Frank Miele, managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispel, Mont., writes Sunday about Erika Hoefer, the newspaper’s business reporter who died last week in a plane crash at the age of 27 along with another one of the paper’s reporters.
Miele writes, “Erika arrived about two weeks later, and we promptly informed Melissa that she was now a ‘senior reporter.’ Erika, however, never quite fit the mold of a junior reporter. She had plenty of experience for someone so young, was conscientious and thoughtful, and struggled to get everything just right. She also had to juggle her tasks as business reporter for the Inter Lake and Flathead Business Journal with working two nights a week as page design editor, and did it without complaint.
“Erika had come to us from Chicago, and we had promised her that in exchange for the glamor and shopping of the big city, we would give her the grandeur of God’s country. She was intrigued and took our offer, and then suffered through the usual drudgery of a Flathead winter and the longest, bleakest, coldest spring in recent memory. We kept promising her that summer was just around the corner, and she kept asking us ‘Which corner?'”
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