Table of Contents
Get our free local reporting delivered straight to your inbox. No noise, no spam — just clear, independent coverage of Marblehead. Sign up for our once-a-week newsletter.
I first met Ed Bell in 2012 when I was 25, a young reporter trying to understand what kind of journalist I wanted to be. I knew his resume before I knew him — five decades in newsrooms that shaped Boston and national coverage. But he never led with that. He was easy to approach. Easy to call.
And I did. All the time.
Sometimes it was about a story I was wrestling with. Sometimes he was calling me — wanting the scoop on an issue in town. But more than any other reason, I called to check in.
He always answered.
He didn't dramatize problems. He asked questions. Is it fair? Is it accurate? Have you made the extra call? The conversation would slow the moment down. The noise would settle.
On Thursday, March 5, several organizations from the Council on Aging to the Rotary Club of Marblehead Harbor will gather at the Boston Yacht Club from 6 to 8 p.m. for "A night to remember Ed Bell." Co-hosted by award-winning journalist Susan Wornick and Bell's daughter, Andrea Bell Bergeron, the evening will include community recognition awards reflecting Bell's values.
One of the honors recognizes student journalism, and it is fitting that Marblehead High School senior Grey Collins will receive it.
Grey began showing up as a sophomore — camera in hand — capturing community events, sitting through long agendas, asking questions and filing clean copy. The work is rarely glamorous. It is patient, repetitive and often invisible. Those were the habits Ed respected most: preparation, curiosity, the willingness to stay until the last vote is taken.
When he learned he would receive the award in Ed's name, Grey said he was "just so stunned at first," adding that "to even have my name mentioned in the same sentence as his was just incredible."
For him, journalism begins with attention — "capturing people's faces and expressions … because that allows the reader to connect with the subject and understand the story better."
Speaking at Ed's funeral, Wornick told a story about lunch.
Before hiring her at WBZ, Ed had driven to a McDonald's parking lot in Salem, New Hampshire, to sit in his car and listen to her tapes. Later, over lunch in Cambridge, she scanned the menu.
"I see I can get a beef tongue sandwich and I think, 'I don't even know this man and I'm gonna order a tongue sandwich,'" she recalled, drawing laughter from the crowd. Ed, without hesitation, ordered the pig knuckles and ate them with relish.
It was, in its own way, a perfect story. A man who would later sit beside presidents was entirely unselfconscious about ordering something faintly absurd for lunch.
At the funeral, Peter Casey recalled the way Ed reshaped a newsroom without theatrics. When Ed took over as news director at WHDH in the 1980s, Casey said, he declined the traditional executive perch along the windows and instead placed his desk squarely in the newsroom — "where the action was."
"Ed had the ability to manage people without having them feel as if they were being managed," Casey said. "That made us want to work hard. He wasn't a micromanager. I never heard him yell."
It was the kind of detail that could easily be overlooked — the location of a desk — and yet it explained something essential. Leadership, for Ed, was proximity. Not volume. Presence.
On "Up for Discussion," that instinct held. The award-winning show — a fixture on MHTV — covered everything from leaf blower warrant articles to school budgets and the collective suspense over when the Mariner would finally open for business.
Former Marblehead Reporter editor Chris Stevens and I sat at that table often enough to know how easily a panel can drift. I could follow a thought quickly, sometimes faster than the conversation required, occasionally losing the thread before I meant to.
Ed rarely interrupted that momentum. He let it stretch. And then, when it had gone far enough, he would enter — not with a correction, but with a question. A reframing that brought the discussion back into focus.
"He gave us a lot of room to roam but there was never any question as to whose show it was," Stevens said. "Ed could effortlessly pull the conversation back on track and deftly shift direction if things got too raucous."
Hearing her describe it that way made me reconsider how I sat at that table. What felt, in the moment, like generosity was also discipline. What felt like patience was also control.
In the Rotary Club of Marblehead Harbor, the rhythm was different but the posture was the same, fellow Rotarian Linda Doliber said. Ed was a "very nonthreatening, calm, welcoming" presence — and beneath it, "a very quiet strength and assurance that all would be well."
When an issue surfaced, he didn't rush to fill the silence. "He would sit back and be very quiet … and then he would sum up the problem very quietly and confidently and give a suggestion," Doliber said. "You would sit back and think, 'Why didn't I see that?'"
At the Council on Aging, the work was less visible but no less urgent. Teri Allen McDonough, who will receive a volunteerism award in Ed's name, worked closely with him when he chaired the COA board. He wanted to understand how the department actually functioned — the programming, the funding streams, the people behind the services.
The budget was complex, sometimes precarious, especially as the town prepared for what McDonough called the "silver tsunami." Ed helped craft strategies to advocate for essential services. He respected the time the work required, she said, but he also reminded her to put "family first."
Andrea Bell Bergeron told me she feared her answers to questions for this piece about her father might be "incredibly boring." They were anything but.
"My father was the same person whether he was on camera, in a meeting, or just at home," she wrote. "He was easy to be around, warm, curious, funny, a little mischievous." She can watch old episodes of "Up for Discussion" and see no performance. "No pretension and genuine. Even when he was serious or stern, he was still kind and empathetic."
But the stories she returns to are smaller.
"I'll miss them answering my phone calls at the same time," she said of her parents during the funeral, "or hearing my dad call my mom shouting 'Yo, Barb!' when he needed to get her attention."
After he died, Andrea found the last video on his phone. It was Ed alone at the Landing, filming the Christmas Walk parade and Santa's arrival — no assignment, no audience, just a man enjoying the spectacle. She thought it was kind of perfect.
Being a newsman was somehow innate to him, Andrea wrote. He delivered papers as a boy, covered Peabody High School sports and earned his first front-page byline at 15, riding his bike to stories because he didn't have a license or a car. When he helped launch the Marblehead Current at 82, it was, as Andrea put it, "a bit like coming home to his roots, including the paper route."
He once described his motivation as driven by "equal portions of hope, optimism and a deep and abiding love for the town." Andrea didn't describe that as ambition. She described it as joy.
When hundreds gathered to remember him, St. Andrew's sanctuary felt less like a formal service and more like a living newsroom reunion. The stories moved easily between reverence and laughter.
Ed was such a great listener, Andrea wrote, that he probably did not share as much of his personal story as he could have. "He was very humble that way."
She said he would look at the town and feel optimistic about the various outlets covering Marblehead. More broadly, she believed he would be concerned. Without quality local journalism, she wrote, "it is easy to offer people clickbait, misinformation or AI-generated content and call it news."
I can move quickly — toward a conclusion, toward a reaction. A comment that meant nothing to someone else could sit with me for days. When one landed harder than I expected, I would call him.
Ed rarely reacted at the same speed.
Instead, he would widen the frame. What else might be true? Is there more context? Have you made the extra call? He didn't dismiss what I was feeling. He just helped me hold it at arm's length long enough to see it clearly.
The temperature would drop. The issue would shrink to its proper size. I now realize he answered the phone not to take my side — as much as I sometimes wanted him to — but to give me perspective.
When we later shared in launching a nonprofit newsroom in Marblehead, I saw that instinct extend beyond our phone calls. He believed local journalism was a form of stewardship — not simply publishing information, but tending to the civic life of a town he loved.
