Mike Peck, The Camera Guy: December 16, 1956-August 30, 2005
Note:
Whether via photographs or words, Mike Peck was a storyteller. The 48-year-old managing editor of The Cameron Herald believed strongly that his place was behind the camera and the pen, so it was only his wonderful habit of sharing his stories that enabled us to write this story. His story.
"I learned to tell stories in West Cameron," he said once. "When I was a kid, I'd go over there and sit and listen to the old men tell their stories. They told wonderful stories that I could listen to forever."
Mike parlayed that experience into a career chronicling the life of this town for The Cameron Herald. The good, the bad, the indifferent, the ducks and the giant cucumbers - it didn't matter, all eventually made their way in front of Mike's camera or earned a spot as the subject of one of his stories.
That career lasted 32 years. He died Tuesday morning at his home in Cameron after suffering a stroke.
"I love this job. I can't imagine doing anything else," Mike said with a grin after midnight one Wednesday morning. Those long weeks and late nights were just part of his job. But, it didn't really matter to Mike. "What other job lets you go to a football game one minute and then to see (British Prime Minister) Tony Blair the next?" he said. "It's about the high you get when you're working on something that might actually make people think. That's more powerful than money."
Even so, Mike wasn't without a sense of gallows humor regarding this job. "Another day in the box," he'd say, sometimes cheerfully, occasionally factiously.
But that box often galled him.
He believed that Cameron's story needed to be told accurately and thoroughly. And, he knew when a story or column he was writing would anger or frustrate someone. He even knew when a story might hurt someone. And, he would write and re-write and agonize over it. But it didn't stop him from telling the story and it never stopped him from telling the truth.
"I'm not sure many people understand what that meant to him," said childhood friend and former C.H. Yoe High head football coach Randy Sapp. "He went through a lot [of personal hardship] to be a newspaper guy in his home town. Most of what he went through came from people right here in Cameron, people who should have known better. He'd get phone calls and emails from people griping at him for the smallest things. It was tough on him, sometimes. But he stood up for what he believed and didn't mind writing about it, even when it made some people angry."
Mike recalled one time a mother reacted badly to his work at an accident scene.
"She jumped in front of me and started yelling," he said. "I wish people understood that we don't like taking [pictures at car accidents] but it's our job. Sometimes, telling those stories can help someone else."
Still, Mike never went out of his way to make people angry. Ideas meant something to him and he respected others who shared them, even when they didn't agree. And there was something in him that secretly enjoyed being stopped on the street or in the grocery store by people who wanted to talk.
During his career as a photographer and reporter Mike simply called 'em like he saw them. Sometimes he saw them like everyone else. Sometimes he didn't. "But, you always knew where he stood," said Sapp. "He wasn't wishy-washy."
"When I think about Mike, the thing I think about the most is the way that he touched everybody in the community," said Rob Reed. Reed worked as a reporter and announcer at KMIL for many years and, during that time, struck up a friendship with Mike. "He had such a passion for Cameron and the people who live there. Whatever he did or wrote, it had an impact on the community."
It had an impact on those two men as well. Mike wrote stories about both men and both still have copies of those stories easily accessible.
"He could really choke you up with a pen," said Reed. "He was that kind of a writer and probably one of the best friends I've ever had."
First photo was [bad]
Mike's newspaper career began while he was still in high school. In fact, the story of his first sale to The Cameron Herald includes all you really need to know about Mike Peck and his love for Cameron and Yoe sports.
"I sold my first picture ... when I was 16," Mike said. "I came in and said, 'Hey, I'm the junior photographer at Yoe High and I noticed you don't have a sports page and thought you might like some pictures every now and then.' And by the time I left, we'd struck a deal."
He said that first profitable picture was of a running back, George Whiteside, hurdling another player.
"I took it. It was [bad] but when I saw it in the newspaper, it was real and it was, 'wow,'" he said. "I still have that first page folded up somewhere at the house."
With that, he began selling shots to The Herald for $5-6 each.
While that may tell you a lot about Mike and this business of newspapering, it doesn't really explain it.
Born and raised in Cameron, he suffered from hepatitis when he was in middle school. In the hospital for weeks upon weeks, he said he and his family were cradled and comforted by the people here.
His wife, Kim, said that the doctors had given up on him. "They gathered the family in, one night, and explained that they thought he wouldn't make it until morning," she said.
But Mike fooled the doctors that time. He survived.
But, he wouldn't have kept up with everything had not the community pulled together to help him. The schools even made it possible for him to listen in on classes though he couldn't be there physically. "They installed a telephone in my room," he joked. "It was probably the first example of distance learning in Cameron."
Within days of Mike's leaving the hospital, his mother was killed after suffering an aneurysm at work. Again, the family found comfort and support in their hometown.
"I could have gone someplace else," he said once. "I've thought about it. But, when it comes down to it, Cameron is a special place and these people have given me so much. I don't think I could be happy."
The visual storyteller
Mike spent much of his youth watching movies. His father, Billy, worked for the post office but also held a night job as manager of the local movie theater. Those moving pictures and the stories told by those movies, probably kindled Peck's visual and storytelling talents before he even realized it.
And he didn't realize it, at first. He was a typical high school kid, struggling to meet obligations with increasingly long hair and an intensifying 16-year-old attitude. He wanted (and got) a motorcycle, then wrecked it, then rebuilt it. Got an old truck and rebuilt it. But, despite being directed toward these goals, he still lacked a real focus when he got a call from the journalism teacher, Barbara Burke, one summer.
