Before there were blogs or podcasts or online chats, Baltimore journalist John Dorsey, who died Friday at age 69, made his mark the old-fashioned way -- by sheer dint of the written word.
During four decades as a feature writer and critic for The Sunday Sun and The Sun, his writing had an impact not because it was instantaneous but because it was enduring. And, yet, he brought something new to the paper -- a fresh eye on art, a different way of looking at Baltimore's emerging restaurant scene and its changing urban landscape.
Following are reminiscences of him from other journalists who knew him as both a colleague and a friend:
A taste barometer
John Dorsey believed that the essential element of criticism is praise. This didn't mean he lauded everything he saw. He was far too discerning for that.
But when he saw something worthy of praise, he took great joy in championing it -- whether this meant adding insights to the body of criticism on an old master (he was fascinated by Rembrandt's self-portraits) or cheering on the career of a budding local artist.
And he knew criticism from both sides. Not only was he the author of several books, but after retiring from The Sun, he was invited to curate exhibits -- an unexpected and happy post-career career. For most of John's tenure as The Sun's art critic, I shared a computer with him (this was before Sun reporters had their own PCs). We gossiped and griped and traded advice about writing.
Most of all, I relied on John as my "taste barometer." In a society descending deeper and deeper into crassness, John remained a true gentleman, with an unfailing sense of what was appropriate and what was over the line. Even though John achieved considerable renown as the Sun's first restaurant critic, he claimed that eventually he ran out of new ways to describe a crab cake. He never, however, ran out of new ways to describe art.
Maybe the difference was that, though eating is a requirement of life, art is what makes life worth living. I think John would have agreed with that, but how I wish I could turn my chair toward his desk one more time and run that notion by him. J. Wynn Rousuck Former Sun theater critic
`Ravening wolves'
