Tom Kearney's former understudy Simon Dulhunty, who started as a cadet at The Border Mail in 1988 and later became Editor from 2001 to 2005, was asked to reflect on Tom’s life and times for a story about the ultimate storyteller.
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“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages” - William Shakespeare.
When it came to telling a story, Tommy Kearney was more Damon Runyon than William Shakespeare. He could spring from any seat, as comfortable from an office chair or bar stool, to an instant stage where the performance would begin. People would gather, regardless if they had heard the story or not. This was Tom’s gift.
Of the hundreds of stories, my favourite was Larry The Lip.
Larry The Lip preferred money in his own pocket to someone else’s. And when times were tough, as they often seemed to be for Larry The Lip, he was entrepreneurial about how to cut costs on the essentials, such as electricity.
With the scene set, Tom would launch from his seat. His eyes would widen. His arms started to gain momentum. He was warming up.
“There he is, Larry The Lip, in the middle of the night at the Albury Railway Station, running a cable from the railway station to his own house. And when Larry The Lip plugs the cables together he’s got that many volts running through him he’s lit up like a bloody Christmas tree. They reckon you could see his skeleton glowing in the dark.”
Tom, on tippy toes, would have his arms stretched high above his head joining the imaginary cables, his shirt out, his body shaking with its own electricity. The crowd always roared for more and Tom always delivered.
“… and anyway, Larry The Lip probably enjoys free electricity for the rest of his life except that one night there’s an accident in the middle of Albury. A car has run into a power pole, and the whole of Albury is blacked out. When police get to the scene it’s pitch black, they look all around, it’s darkness everywhere, except for two objects shining brightly in the distance. One is the Albury Railway Station and other is a little house close by. When police drop by the house they find Larry The Lip going about his business as usual while the rest of Albury fumbles in the darkness. The police want to know how Larry The Lip’s joint isn’t blacked out too, and all he can offer is that it’s about time he has some good luck because there’s been plenty of the bad luck recently.”
And then, with knees bent, Tommy bounces up to the crescendo:
“Larry The Lip digs in, he sticks to his story that it is purely a co-incidence that of 30,000 homes in the city it’s just his and the Albury Railway Station that are blazing like the Fourth of July. But you wouldn’t credit it, just at that very moment one of the coppers clocks that Larry The Lip’s house is painted the exact same shade of green as the railway station. Poor Larry The Lip, he’s done like a dinner. Some silly drunk driver has hit a power line going home from the pub and Larry The Lip’s free ride is over. The next free thing he ever gets is a lift to the police station.”
He was a people magnet who could tell a ripping yarn and that’s what the greatest journalists are: natural storytellers who find stories.
- SIMON DULHUNTY
Thomas Edward Kearney, born February 23, 1943, was a master storyteller and remarkable newspaper man who for many years was the reason thousands of the Border District’s punters received the racing form guides and results in each day’s paper.
Tommy was my first mentor. We met late one night in a side office along the corridors of what seems another time, in a newsroom filled with cigarette smoke, in a building that rumbled with a magical energy as newly married words and pictures danced on the press below and sub editors, eternally unsung, drank bottles of beer at their post-work “Gutta Klub” meeting on the footpath outside.
It was 1988. The Border Morning Mail had only recently published its first colour photograph. Times were changing. I had just been set free from school with an early release, out on good behaviour, to start a cadetship at the newspaper.
Tom’s main job was producing racing form guides for The Border Mail six days a week. He was responsible for collating all the information, from the city race fields, jockeys, form and odds, to the many local meetings across all racing codes - gallops, trots and dogs. He’d ring the TAB to get information such as which were the Daily Double races. He’d ring racetracks and metropolitan papers to get track and weather information such as “slow and showers” or “good and fine”. He’d assemble the tipsters and expert comments. He’d type in the last result from Harold Park dogs or trots and then, finally, he would proof read every page as if his life depended on it because “trust me mate, you’ll never hear the end of it if there’s even the smallest mistake”.
It was a big job given The Border Mail covered both NSW and Victorian TAB meetings, an ongoing challenge, and was such a strong supporter of the local racing industry. Which is why Tom needed a young offsider to help out, someone who knew a little but liked a lot about racing. Someone like a very green and raw 16-year-old me.
And so began my masters degree in the school of hard knocks under Professor Thomas E. Kearney. For the next five years I sat next to Tom in The Border Mail’s magnificent former home on the corner of Kiewa and Olive streets. Tom spoke in riddles that I learned quickly. The “dog and bone” was the telephone. The “trouble and strife” was the wife. And if you were in deep “Edgar Britt”, then you certainly weren’t backing any winners, whatever the game in your life.
Tom’s father, Frank, had once been the associate editor of The Border Mail and was considered to be one of the top editorial minds in the land. Frank’s death in 1963 at the age of 62 was featured in The Age newspaper.
Tom was 20 when his dad died. He’d grown up on the tougher side of South Albury, a place he always said presented two early choices for young boys: you learned how to use your fists or you found another place to live.
By the age of 26, when he first started work at what was then The Border Morning Mail, Tom had already lived a life and a half. He’d found a dollar doing all sorts of work and found trouble in all sorts of mischief. He’d ridden track work as a jockey, worked on construction sites far and wide; been involved in boxing promotion; and my personal favourite, revealed with a trademark wide grin, been employed as a Chinese chef (a job title which, on advice, Tom later revised down to a Chinese cook).
