About Nick E. Yengich
Nick was my brother. He was a man I loved and miss. This is my tribute to him.
Tribute to Nick Yengich
Hon. Barbara A. Mikulski
of Maryland
In the House of Representatives
Thursday, May 10, 1984
Ms. MIKULSKI, Mr. Speaker. I would like to pay tribute to one of the most professional, talented and good reporters in the newspaper world. Nick Edward Yengich, a reporter for the Baltimore Evening Sun, died on May 1, 1984. Few reporters cover the news as solidly and as honestly as Mr. Yengich did. His hard work, dedication and amazing ability made him one of the best in his field. Nick Yengich will be missed immensely. I believe that Carl Schoettler of the Evening Sun stated it best:
From the Baltimore Evening Sun
May 2, 1984
NICK YENGICH, EVENING SUN REPORTER DIES AT 37
(By Carl Schoettler)
Nick Edward Yengich, 37, a tough, tenacious reporter whose stubborn integrity and worker's cap he bought near his ancestral home to Yugoslavia, had worked for the Evening Sun from 1972 until his death.
He started out covering neighborhoods and communities. He became a rewrite man with the reputation of being able to take the leg work of the rawest new reporter and turn it into an interesting, coherent and accurate story.
Yengich was a specialist to court coverage, with a special interest and delight in reporting on white-collar and political corruption.
He was most proud of his coverage of the two trials of former Gov. Marvin Mandel.
Don Baker, now Maryland editor of the Washington Post, was reporter in competition with Yengich on the Mandel story. They became friends.
"He was a great, old-timey newspaperman," Baker said. "He could be at once the most cynical guy who ever lived and, at the same time, he had a sense of fair play and justice for the little guy."
And in a courtroom full of lawyers and defendants wearing hand-tailored, three-piece suits, Yengich made no concession to judicial decorum, not even a tie. He wore what was virtually his uniform: an open-neck button-down blue oxford shirt and chino pants.
But he immersed himself in the Mandel case, working virtually 24 hours many, many days during trials and appeals that stretched out over several years.
He earned the respect and admiration not only of fellow reporters, but of most of the lawyers, defense and prosecution alike, even some of the defendants.
Barnet D. Skolnick, the chief prosecutor in the Mandel case, said he felt Yengich's questions were like cross-examination.
"To me as a prosecutor, he was a pain in it he neck," said Skolnick, now in private practice. "But he was good.
He'll be missed. Not just personally, but also professionally. There ought to be more journalists like him. He was very good at what he did."
Yengich felt deeply the responsibility of covering one of the most important stories in Maryland history and he took pride in providing minutely detailed, accurate daily coverage, coverage he revised edition by edition, almost minute by minute.
"I think Nick would always want to be remembered as a man who could dictate from the scene," said his wife, Karen, who is editor of the Laurel Leader. " He thought few reporters could do that, and he was one of the few."
Yengich had an extraordinary ability to develop news sources. He was still using them Monday when he called Irvin Kovens, the political boss convicted with Mandel, in a characteristic effort to help a younger reporter develop his story.
Karen Yengich was at her husband's bedside when he died at 9 a.m. yesterday. She had taken him to Johns Hopkins Hospital at midnight when he complained of difficulties in breathing. He was fully conscious and alert and talking to her until he end. They had been married since June 16, 1970.
The idea that his boyhood home was gone remained important to him throughout his life. Yengich framed a picture of the open-man, active in the Newspaper Guild until his death. He was union steward and a member of the executive committee of the Guild's Washington-Baltimore local. He helped negotiate several contracts between the Baltimore unit of the Guild and the Baltimore Sun.
It was part of Yengich's brand of integrity that he was a fiercely independent thinker who has no hesitation in expressing his opinions to anyone at any time, to his fellow unionists or his bosses at any level of the newspaper.
"Nick was possessed of the single-mindedness and open-mindedness which consistently superior achievement," said Tom James, a friend and newspaper colleague who left the profession to become an attorney.
"He was a professional journalist in the best sense of the term. He demanded a great deal from his associates, but never more than he demanded of himself.
"He would wish to be remembered as a man of integrity," James said, "He has his wish in my mind and my heart."
Yengich began his newspaper career while a student at the University of Utah, where he received a degree in journalism in 1969. He was a sports writer at the Deseret News, in Salt Lake City. He worked full time while he went to college.
"He was a helluva man," John Schullian, a nationally syndicated sports columnist, who began by filling box scores for Yengich in Salt Lake City.
"He was one of those rare people whom you could really count on if you needed something that was really important to you.
"He gave praise very stintingly," Schulian said, "Not because he was tough, but because he had high standards. I think they were standards he tried to live up to as a newspaperman and as a human being.
"When he told me I had written a good column I really thought I had scored. He was a good newspaperman. That's what he wanted to be and that's what he was."
Yengich didn't like much fuss either. He might not have liked this obituary. He once said to a friend writing another obit: "Hey, when Yengich goes say: He lived. He died. That's it."
He worked hard and he continued working hard during the past two years when he fought the effects of a dangerous and debilitat