The heart of the Collegian

By Jill Carroll

One night during our senior year in college the whole class of '99 Collegian crew along with Matt, Casey's brother Chris and my roomates ended up at a restaurant in Northampton for late-night food and drinks.

The Collegian staff is a pretty tight group, especially that year, and we sat around the table laughing and trading gossip and inside jokes. My three roomates, all with swimming backgrounds and two on the UMass team at the time, didn't know the newspaper folks too well but wanted to come along because they were Collegian fans.

Casey, recongnizing the awkwardness, turned to them with her swimming background and encyclopedic sports knowledge and started chatting them up about the swim team, the coaches and who was going to swim what in Atlantic-10's. She named actual names of team members and what they swam---a shocking depth of knowledge for a student at a school where I guarantee 90% of people didn't know a swim team existed.

No one else would have had the compassion to want to make them feel included and follow an obscure sport like women's swimming enough to be able to make them a part of the table that night.

Casey kept a field hockey stick behind her desk at the Collegian and would frequently whip it out and kick a makeshift ball around while talking through ideas.

She would sometimes sail through the air of the newsroom playing catch with a lacrosse stick.

She knew headline counts and column counts by heart.

She believed in journalism as the public service that it is and infused that theme in all of us.

She got the nickname "coach" by some of the staff.

She shook the sports world everytime someone met the face behind the byline and discovered a woman.

She came as Jem to the Collegian costume party.

I spent the "greatest day ever" with her playing softball and eating hotdogs in my backyard at the one-time-only Collegian picnic. Years later she sent me a picture of all of us from that day, festooned in the rhinestones and glitter she knows I love.
She came in the beautiful green dress she wore in Holyoke's Irish festival pagent in (whose name escapes me) to the Collegian formal at my house---an event she conceived. We danced so hard the floorboards flexed and pictures were knocked off my neighbors' walls.

We laid on pillows on the floor of the Collegian "clubhouse" the night of graduation, determined to stay there until dawn.
As graduation loomed, she surveyd us all on questionnares she drew up. When I saw her last winter she pulled out the book of collected questionnaries, and there was an invaluable glimpse of that brief, rich period that she had had the foresight to capture.

She got me reading Rick Bragg.

She lead us to the NENA conference in '99 where we won Daily newspaper of the year.

She battled the Student Government Association, the Graduate Student Union and the administration to keep the paper independent.

She was the wise one we turned to to weather these storms, who, truely, always knew what to do.

I turned to wine-in-a-box and Casey to save me during the hellish weeks in August 1998 when I, as a totally unqualified news editor, tried to put the news pages together for the first editon of the paper.

About to embark on her stem cell treatment, she was the one who drove all the way to New York to visit me.

She brought an album of picturs of friends from the Collegian. On the back of each pictures were quotes and memories from those people which she had collected for me. She made it because I was moving overseas and she didn't want me to feel lonely.

While she was sick and recovering from her treatments she made care packages for me, decorated in detail and covered in inspirational quotes.

She sent me a postpcard of a dog dancing on its hind legs on the beach to tell me she had cancer.

We made plans for her to come see me in the Middle East one day. I know now she's finally here.

Jill worked with Casey at the UMass Daily Collegian. She's currently covering events in the Middle East.