We are losing two good friends

I feel like I am losing two good friends. I’ve never met either one of them in person but I feel they are close friends. I looked for them weekly in The Sun News and most of the time they didn’t disappoint me. They are both retiring and I will miss them terribly.

Carolyn Murray, The Sun News editor who is retiring, will be missed by a lot of people both at the newspaper office and readers of this paper. I did not always agree with her, but each column she wrote was carefully written to show us her and the newspaper’s views about a situation. Each one showed her careful research and her own investigations of each subject and why she believed the way she did. She was not afraid to take on any subject or even Myrtle Beach law enforcement and politicians and if in her mind, she had proved they were wrong she did not hesitate to say so. I for one admired her spunk and intelligence very much. If I agreed with her or no,t it made me think and examine things for my own mind.

Some conservatives said she was liberal and filled the paper with her liberal view. Liberals said she was too conservative and filled the paper with her conservative views. Being independent and neither a conservative nor a liberal, I could see that it was filled with both views, with neither getting more coverage than the other.

She will be missed and her shoes hard to fill. Praying her retirement will be blessed and filled with good things.

Issac Bailey, dear Issac who has taken abuse, ugly name-calling and all kinds of insults as he worked so hard to bring us the true horrible abuse that people of races other than white have to endure from police officers, schools, government officials and who also suffer housing inadequacy and other things that we don’t want to really face. Many complained when they didn’t want to face the truth.

While I didn’t always agree with him either, his thought-provoking columns made me stop, think and yes, study for myself. I was born and raised in a cotton mill town, where blacks and whites were friends, working and playing side by side, and we never knew hate or racism until I was grown and moved away. Reading Isaac Bailey every week and living here in Myrtle Beach has educated me to this ugliness and hatred. It’s hard to understand.

Besides this reporting, he has visited the parks and historical places here in this beautiful state and reported the beauty and history that I, and so many of us, didn’t know. Sometimes he wrote of the sick and their heart-rending diseases, the abused and their feelings of aloneness, and so many things that I take for granted that others don’t enjoy. Whatever he chose to write about he did it with feeling and grace that brings us into the situation if we think on it.

Both will be missed and I wish both of them, Carolyn and Isaac, much happiness and wishes that all their dreams come true

This story was originally published October 4, 2015 at 12:50 PM with the headline "We are losing two good friends."