The stories from these times in Tommy’s life are Runyonesque. In Runyon’s stories, set in New York, the characters include Harry The Horse, Dave The Dude, Big Jule and Miss Sarah Brown. These were but a few of Runyon’s “Guys and Dolls”. For Tommy, his stories were more blokes and “potato peelers” (sheilas). They featured such characters as: “Christmas” Carroll, Albury’s best street fighter; “Stormy” Knight, the fighter pilot war hero who once flew his plane upside down under the Bethanga bridge as people jumped from their boats; “Toothpick” Ted who used to jam his gas meter with toothpicks to stop it running up a bill; “Aero” who could make two pennies fly like an aeroplane and once threw 13 heads in a row at The Star Hotel’s Anzac Day two-up school; “Hock” who had “trained” dancing ducks performing mid races at the Albury dog track (they were real ducks that danced on a blanket that was known to be fireproof because it had two hotplates underneath it); and many, many more.
Most of the stories came from Tom’s passion for horse racing and boxing and especially the people these pastimes fused together in pub life, characters usually described in the media as colourful identities.
On one occasion, a Border horse trainer was selling a promising young horse for a good amount of money to wealthy buyers who first wanted to see the horse trial in private under a stopwatch. They would make their decision after seeing the time it could run. In semi-darkness, just before first light, the youngster broke the clock, running a track record, and the deal was done. As the new owners departed with the horse, the trainer and his offsider got the shovels back out of the ute and proceeded to dig the finishing post out of its temporary hole and replace it 10 metres or so back to where it belonged.
Tom had been at The Border Morning Mail for only a few months when, in 1969, he almost won a fortune on a Caulfield Cup-Melbourne Cup double. After Big Philou won the Caulfield Cup, Tom had Alsop going in the Melbourne Cup for enough money to significantly change his life. If you watch the race replay, Alsop, ridden by Ray Setches, one of Tom’s favourite jockeys who was also a friend, looms alongside Rain Lover and threatens several times to pass him down the long Flemington straight. But Rain Lover, under urgings from Jim Johnson, holds on to beat Alsop by the narrowest margin to make it back-to-back Melbourne Cup victories.
“Setches told me every time he hit Alsop and thought he was going to win the Cup he’d see Rain Lover lifting inside him,” Tom would grimace at every re-telling. But as the years passed it became just another punter’s tale destined for the “if only” bin, which as Tommy knew and every punter still knows is always pretty full.
One of Tom’s great lifetime mates was Neville “Dick” Seymour (deceased) who featured heavily in many of his stories. Dick and Tom, partners in crime for so long in those early days, ended up as brothers-in-law. Tom married Pam and Dick married Pam’s sister, Carol. The adventures of Tom and Dick, their close calls, hilarious scrapes and hard luck stories, would fill several books. Sometimes they filled the newspaper via the must-read Border Mail column written by another legend of that era, Brian “Wrecka” Leahy.
It was “Wrecka” who Tommy would quote every time a story of true love, usually involving a colleague, was revealed to have gone pear-shaped: “I’m telling ya mate, as Wrecka would say, the power of love has brought down Roman empires - what chance does a poor bastard from Howlong have?”
Dick and Tom were also regular faces at racetracks throughout the Border, usually on the bag for bookmakers including Trevor Hulm and Roy Poy.
Hulm, one of Tom’s dear friends, was the Deputy Editor of The Border Mail and the person who hired me in 1988 to sit alongside Tom. He was also the person who had plucked Tom from other duties at The Border Mail to take control of the form guide in a more modern era of electronic page make-up on a new computer system installed under editor James Thomson.
Tom had originally been a compositor and had worked in the hot metal days with such printing legends as “Boxer” Ward. Another compositor in those days who shared Tom’s knowing grin was Franky Slade and the two were good friends who shared many laughs throughout long careers.
In leaving the pre-press and compositing area to sit among the journalists, Tom had found a new role, the next chapter in his life. And he absolutely loved it. His new home at work complemented his happiness at home with Pam and their two daughters, Narelle and Nicole.
Beyond the relentless form guide duties, lotto and weather results, which he had mastered, Tom would also write articles for The Border Mail. He’d write about all the racing codes as well as several of the country football leagues, which he greatly enjoyed. He was an eagle-eyed sub editor who would have cut this long-winded piece in half (at least) by first declaring: “Fair dinkum, I’m going to need a bigger knife for this shit. Who does he think he is, Jules Verne?”
Tom retired from The Border Mail after almost 34 years of service in October, 2003. By that time I was Editor of the newspaper, a position I would never have realised had Tom not sent me on that journey with a brilliant education and warm mateship. And like for many people inside and outside of The Border Mail, from the editor to the cleaner, Tom’s was a smiling face you wanted to see each day. Wherever he went car horns tooted, people yelled out, waved and just had to say G’day. He was a people magnet who could tell a ripping yarn and that’s what the greatest journalists are: natural storytellers who find stories.
Typically, on his last day at The Border Mail, Tom didn’t want any fuss. There was a newsroom full of people, many of them whom Tom had given their nicknames and entertained for years, but farewells just weren’t Tom’s style.
He simply wanted to slip quietly out the back door while no-one was looking, never wanting to bother anyone.
And that’s what he’s done again.
Vale Tommy Kearney, you were one of the greats.