Monday at the Fair I got a chance to catch up with Delbert and Diane Mohrman.
Delbert is the father and Diane is the wife of longtime Chronicle-Telegram reporter and Lorain County Fair fixture Jeff Mohrman. Jeff Mohrman, who was a friend and colleague of mine, died March 12, 2007, at age 43, two years and two surgeries after he was diagnosed with brain cancer.
The Chronicle collected donations to place a bench in honor of Jeff. It sits outside the fair offices.
Jeff grew up in Wellington, attending the fair yearly, and covered the fair religiously and passionately during his 20-plus years reporting for The Chronicle.
Diane Mohrman, wife of Jeff Mohrman, and Delbert Mohrman, Jeff's father, with the bench honoring Jeff at the Lorain County Fair. (Photo by Rona Proudfoot, The Chronicle-Telegram.)
Chronicle Managing Editor Julie Wallace said she learned the hard way how Jeff felt about the fair.
In what she calls “one of the worst moments of my editing career,” she took Jeff off fair duty one year.
He cried, she recalled.
“I really, really crushed him so much, so I had to send him back,” Wallace said.
“As a kid he came all the time, as a reporter, the fair was magical for him,” Diane Mohrman said.
Jeff knew tons of people at the fair, so the bench is a fitting tribute to him, Diane said.
“This is where it belongs. Jeff’s spirit is here,” she said.
In September of 1986, Mohrman — then a spry 23-year-old — began a newspaper career that would set him apart from any other reporter in the most unusual of ways.
“In a newsroom filled with cranky journalists, Jeff was cheery,” said Patti Ewald, managing editor at The Chronicle at the time of his death. “When we were all too busy to talk, Jeff wanted to chat.
“We couldn’t find the time to get ourselves a drink from the water cooler, yet Jeff found time to go around the newsroom asking everyone if he could bring them a pop from the basement,” Ewald said. “It’s almost as if he always knew that life — short as it may be — is for living.”
Mohrman started as a part-timer at The Chronicle on Sept. 15, 1986, and his first article — a short story on a property purchase in Grafton — was published Sept. 17, 1986.
Jeff was joined in death by his mother, Alice, 76, who died just nine days later.
“He’s only been buried for nine days,” Delbert said of Jeff, just hours after his wife’s death. “We think she stayed alive until Jeff was gone.”
Contact Rona Proudfoot at rproudfoot@chroniclet.com, (440) 371-0792 or stop by to see her at the fair. She’s based at the WEOL booth and will be wondering the fairgrounds in a bright gold Chroniclet.com T-shirt.
