Remembering veteran reporter Gordon King, who covered it all

LACONIA — Gordon King, a reporter who chronicled happenings throughout the Lakes Region for the better part of 30 years — ranging from the serious to the poignant, and at times the zany — has died. He was 83.

King, whose journalistic career began and ended with The Citizen, died last Thursday at Lakes Region General Hospital, according to his son, Brooks.

He started with The Laconia Evening Citizen in the 1960s as a reporter and photographer. In the late '60s he moved on to work for weekly newspapers in the southern part of the state (the Milford Cabinet and the Hudson News) and then in Wilton, Iowa, before returning to New Hampshire in the early 1980s. Soon afterward rejoined The Citizen as a reporter assigned to cover the Franklin-Tilton-Northfield area.

“He was always a fair reporter. He would get the facts and opinions on both sides,” recalled Kathy Fuller, who served on the Franklin City Council, and later for 10 years on the School Board, six of them as board chair.

“When you’re on the other side of the fence it isn’t always easy to deal with reporters,” said Cathy Bateson-Carlson, who served as Franklin’s finance officer and had a brief stint as city manager during King’s time covering the Twin Rivers area. She later moved on to become business administrator for SAU 18, which includes the Franklin School District. “He was a decent reporter … very fair.”

King was able to strike that delicate balance between his duties to get the facts of a story and still enjoy a warm personal relationship with the people he covered.

“He was not only a good and hard-working reporter, but also a good friend,” said Steve Hodges who served as Belknap County sheriff from 1989 to 2002.

King credited Eva Kvedar, a teacher he had at Ashland High School, with fostering his interest in writing, which in time led him to apply for a reporter’s position at The Laconia Evening Citizen and leave his job as a worker at the Allen-Rogers factory.

Over the years Miss Kvedar, as King and his classmates knew her, “... often wrote me letters of encouragement and acknowledged the writing awards which I received thanks to her pushing me during high school,” he recalled in a Letter to the Editor published in The Laconia Daily Sun in 2012.

Much of King’s work, like that of other Citizen reporters, was covering hard news — municipal government meetings, police and fire news — and community events, including Franklin’s Frontier Days celebrations, and the annual Franklin High School class day parade when the entire senior class marches down Central Street in their blue and gold caps and gowns.

But Fuller said while she had countless contacts with King as he went about covering news events, what she remembered most about him was his interest in history, and especially in the experiences of military veterans.

“My father was a Navy pilot in World War II and my husband was a Vietnam veteran,” Fuller said. “Gordon shared his love of history,” she added, noting that King was especially fascinated that her husband’s ancestors had come over on the Mayflower and that Fullers had fought in the Revolutionary War and in every U.S. war that followed.

King put a great deal of energy and time into recording the recollections of area veterans who fought in World War II, especially those who were at Pearl Harbor or who took part in D-Day.

But there was one story that was especially meaningful for King. In July 2002, he wrote a story about his cousin, Eugene Goyette Jr., who died on May 6, 1945, just two days before VE Day. His body was returned to Ashland for burial three years later. Goyette’s mother did not accept the flag that draped her son’s casket — perhaps because it was the second son she had buried. Instead, the flag was presented to King’s mother and was subsequently given to King for safekeeping.

“It is this memory and that of a child growing up during World War II which has given me a lifelong respect for veterans,” King wrote in that story.

Those years growing up during World War II were also responsible for King’s decades-long hobby of building model airplanes, especially of World War II military aircraft.

“He and his brother would lie on their backs in a field and watch” the Army Air Force planes which had taken off from Grenier Field in Manchester just minutes before, fly overhead enroute to Newfoundland and ultimately to Great Britain, his son Brooks recalled. “Dad had a scope and a card to identify what kinds of planes they saw.”

“He took his craft very seriously,” said Thomas Matzke who served as Franklin mayor and for a time was part-owner of the former Franklin Telegram. “But what I really enjoyed about Gordon was his sense of humor.”

King’s funnybone was probably no more evident than in a series of stories he wrote over the years about the Society for the Preservation of Artificial Wildlife — or SPAW.

The group was born when King was discussing the new artificial wetland created by the state to replace a natural wetland area that had been sacrificed to roadwork at Exit 19 of Interstate 93 in Northfield. Speaking with Tilton Attorney Charles Chandler, the two decided that an artificial wetland needed artificial wildlife, as well, and the rest was — well, history.

Plastic pink flamingos began appearing in the new wetland area, then migrated to other sites in Northfield and Tilton, and eventually spread throughout central New Hampshire, some of them even being spotted in the Plymouth area.

In a case of what goes around comes around, King woke one morning in 2009 to find the lawn of his house on Massachusetts Avenue in Lakeport was covered by plastic pink flamingos that had “landed” overnight, along with a sign indicating that he had been “pinked” in support of the Laconia Historical and Museum Society, Citizen News Editor Tom Caldwell reported at the time.

It could be said that during his career King covered everything from the sublime to the ridiculous.

“He added to my journey and the journey of a lot of other people,” Matzke said.

King’s death came after a four-week-long hospitalization. Funeral arrangements are incomplete.