Dennis Shaughnessey loved the singer-songwriter John Prine.
Especially “Sam Stone,” Prine’s song about a veteran who returned from Vietnam with a morphine habit.
“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes,” sings Prine.
“Man, that’s writing,” Dennis said more than once. “Show it, don’t tell it.”
He applied the axiom regularly, as a stringer and then reporter for the Sun and the Dracut Dispatch.
He was so good, recalls former Sun scribe Peter Ward, “they had to hire him.”
Dennis died Friday evening, June 5, after a fall at home two days earlier. Surgery couldn’t save him. He was 64.
He leaves a wife of 31 years, Diane, their children Rory, 29 and Kathleen, 30. Dennis also leaves step-children Tami and Jay. He was predeceased by a stepson, Lee. He also leaves Roxy, his beloved 7-year-old Siberian Husky.
I interviewed Dennis in December 2000, for a story on the 20th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder. We solicited folks with a notice in the paper. Dennis answered. Man, I remember thinking, this guy knows a lot about Lennon.
At some point, after The Sun hired him, he introduced himself in the newsroom. The Lennon guy.
Who didn’t love this guy immediately?
“When I met him,” said Ward, “it was like seeing an old friend again, never a stranger.”
Dennis covered anything he could. He loved the craft of writing. He approached it the same way he learned to drive a truck.
Listen to those with experience and know the nuts and bolts before you put it in drive, and take the most direct route.
“Dennis wasn’t one of the flashiest reporters to walk into The Sun’s newsroom,” says Enterprise Editor Christopher Scott, “but he was one of the most dependable scribes to ever work here. Dennis was always willing to take on that extra story when other folks were heading out the door. I would turn over my shoulder, say ‘Dennis,’ and he would gladly say, ‘What do you need?’”
He wrote a column called Copious Notes that “got right to the point,” recalls former Sun Managing Editor Charlie St. Amand. “He wasn’t interested in wasting the reader’s time.”
And Dennis never forgot to enjoy the ride. He regaled co-workers with stories of the most mundane civic meetings, many from when he covered Billerica, as if they were Senate hearings. Which is what helped make him a great reporter. He told a great story and dropped the punch-line perfectly. You could shave with his wit.
He was blessed with perspective.
“I knew not to look at him during a staff meeting if one of the bosses was saying something ridiculous because Dennis would make me laugh by rolling his eyes,” recalled Jennifer Myers, who worked with him in Dracut and Lowell. “He just got it. He was so sharp and quick-witted and always knew what was going on. And I knew I could always go to him to bounce ideas around or just vent, and we shared a dark sense of humor that helped both of us keep going through some tough times, and he was so good at keeping a positive attitude and laughing through even the tough times. We all need more of that.”
He was street smarts and grit, rather than the journalism-school polish. Fred Flintstone with a notebook.
Mark Van Der Hyde calls it “the gruff Dracut townie exterior.” The two men shared a church family at Grace Bible Church in Dracut. Dennis was a founding member of the church. Van Der Hyde joined years later.
“What really struck me at the time was how approachable and friendly he was. … He was a Christian,” says Van Der Hyde, “but also a normal guy who did normal things.”
Van Der Hyde admired Dennis’ “encyclopedic knowledge of Dracut and Lowell politics and history, and more stories than I could ever absorb. We had many long chats about that kind of nerdy thing, usually while I was doing some sort of computer repair for him.”
Like Van Der Hyde, Dennis met his wife at the church, too.
Something else Dennis loved deeply was history. He was blessed with abundant curiosity. He lived life.
He drove a cab. He drove a truck. He could tell you where the old head shop was in ’60s Lowell.
He played guitar. Well, in fact. Was a classic-rock guy but never ignored good new stuff.
He once stole a Sun gathering, recalls Myers, with an acoustic rendition of Britney Spears’ “Oops, I Did it Again,” a la Richard Thompson.
“It was,” she recalls, “magnificent.”
He did OK on TV, too, singing each year at the annual televised Dracut Scholarship Foundation. In 2012, he sang a note-perfect rendition of Delta Spirit’s “Devil Knows You’re Dead,” which he heard on the “Friday Night Lights” finale.
