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Extended, more inclusive obituary from Christy McCormick, with lots of quotes from Lamma people:
Joel McCormick at 65 - editor with the Midas touch
In his youth, Joel McCormick, who died after a lengthy battle with cancer on December 4 in San Jose, California, was hockey defenceman at Bishops College School. Defencemen in ice hockey are the marines of the game - they work with nothing but disaster to establish a beachhead, so a way can be paved for the success of others who score the goals and win the glory.
Joel's professional life was one of taking on projects that had either failed or had just begun when all was crisis and first rate results were demanded of third rate material.
"He was the best re-write man I have ever worked with.... he could take fractured English and make it into a story that sang," said early Hong Kong boss and long time friend Tom McHale.
Said Lamma resident and his last Hong Kong boss Simon Twiston Davies: "He could take some hopeless dross and turn it into a great story. Not just passable, but something superb!"
Throughout much of his 27 years in Hong Kong, and most of it living on Lamma Island, he was also a steady contributor to the Stanford University alumni magazine, writing in-depth reviews and articles on matters affecting Asia, a continent he had come to love. This opportunity came his way from his widow, the magazine's deputy editor Ginny McCormick, his wife of 43 years.
Son of two local celebrities, journalists Ted and Marion McCormick, he grew up in a series of flats in Montreal, which in many respects reflected the lifestyle he found in Hong Kong when he arrived in 1985. Like Hong Kong, Montreal is bilingual and bicultural and a product of a British colonial past. It is a city from which one can stand on atop a mountain, gaze through a forest of high rises to a harbour below. Proportions and scale are different, but outlines are plain enough.
Joel attended Victoria School, an unremarkable downtown primary in Montreal, and was then sent to Bishop's College School, in Lennoxville, Quebec, which was so British in style that it became subject to a full blown multi-page feature in the Illustrated London News.
He then attended Sir George Williams University, where he edited the campus newspaper, The Georgian, which did not do much for his academic achievement. But instead of dropping out, he joined the college's public relations office, and soon began to produce an administration weekly newspaper, then called Issues & Events.
Over the next 15 years, he worked at Sir George, which became Concordia University with the merger of Loyola College in 1975, with his wife Ginny working at his side for much of the time before she got a better job at neighbouring McGill University.
But when Hong Kong resident and fellow Montrealer Robert Karniol offered a job at Insight magazine in Hong Kong in spring 1985 and gave him a week to make up his mind, he decided to go for it. "Working in universities was getting stale and Asia looked like an interesting adventure," Ginny recalled.
Tom McHale, the editor of Electronic Business Asia, was one of his first friends and colleagues in Hong Kong. Often working at more than one job in the easy-money go-go days of Hong Kong Joel worked at China Trade Channels, later China Trade Communique, and at Window, often with Ginny, a former Lamma resident, by his side.
McHale recalled: "You could never actually 'own' Joel's time, he had his hand in several projects at once - always. I recall we were on deadline rushing to get Electronic Business Asia out the door when a blonde woman walked into our office, went over to Joel and read him the Riot Act that he was on deadline at his other job and had better get over there now. This turned my full time staff into a mutinous mob as they had not been allowed to freelance."
Their children's needs induced Ginny to return to North America, where she became the deputy editor of Stanford University magazine. In later years, he became an editor at Red Herring, in Belmont, California, south of San Francisco.
He became the editor of Graham Earnshaw's China Economic Review (Shanghai) working with Kaiser Kuo, then the editor of Asia Venture Capital Journal in Hong Kong in 2004 where he worked with friend VG Kulkarni for whom he had much admiration for good sense and a cool head in the many crises that beset them. He produced an in-house quarterly for Canon executives involving extensive travel throughout the region.
In 2008, he took over the editorship of the quarterly of the Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia (CASBAA), under Simon Twiston Davies, the industry association's executive director.
Throughout this period, he was a contributor of Stanford University magazine, often interviewing prominent alumni, who not surprisingly turned out to be the movers and shakers in the world long after graduation. Or sometimes it involved going to a remote part of the world, typically northern China and Mongolia to draft reports on cutting edge Stanford research in various fields.
