From the President's Desk

Remembering a Hero

By Marcia Zarley Taylor

There's a line in "Band of Brothers," the award-winning HBO series that resonates with me. "Grandpa, were you a hero in the war?" a child asks one of the D Day paratroopers who also survived the Battle of the Bulge. "No, but I served in the company of heroes," he responds.

We don't work under anything close to battlefield stresses, but finding nobility in our co-workers and our life's work is one of the privileges of our career choice. In her own unique way, Farm Journal Editorial Director Sonja Hillgren, 58, who died of a brain tumor last month, was one of my own agricultural journalism inspirations. She gave our profession more stature and national presence than anyone else in her generation.

I knew Sonja for almost 30 years, first as my most respected competitor in the Washington press pool in the late 1970s and 1980s, later as a colleague and sounding board on stories, and for the past decade as my boss. Her passions, perhaps not in this order, were her native South Dakota, politics, farming and University of Missouri's J-school.

For her, journalism was a calling, like some people find the ministry or others dedicate themselves to medicine. Widowed by the time I met her in 1978, she made her career her life's work. She was on a first-name basis with secretaries of agriculture, trade ambassadors and congressmen, but used her access to improve conditions for American farm families. She understood the power of the press, but she never forgot it was all about serving the powerless or correcting an injustice. The people she wrote for were not the 2 million nameless farmers on a mailing list, but families she knew in places that don't show up on most road atlases. By midway through her career, I doubt there was a zip code in the U.S. where Sonja didn't know a farm family or someone connected to agriculture - and 9 times out of 10, they knew and admired her.

It was during the farm financial crisis of the early 1980s that Sonja, then the beat reporter responsible for covering Washington-based agricultural news for United Press International, first became a household name with the millions of people who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods and earned the lifelong respect of those who worked with her.

The 1985 farm bill negotiations occurred at one of modern agriculture's darkest hours. Record high interest rates meant approximately 25% of farm portfolios were classified as marginal loans and many farm families saw their life savings vanish with falling land prices. Foreclosures and auctions raced through the Midwest. Sonja reported on everything from the tractorcades to the acrimonious political debate. Often, her stories made the front page of newspapers across America. As Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana told us when he nominated her for an Oscar in Agriculture several years ago, sometimes as late as 2 a.m., Sonja was the last person in the press gallery watching the floor debate in Congress. I think she stayed as the public's witness and as a visible sign that the American public watched and awaited their important work.

Later, through her visibility as president of the National Press Club, Sonja made agricultural journalism seem downright glamorous, says the Wall Street Journal's Scott Kilman. True, her closets were so full of designer clothes that she once broke the rods in her apartment - and that was after she made a trip to donate to Goodwill. But again, she knew she was Agriculture's representative on the world stage that year.

As Kilman told us, "I was thrilled when Sonja gave me a tour of the National Press Club that included anecdotes about the guys bellied up to the bar, who shook my hand only because I was with her. My conversations with Sonja over many years helped me to see larger issues and forces at play that I wouldn't have otherwise - sometimes because she took the time to call me up and tell me what I had missed in a story, and how to get right next time."

Clayton Yeutter, former trade ambassador and secretary of agriculture, could have been writing a job description for the ideal ag journalist during a tribute to her in 1998. "What I have especially liked about Sonja is that she is all business. And she is truly substantive. Many journalists are good writers, but they have no depth. They simply do not work hard enough to make a significant contribution to the debate of a particular issue. [Sonja] does her homework always; she asks the right questions, nearly always knowing the answer even before the question was posed; and she fills in the gaps of an interview with her own analysis, which is always thorough, fair and objective. Sonja can be a tough interviewer, but she expects the interviewee to know his or her stuff."

Journalists measure success not in wealth, but in the accuracy and impact of their work. Sonja had a keen ability to make the complex understandable, to "sell" city editors on the notion that urban audiences had a stake in American agriculture. She helped changed public opinion. Her work mattered, especially at a time when farmers needed real assistance. Sonja, respect is the greatest tribute your peers can give to you. Well done. Now it's our job to inspire more agricultural journalists to be like you.

Plans for a memorial to Sonja are under discussion and will be shared with AAEA members through The ByLine.

AAEA President Marcia Zarley Taylor is editor of Top Producer magazine. She can be reached at mtaylor@farmjournal.com.