He could quote verbatim dialogue from movies and TV, especially the turkey hotline episode of “The West Wing.”
He was pretty much a one-man technical crew when The Sun briefly did a radio show. Reporters had to say a bit about the stories they worked on. Ward recalls never having been on — he could never be in a room with Dennis without laughing. They never finished a segment.
Scott recalls the time he was on the show with Dennis.
“True to form, as Dennis introduced me, the bumper music was ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin. Classic rock and classic Dennis.”
Dennis called Sun editor and columnist Dan Phelps two nights before he fell “out of the blue.” There’s a Pink Floyd special at 9:30 on PBS, he told Phelps.
“He knew I loved Floyd, as did he,” says Phelps. “We chatted for 15, 20 minutes, and of course, his wife, son and daughter all came up in the conversation. He was in good spirits, told me he had just gotten out of the hospital after a 24-day stay and was homebound. After we signed off, I put PBS on and, wouldn’t you know it, there was no Floyd special. Instead a show on Ted Williams was on. He texted me: ‘What the hell is this? Where’s Floyd? And by the way, which one’s Pink?’”
Nicholas Tsui remembers Dennis as an adviser for UMass Lowell’s Connector newspaper during the 2007-2008 year. Tsui recalls an article Dennis wrote about the experience. “He was actually scared to teach us and skeptical about how he might mold us.”
“I always wrote about music and that was really important to him,” said Tsui.
They shared taste, especially in Jimi Hendrix.
Never one to miss a story, Dennis wrote about Tsui and the guitar he had signed by an astounding number of guitar legends.
Dennis and I smoked cigarettes together. It was an addiction that got us out of the office. Along the canal at the Kearney Square Sun building, then across a parking lot from the new place on Dutton Street. Sweating in the summer, shivering in the winter, undaunted by skyrocketing prices or persistent coughs.
We smoked like it was part of the job. Marlboros.
Diane hated his smoking. Not just then, but during all the more recent times he thought she didn’t know.
I quit July 2, 2010. I know I bummed more cigarettes from him than he did me. By a long shot. (Sorry, Den.)
Over the last couple of years, he was in and out of hospitals more than most doctors. I visited him a year ago in a nursing home in Chelmsford during a recovery stint. He told me how he would unhook his oxygen tank for a smoke break in the bathroom at home. He couldn’t quit.
Three years ago, I was driving a road that snaked behind Dennis’ house. I could see him hanging out a back window, sucking on a cigarette. He couldn’t see me.
“Quit smoking, you idiot!!” I bellowed as I drove past. (I may not have used “idiot.”)
My cellphone rang.
“Hey, was that you?” he barked.
“Was what me?” I lied.
He laughed a congested laugh and hung up. And then he hooked his oxygen tank back up.
I found a message on my work phone a few weeks later with Dennis’ detailed instructions on how he liked his Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Large iced, regular.
“With a pack of butts on the side. See ya Monday, buddy.”
I last spoke with him a couple weeks ago, during his latest hospital stay. They had just finished draining fluid from him.
“I’m quitting, man,” he said. He sounded like he’d just whiffed with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. “I’ve gotta. It’s gonna kill me.”
He thanked me again for taking him to see Prine at Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Dennis took my extra ticket on Sept 13, 2008. Prine was amazing. Dennis was amazed at the flow of great songs, one after the other, that spilled from the great artist. When Prine sang “Sam Stone,” Dennis leaned over and whispered, “man, that’s writing.” Again.
He’d know.
Cancer took a chunk of Prine’s neck in 1998 and sidelined him for a bit. He cursed smoking but he missed it.
Prine died of COVID-19 on April 7. His last album, “The Tree of Forgiveness,” came out just over two years ago. The last song was called “When I Get to Heaven.”
In heaven, Prine sang, there were girls and cocktails and old friends and family to enjoy, and “I’m gonna smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long.”
Smoke ’em if you got ’em, Den. And don’t worry about the oxygen tank.
David Perry is a former award-winning journalist for The Sun. He owns Vinyl Destination at Mill No. 5 in Lowell.
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