Said former Lamma resident, long-time friend and journalist Nicola Nightingale: "For example, his March/April 2011 in Stanford magazine review of a book on why the western world dominates is well researched, well argued and classily written."
Said former Lamma resident and Financial Times correspondent Enid Tsui: "I remember that time when Joel clinched a one-on-one interview with [ex-Prime Minister] Yukio Hatoyama in Tokyo. Hatoyama had just left office and every journalist in Japan would have wanted an exclusive with the man who broke Japan's de facto one-party rule. It was a real coup, but Joel had no idea when he was supposed to show up for the interview because Hatoyama's assistant had zero English! Fortunately for Joel, Sandra 'Wonder Woman' Pang managed to recall a few Japanese lessons that saved the day, as she's done many times I'm sure The result was a very, very good piece indeed."
Said Lamma resident Sandra Pang, also CEO of Pronto Communications: "I met Joel when he began with the Banking World. He was performing with very little help, I was helping to do the translation for the Chinese executive summary. Joel always enjoyed his job. He always took his work seriously be it serious journalism, or corporate writing, which he couldn't stand," she said.
Recalled friend and Lamma resident Cathy Holcombe: "We worked together at Window together, but that was more a money gig than a gig that would have interested him. Still, he was a pro about it. Joel was at Banking World at the SCMP when I was there too, but we barely crossed paths. He did some good stuff there. Always had the sense he was a pro."
South China Morning Post sub-editor Sean Kennedy worked with him at Window. "I talked to him on Skype a couple of months back and he was upset about losing his hair, but was philosophical. I was hoping to see him back here in March as hoped to be. I enjoyed every minute of having Joel (and Ginny) rewrite my copy at Window, where they also helped my brother Adrian so much. He wasn’t just a great editor, he was a wonderful writer. I remember his wonderful feature on the obesity epidemic - written well before it was fashionable to call it an epidemic. And he used to write hilarious pieces for Window magazine, which he’d read out to us in the Press Club.
Said Bloomberg correspondent Adrian Kennedy: "He gave me a foot in the door into HK journalism by accepting a couple of turgidly written freelance pieces. And he let me and our younger brother Seamus flat-sit for him and Ginny in his Happy Valley place, a rambling and character-filled Chinese walk-up. It's impossible to forget what he was like, with a voice that carried and a generous temperament when ordering drinks. I'll never forget when I first met him, a couple of days after I arrived in Hong Kong in 1994 at the Press Club to await Sean. Joel came in - I didn't know him from Adam - and bowled up to me and said 'How're things?'. I was a bit taken aback and said 'Fine', wondering who the fellow was. He said a couple more things and then, nonplussed, took himself off to a corner table. Then Sean walked in. Joel did a double-take, and it turned out that our ever-friendly Canadian had mistaken me for my much older - and I dare say, portlier brother."
Said Simon: "Joel’s departure has, of course, left us bereft of a remarkably generous and spirited man. He was also such an extraordinarily patient (and sometimes impatient!) man and few of us came close to expressing sufficient appreciation. His kindnesses changed lives (and no less his open handedness) almost 30 years ago."
"And now he has gone - bravely and humorously – as with few we have known. He was an extraordinary writer (not least for his determination to learn everything to be known about a given subject), but also his ability to turn other people’s dross into something that was better than normal and sometimes brilliant. Many, many more people should recognise that vital part of his life," said Simon.
In his last email to friends, Joel said: "I just want to say that Asia, Asians and all of you fine people have been the biggest thrill of my life. So I want everybody to hold the violins and just remember there are not many people as fortunate as me and you in discovering Asia. And I have a lot of people to thank for that. And I know you know who they are. I have been very fortunate here to have the best personal and medical attention and I am not in any way unhappy. Life has been tremendous for me."
He is survived by wife Ginny, sons Jeremy and Ted and daughter Jessie, stepdaughter Hilary and two grandchildren.
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