In March, I called Bruce MacMillan at the Broadside Bookshop to ask if we could get together so I could interview him for an article I wanted to write about him for downstreet.net.

I told him my notion was to do a profile of him as the longest-running Valley bookseller, known throughout the local book-reading and book-writing community as a nurturer of authors and enabler of book buyers.

He seemed reluctant to submit to an interview, but told me to call in April after he got back from vacation.

On that second call he said quietly but firmly that he was at a stage in his life when he did not feel the need to be written about, and he declined my request.

I was slightly miffed, but I had had enough dealings with Bruce over the years to realize that he could be abrupt, even gruff, with others. So I chalked up his response to simple bad humor.

In July while I was away on vacation, I learned that Bruce had died, I immediately understood what he was saying to me earlier: time was running out for him and he wasn't going to spend precious minutes answering dumb questions from a reporter. He had made precisely the right choice, I felt in retrospect.

His life and his approach to his trade - reading, appreciating, understanding and selling books - told his story. Others could offer their own opinions about his contribution to and impact on the community of readers and writers.

And offer they did at the memorial service held at Sage Hall at Smith College that I was privileged to attend. There are few among us who would not want to be depicted as Bruce was - intelligent, gentle, loving, funny, principled - at that two-hour ceremony attended by some 500 people, many of whom had known Bruce well, and some only in passing, as the proprietor of what had become a Northampton institution - Broadside Bookshop.

Creating an institution takes time - nearly 30 years in this case - of consistent, patient, careful work. It takes thousands and thousands of encounters with customers, new and old, strangers. and friends It takes an abiding belief in the work, in the value of the tasks, some very routine, you perform every day. Do that long enough, well enough, and others get the picture - this is important, this enterprise needs to exist and it can even survive its creator.

Those who spoke - there was a strong feeling of community and unity at the service - clearly had gotten the picture that what Bruce created through his intelligence and his labor at the Broadside Bookshop was worth every frustration and setback along the way. They knew what he probably long ago realized that the bookstore enhanced the community and made the city of Northampton a better place by its very presence.

The High Cost of Lying, Revisited

Sometime in the late 1970s, Fred Cusick, a young reporter at the Daily Hampshire Gazette, was puzzled by information provided in the resume of the background of a gubernatorial nominee for state Secretary of Elder Affairs.

The nominee, Stephen Guptill, had said he had earned a graduate degree in journalism from a university in England as well as another advanced degree from an American institution.

A textbook cynic, Cusick was especially intrigued by mention of the journalism degree - that just didn't sound like a English academic discipline. So he made a few phone calls - the one to England probably represented a good chunk of the newsroom budget in those days, but Cusick established that the university offered no such degree and had never heard of Stephen Guptill. The other degree listed on Guptill's public resume turned out to be bogus as well.

A call to Guptill confirmed that what Cusick had found out was true. Guptill had lied. When the story broke, Guptill beat a hasty retreat and turned down the nomination before Gov. Edward King could withdraw it. End of story.

In 1981, while serving as a Pulitzer Prize juror, I was a member of a five-member panel evaluating and recommending entries in the category of newspaper feature writing. After three days of deliberation and sorting through scores and scores of entries, we came up with our choice - "Murder on a Day Pass" by Teresa Carpenter.

Yet when the actual awards were announced several weeks later, the winner was Janet Cooke for her sensational story in the Washington Post about an 8-year-old heroin addict titled "Jimmy's World." The five us on the feature writing jury were stunned because we had never seen this entry, which it turned out had been submitted in the category of local news reporting, but had been reclassified by the Pulitzer Prize board, which makes the final decisions on prize winners. In other words, the big boys had substituted their choice for ours.

We felt betrayed that our work had been overturned by the board. But our sense of betrayal turned to one of amusement when it was revealed that Janet Cooke had fabricated the entire Jimmy's World story under competitive pressures in the Washington Post newsroom which placed a premium on winning journalism awards. The Pulitzer board had been hood-winked as had the Post's editors and management.

Janet Cooke was stripped of her prize, fired, and from then on became the poster child for the consequences of dishonest journalism. It took both the Post and the Pulitzer board some time to recover from the black mark they had inflicted on themselves and their profession.

Any lesson here concerning Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer-prize historian and his employer, Mount Holyoke College, in the wake of disclosures that he fabricated - lied - about salient aspects of his personal background during classes he taught at the college and in an interview for a newspaper profile of him?

Sure there is. Like Stephen Guptill and Janet Cooke, Joseph Ellis must pay the full price - with his job and his reputation.

In the wake of being turned down in the most recent competition for a state construction grant, Lilly Library in Florence will have to go back to the drawing board.

This might not be a bad time to renew an earlier proposal I made that the trustees of the library make overtures to their neighbor, the Florence Association, about undertaking a joint project that would result in a combined renovated library and civic center to occupy that entire site at the confluence of Meadow, Park and North Main Streets.

Such a combined undertaking has the potential for creating a space that would be distinctive and provide a focus for Florence. Perhaps the state guidelines on funds for library renovation are too restrictive to permit such a combined effort, but it is worth studying even as plans move forward to reapply for state funds for a free-standing library project. Paul Gaffney, president of the Florence Association, told me the other day his organization would be receptive to such talks.

Those of us who had the pleasure recently of listening to the concert given by the brand-new Florence Community Band in the little island at that intersection recognize that as more young families move to Florence a new sense of community is taking root.

A distinctive civic center that would house many activities and provide multiple services - library, cultural, municipal - would do much to further cement Florence's own identity as a community.