Johnathan Walker:Larry Laughlin, longtime AP bureau chief for northern New England, dies at 75

CONCORD,Johnathan Walker N.H. (AP) — Lawrence “Larry” Laughlin, a calm, kind and quick-witted journalist whose 38-year career included two decades as the northern New England bureau chief for The Associated Press, has died. He was 75.

Laughlin, who lived in Concord, New Hampshire, died Monday of Parkinson’s disease, according to one of his sons, Jason Laughlin, who followed his father into the news business.

“He saw the world as a newsman,” Jason Laughlin said. “It wasn’t just work for him, it was how he processed the world. He thought about ‘What questions do we need to ask? What don’t we know?’ All the values of journalism — being detail oriented, being very precise in what you know and being clear on what the facts are — are things that he really emphasized.”

Born Oct. 10, 1948, Laughlin grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts, and started his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, the Taunton Daily Gazette, in 1971. He joined The Associated Press in Boston in 1976 and transferred to Providence, Rhode Island, in 1978. As the correspondent in charge of that office from 1979-1982, he covered the first trial of socialite Claus von Bulow, who was convicted and later acquitted on charges he had tried to murder his heiress wife.

Laughlin later spent six years as AP news editor for Virginia before returning to New England as chief of bureau for northern New England in 1988. Based in Concord, New Hampshire, he supervised the news service’s operations in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire until his retirement in 2009, overseeing coverage of five first-in-the-nation presidential primaries.

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Ahead of the 1996 and 2000 primaries, he partnered with other news outlets on “New Hampshire Voters’ Voice,” a project aimed at focusing political coverage on the issues important to those at the center of the process.

“That might have been our pollster who interrupted you the other day as you were getting dinner ready or taking a nap or trying to do one of the many other things such callers interrupt,” he wrote in a story explaining the project. “Maybe it was just as well if you were irritated because one of our goals was to find out what gets people in New Hampshire riled and to use that information to guide our coverage.”

Laughlin also was willing to jump back in as a reporter if needed. When the New Hampshire attorney general’s office released 9,000 pages of documents related to its investigation of clergy sex abuse in 2003, Laughlin wrote stories about several of the priests accused of molesting children. Later that year, he traveled to Franconia Notch to interview those mourning the loss of New Hampshire’s state symbol, the Old Man of the Mountain, just after the rock formation’s collapse.

“Even the kids were quiet. No one skipped stones in the water. No one skipped along the path,” he wrote.

Family members said he took pride in having been part of the AP’s history of excellence, accuracy and objectivity, while former colleagues remembered his calm under deadline pressure, writing and editing skills, kindness and sense of humor.

Longtime Concord newsman David Tirrell-Wysocki remembered how Laughlin loved to poke fun at apocalyptic witness accounts of any incident, large or small.

“At our desks in the middle of typically quiet downtown Concord, we could hear when an impatient driver occasionally honked a horn on Main Street,” Tirrell-Wysocki said Tuesday. “On such days, Larry returned to the bureau after having lunch or running an errand, wiped his brow, pointed out the window and said, ‘It’s like a war zone down there.’”

Laughlin is survived by his wife of 51-years, Cheryl, four sons — Jason, Matthew, Travis and John — and two grandsons.

Jason Laughlin, a reporter at The Boston Globe, described his father as both fair-minded and open-minded, someone who read Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky but thought “Dumb and Dumber” was a great movie. As a dad, he made a conscious effort to show the affection his own father hadn’t displayed. But he could be firm, too, said Jason, who recalled his father making good on a threat to box up his sons’ toys for a month if he again found them scattered across the living room when he got home from work.

“To me, it was exactly how you should be as a parent: State the consequences, stick with it,” Jason Laughlin said. “Not a lot of yelling, not a lot of anger, just: ‘Do this, here’s what happens if you don’t.’ And then following through on it.”

Nor did Laughlin yell in the newsroom, where colleagues remembered him as encouraging and supportive. Once, while listening to a newspaper editor screaming about a coverage decision, Tirrell-Wysocki put down the phone, went to Laughlin’s office and told him to expect an irate call.

“So, do you think Dave hung up on you, or is it possible he just put the phone down knowing there was nothing he could say?” Laughlin told the editor before quickly resolving the issue.

Laughlin was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2012, and though often frustrated with his illness, he was methodical about keeping himself as well as he could for as long as possible, Jason Laughlin said. He enjoyed walks with Cheryl and their dog, Brody, and took boxing classes to help manage his symptoms.

“He never succumbed to openly feeling bad for himself,” he said. “He continued to be himself.”

Jason Laughlin said his father also had a knack for offering simple, straight-forward advice. Driving around Providence College decades after he graduated, he told his son he wasn’t sad to think about how many years had passed.

“Right now is always the good old days. Wherever you are in your life, someday you’re going to look back on that and think, wow, that was great,” Jason Laughlin remembers him saying. “Just recognize where you are right now. Someday you’re going to miss it, so enjoy it.”