I am crestfallen to learn that a dear friend and longtime colleague from my days at the TIME Magazine News Desk, Eileen (the redhead on the far right), has suddenly passed away.
Eileen was quite literally the very first person I met at the magazine, and her warmth, professional dedication, propensity for kindness and impossibly convivial nature were brilliant enough to power an entire city. I am shocked and heartbroken.
I, of course, remember the big-event news cycles — the slow O.J. car chase to the Oklahoma City bombing to the death of Princess Diana to September 11th to the Iraq War to the tsunami and countless other stressful, busy nights. Eileen was a rock-solid part of each and every one of those experiences when we were all working shoulder-to-shoulder to support and facilitate the crucial exchange or reporting between the editors and the correspondents and reporters in the field around the world. But more than anything, I remember the quiet days and nights when broken news didn’t need to be attended to, when we’d sit around going well out of our may to make each other laugh, and no one was more rewarding to make laugh than Eileen. The long hours were meaningless when you were spending them with such good friends.
The picture above was taken on the eve of TIME's 75th Anniversary party in 1998, snapped in the hallway outside the News Desk at 1271 Sixth Avenue, just across the street from the party's location, Radio City Music Hall. Our department was sort of half-heartedly invited at the eleventh hour (practically with a "now don't feel you have to come...") and we jumped on it with gusto. In attendance that evening was every living individual that had ever appeared on the cover of the magazine. During the course of the evening, I saw F. Lee Bailey and Lee Iacocca embrace, I clinked glasses with George Plimpton (unsolicitedly), saw David Copperfield and then-girlfriend Claudia Schiffer have a heated argument in the downstairs lounge and squeezed behind Dr. Jack Kevorkian on the stairs (a "brush with death," as it were). I remember relaying this to Eileen and seeing her beaming from having a chatty exchange with Tom Hanks. It was that kind of evening.
Goodnight & god bless, Eileen Harkin. You were the soul of the TIME Magzine News Desk and your big, familial heart was beloved by friends & colleagues both near and scattered across the globe, from Kansas to Kandahar.
Godspeed & Erin go Bragh!
xo
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