and years of involvement in the cause of press freedom, in the essential human right of free expression.

It was 15 years ago, I think, when I had just been elected to my first term on the Overseas Press Club’s board of directors, that I first met Norm. I was looking for a specific way to make a contribution to the board and Norman’s partner on the press-freedom committee, Larry Martz, suggested I make Norman’s acquaintance. After a long lunch in some joint on Madison Avenue he had me fully converted to the cause. Norman was the sort of man you are glad to meet in life, practical and smart and honorable. By the time I knew him Norman’s involvement in press-freedom issues was a commitment of long standing. He was, as most of you know, a founding board member of Amnesty International. It was logical for him to see the cause of free expression as an extension of that work. By that point he had already been a member of the Overseas Press Club of America since 1953.

Until this last year or so when illness and injury began to overtake him, Norman’s concern for journalists in jeopardy never stopped, never quit. It might be a reporter imprisoned without trial in Belarus. Or an editor in Sri Lanka whose office was firebombed. Norman would be on the phone within a day or so brainstorming about how the Overseas Press Club of America might go to bat for these people. There was such a steady flow of those phone calls form Norm that I began to feel grateful that he never learned to use e-mail. His daughter Susan may feel differently about that, since she was inevitably volunteered for anything Norman couldn’t accomplish with a telephone or a typewriter.

Five or six years ago I was in Washington for a meeting of the Inter American Press Association. I recall chatting with a member of the board who expressed amazement at what OPC’s press-freedom committee accomplished with its handful of volunteers. I remember saying that it was entirely due to the energies and genuine commitment of people like Norman and Larry and Jeremy Main, the current co-chairs of the committee.

Press freedom was the focus of Norman’s energy. But on or off the OPC’s board of governors Norman was stalwart in support of the organization, through fat times and thin. OPC is coming up on its 75th birthday and Norman and his wife Thelma have been members for better than three quarters of that time. The emails I’ve exchanged with past and present board members these past few days are evidence of someone who left his mark on what he considered an essential work—not just to the business of covering the news but to the nonnegotiable right of everyone everywhere to think and speak as they please.

Norm seemed to me impelled in his pursuit of this good work by several motives at once, and first of all by intellectual curiosity. The problems were interestingly knotty, especially in the ways they crossed and recrossed international borders.

But it was also implicitly a moral obligation Norman felt. Sticking up for some reporter he would never meet was a mitzvah. You can ask Thelma if I’m right about that. I think the wish to do good in the world was central to Norman in his decades of working for press freedom.

There are people in remote parts of the Earth this morning who don’t know Norman’s name nor that that he stood up for them when they were in a bad spot. I did know him, and it was a blessing to me. I’ll miss him, and I’ll certainly never forget him.

Norman Schorr's Obituary >>