I have always been fascinated by literary references to Maxwell Perkins. I’m not certain when he first came into my consciousness. Maybe some college paper I had to write about F. Scott Fitzgerald. Or was it Hemingway? Perhaps Wolfe. It could have been any or all of them. Perkins was the genius who was the editor for geniuses. His years at Charles Scribner’s Sons in the ’20s until his death in 1947 saw him shaping American literature in an unparalleled fashion. He was confidante, money lender, therapist and wordsmith to dozens of writers who might be giants.

And some of them were.

Perkins is credited with shaping Hemingway’s style and editing to make his prose sparse. He took Fitzgerald’s overly descriptive passages and made them tighter and smarter. He had a love/hate relationship with Thomas Wolfe, which they seemed to love /hate having. I never found anything that really talked about Perkins, as a person, until now. My newest read is a winner of the National Book Award, A. Scott Berg’s biography, “Maxwell Perkins, Editor of Genius.”

A few years ago there were some awards passed out and I called my longtime editor/friend/confidante/wordsmith, David Hampshire, to thank him for helping me win something. He declined to take any credit. He has long been the Maxwell Perkins to Park City writers and he deflected any personal praise.

I met David in the early ’80s, I don’t remember which year it doesn’t matter. He was the editor of the second paper in town called simply, “The Newspaper.” I was a columnist, under an assumed name with a column called, “Strike a Vein.” I loved having a nom de plume and few folks had figured out the very silly, small-town puzzle until My editor at the old Park Record hired a reporter who was certain he was Woodward and Bernstein rolled into The One True Reporter. One day, without telling me, he stuck a line of copy at the bottom of my column.

“Jamie Olsen is the pen name of reporter Teri Orr.”

I hated him for spoiling my ruse. I marched down the street into David’s office and asked him if he wanted the column. Our negotiations were brief and the column continued without missing a week. From time to time I contributed photos and stories and David massaged them and took out all the unnecessary words and added all the missing ones. He would for decades.

Years later, I became editor of the combined papers that had taken on the historic name The Park Record after a buyout or sellout, depending upon your view. David had left for a spell to work in the corporate world of words and we stayed in touch.

David was married in my living room while he was editor of the paper. And it was a lovely, small wedding and a lovely, small reception, which fit nicely into my lovely, small home. Years later, after his beautiful daughter was born, I took a three-month sabbatical from the paper to work on a book I never did publish. I was living for two full months on a private island in the San Juan Islands, three nautical miles from Canada. It was, in so many ways, the best summer of my life. And David and his family came to visit.

The island only had three other full-time inhabitants in the caretakers home and three times during that summer there was a week-long whale-watching camp with young people who stayed in an old, funky lodge built by John Wayne, who had wanted the island to be a private game reserve. There were dozens of curly-horned mouflon sheep and the largest herd of tiny, chocolate-colored, sika deer outside of Japan. Half the island was windswept and barren and half was an old-growth forest. It was rugged, with only one pickup truck to go from the dock to the lodge. We were a nautical mile from Roche Harbor on San Juan Island. By necessity, I learned all about the carry on/carry off philosophy of island living.

I loved my solitude. And I rarely used my giant, newly-issued cell phone, which resembled a brick with a stem. Honest. This was 1994.

David had written? Could that be? He was planning a vacation to the Pacific Northwest with his wife and daughter and they were thinking of taking a ferry and heading in my direction. “Would a visit be possible?” I was thrilled for the good company. I remember walking the three miles down to the dock and greeting them at the little boat they hired to bring them over. We walked up to my house with the stunning views and we sat on the redwood deck and talked and talked and talked and ate the crab they had carefully brought over with them in a backpack on ice for our feast. Somewhere there is a picture from that day David took. I am sitting on the deck, deeply tan, with buff arms and legs (all that walking each day) and wild, curly (humidity infused), naturally salt-watered, sun-streaked blonde/brown hair. I am laughing. It was such a generous act of friendship for them to make the great effort to join me in my remoteness.

I came back that September and resigned as editor the very same week. I didn’t know what I would do, I just knew, like the tides I watched all summer, that it was time to see where the currents would take me.

All along, I kept the column. I changed the name to be more artsy. And during that period when we opened the Eccles Center, I stopped writing for a few months. A few years ago, after David had left both his corporate job and his marriage, he returned for a gig as a copy editor at this paper. He was, once again, taking my ramblings and making them into something readable.

Last week, David left The Park Record to pursue his own writing projects. We will keep meeting to share thoughts and confidences and beverages and though I am no literary genius, I am convinced he is. Thank you, David, for all the thoughtful editing and encouragement you offered for decades. And when I finish the book on Perkins, I’ll be certain to lend it to you … maybe this very Sunday in the Park.

Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.