"She put this little camera down in front of me and said, 'I want you to be our junior photographer next year,' " he remembered. "I told her, 'Hey you've got the wrong guy' and pushed it back at her."
But she insisted and he, finally, acquiesced and found his passion.
"I used to get out of football games, run home for a sandwich and go back up to the school. I just couldn't wait to see what was on that film," he said. "I guess I'd be up there until about 3 o'clock in the morning."
One day a man gave him an enlarger for his home.
"I'll bet I used 7,000 trash bags plugging up the holes in my grandma's garage to make a dark room," he remembered. "I didn't have running water out there. I stuck a hose through the wall and had to run out and around to turn it on and run," he made running motions, "out again to turn it off."
"And now at, it's just about the only thing I know how to do so it's like - better do it," he smiled.
Cameras, anyone?
To Mike, doing his job meant lugging his enormous camera bag everywhere. His passion for new camera gear - for electronics of any kind - is legend. "I've got 15 or 20 camera bodies in a closet at home," he said while scrolling through a website with the specs for the latest Cannon digital camera. He weighed that last camera purchase for a very long time and could cite even the most esoteric specs on the new Cannon 20D with little or no provocation.
"There's nothing like the smell of new electronics fresh out of the box," he'd say, inhaling deeply.
But, having the best camera he could afford was important to him. "I believe that if you don't take the time to catch that moment on film, it's completely gone forever and some things only happen once," he said.
And sometimes, Mike tried to tell those stories and take those pictures, even if it put him in harm's way.
Once, he was backing up to better frame a rodeo shot when he stepped into a posthole and badly twisted his ankle. Bill Cooke, from the Rockdale Reporter took a picture of him several days later catching pictures on the courthouse lawn, his swollen foot stretched out in front of him.
"Mike's a good one," Cooke wrote on the back of the photo he sent to then-publisher Frank Luecke.
Giddings ignites opinions
While Mike took his photography seriously, he never considered himself to be a good writer.
"When Jacquie and I arrived in Cameron, Mike was already an exceptional photographer and was desperately eager to become an exceptional reporter," said former Herald publisher Wayne Green. "He was like a sponge, in a way. He soaked up every useful piece of instruction you could offer him and he put it to good use. Mike, I think, went on to become a very, very good reporter. Not only for a small town, at just about any level. He was an asset to Cameron."
While Mike grew as a reporter and writer, he resisted writing anything that gave him the opportunity to express his own opinion ... until that infamous football game in Giddings.
As the story goes, Mike was on the Yoe sideline, minding his own business when he heard the PA system call for security. He turned to the side judge to find out what was up but, instead, found two members of Giddings Police Department ready to escort him from the field.
"They said that I was creating a disturbance," Mike remembered. "What, me?!"
"I thought that Giddings was way out of line," said Sapp. "I think they were just looking for something to get our mind off the game. He wasn't disrupting us at all. I thought it was a ploy on their part but it's a standing joke, now. It is in Giddings, too."
"I'd been trying to talk him into writing a column for some time," remembered Frank Shubert, the publisher at the time. "Then, he came back from that game and he was hot. He just sat down and wrote it, beginning to end. Then, when he was finished, I worried that we would have room for it, it was so long."
Kids at school
By anyone's count, Mike attended every Cameron Yoe football game from the day he drew his first paycheck as a freelance photographer through last season. In fact, last Friday's season opener was likely the first time since 1972 that the Cameron Yoemen played a football game without Mike Peck stalking the sidelines.
It is certain that, over the years, Mike knew every kid that donned a Yoe helmet, and most of those who didn't.
"He and Kim didn't have any kids," said Sapp, "but he had a bunch of kids at the high school and he helped to raise them all."
"You know if I had to do it all again, I'd line up to do it the same way," Mike said. "It's been so much fun. I look at high school kids. This year's valedictorian wasn't even born when I started to work here."
Mike served his community and this newspaper for 32 years, through three owners and five publishers. He's watched the paper go from twice weekly and back again, from lean times when he raced to the bank with his paycheck, to more stable ones.
And like his community supported him, he supported it, with his life and his energy, his stories and his pictures.
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Funeral services
Family visitation will be Thursday from 6 - 8 p.m. at Marek-Burns-Laywell Funeral Home in Cameron.
Funeral Services will be Friday at 1 p.m. at the funeral home.
Burial will follow the funeral service in Oak Hill Cemetery.
The Cameron Herald will close at 11 a.m. on Friday and remain closed for the rest of the day.
Mike Peck: side bar
Over the years, Mike garnered a variety of press awards. He was even quite proud of many of them.
However, he coveted the state trophy for sports photography. After years of trying, someone else always won.
"Always a bridesmaid, never a bride," he'd say.
To make matters worse, one year, his cross-county rival at the Rockdale Reporter won that particular category with a rodeo photo.
"That's not really even sports," he said in dismay.
But, in 2004, Mike's material won the first place trophy in both sports and feature photography.
In the last few years, he'd won state and regional recognition for his sports coverage, news writing and a third place national trophy for humorous column writing.
Mike is survived by his father, Billy, Kim, his wife of 23-years, his Aunt Lois, his step-mom Melissa, two step-sisters, a variety of nieces and nephews, two cats, a computer, an iPod and more camera gear than you can shake a magic stick at.
In lieu of flowers, you may make a donation in his name to the Cameron ISD Scholarship Foundation.
We'll miss you, Mike. This place will never be the same. We're expecting you to have the cigarette boat fired up and ready to go!
This story was published in the Cameron Herald August 31, 2005.
