Loren Steffy, a former colleague of Bloomberg News reporter Darrell Preston who died on Monday, remembers his friend.
Steffy writes, “On my first day at the Dallas Business Journal in 1989, he took me in his old red Jeep C-J to lunch at Chip’s, a greasy burger joint off Central Expressway. Most of the meal was consumed with awkward silence. Darrell was comfortable with silence in a way that few people are. He tended not to notice because his mind was always occupied, but not always with the present conversation.
“He asked me what kind of music I liked. I shrugged. The Travelling Wilburys weren’t bad. He nodded, but didn’t say anything. ‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘Well,’ he said, and stared into the distance for a while. I wasn’t yet familiar with his habit of thinking about what he was about to say after he’d started to say it. ‘My tastes are a little more esoteric.’ He didn’t elaborate.
“Years later, laughing about the awkwardness of that first meeting, he told me he had been trying to keep me off guard to see how I handled myself.
“I soon realized that in the DBJ newsroom Darrell, his desk piled high with files and notes on various investigations, was the guy to beat. He did the stories everyone talked about, stories that he spent months poking around in his spare time. He did the kinds of stories that I wanted to do.”
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