So Long Janis
By Chris Jones

Janis Osborne, long-time columnist for the Tri-State Gazette who became the voice of Port Jervis, has died. Like many people, when Janis retired, she chose to take her act to Pike County, not to live, but to continue to write her column for the Dispatch.

And so she did, for a year or two, until her health problems got the best of her, and she switched from a column a week, to two a month and then last October, her last column, about how the local fire department descended upon her house when she burnt her Texas toast in the microwave and couldn’t turn off the fire alarm.

Like all good writers, Janis could not put down her pen. If life was going to throw lemons at her, she would make them into a lemonade of a good column, good old-fashioned tart lemonade.

Many of her last columns, while they did not dwell on her health, nevertheless tackled disasters of everyday life, from her car disintegrating in the middle of an intersection, to unwittingly wiping out a nest of little birds. Life was throwing odd things at her, but she would remain a bemused, polite lady through it all, telling us how to “Grow Old Gracefully.”

But is wasn’t all bad. She took two monumental RV trips out west with her husband Peter, and to judge by her columns, managed to enjoy them in spite of her worst misgivings about endless prairies and freeways that weren’t free.

Janis connected with readers. Once she couldn’t find Tangee lipstick, and the next week several readers called to tell her it was still advertised in Yankee Magazine.

In many ways, Janis Osborne, or Janis McCann, as she was known in her previous byline, was the voice of Port Jervis; nostalgic without a grain of sentimentality, smart and canny, but never highfalutin’.

Someone once said about Port Jervians that they could be rich and successful but they never flaunt it. Janis was successful in many ways, but never lost her humble voice, and that’s why readers loved her columns. I know I did.

Old Friends and Colleagues
By Chris Farlekas

Janis Osborne was my friend for nearly fifty years. We first met at Spero’s, my family’s Front Street soda fountain, while she was in high school. She worked on the high school newspaper, then printed weekly in the Union Gazette.

Since I’d been the editor of the school paper in my day, I helped Janis with the writing. Sometime after she graduated in 1961, she wanted to fly to Florida to see Bill McCann, her then boyfriend and later her first husband. Her parents didn’t approve so I bought the ticket.

For years, Janis would tell that story . . . I was thrilled when she fell in love with and married Peter Osborne. Their 1994 wedding at High Point State Park was a glorious event.

After I officially retired from the Record because of cancer and heart problems, I became a columnist for the Gazette. For the next six years until her retirement in 2005, she was my editor - a nice reversal of roles.

She Knew

Through the decades of our friendship, she’d tell me two things: that we were lucky to be in Port Jervis, and that we knew “where the bodies were buried, and what skeletons were hidden in what closet.”

Janis believed, like one of her favorite mystery characters, Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, that bloodlines can tell you a lot about a person, that the sins of the fathers are often visited with their children. When there was a scandal or pain (suicide, murder) involving someone, she’d always ask, “Who was the father? Who was the mother?” or “Who were the grandparents?” And then she’d say, “You see, the problems started long ago.”

When you’ve been a newspaper person in a small town for years, you get to understand the petty, the shallow, as well as the enormously big-hearted people. Every week, Janis and I would talk about people we knew, people in the news. It was usually polite gossip, but sometimes, if the person or situation was vivid or absurd, the talk could be as bitchy as anything Truman Capote wrote.

Janis was never fooled by politicians or others who wore emperor’s clothes. She saw right through them. She was the champion of the little people, and a force through the Salvation Army, where she served on the advisory board for many years.

There were times when I saw her reach into her pocketbook to help the poor. Including myself. Four years ago when I became the victim of identity theft, and was left almost penniless, she and Peter gave me enough money to help pay my tax bill.

An Important Calling

Janis was a journalist and that was a sacred duty. What was happening in Port Jervis and the Tri-State area was important. She called this a cross section of the world: Port Jervis playing arch-enemy Middletown on Thanksgiving; a local woman receiving national recognition; the books of Orrie Hitt and her deep friendship with his daugther Joyce; a young soldier like Tommy Case killed in battle; Theodora Cohen murdered by terrorists over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Those were dramatic incidents, but Janis also saw the importance of the everyday; a Little League game, a high school musical, and even a foray into acting with Presby Players. “That’s what makes up the fabric of our community,” she’d tell me.

And now with her death, the fabric has been torn.

In Memoriam