I learned heartbreaking news today (Friday, Oct. 23): My longtime friend and former newspaper colleague Tracy Cowle, whom I’ve known for more than 40 years, passed away a month ago in his sleep while visiting his mother in Arizona. He was only 65, far too soon for someone of Tracy’s vitality, enthusiasm and energy to be gone.
At a time in our lives when we are losing friends at a devastating pace, his passing comes as a shock greater than almost any I’ve felt. I won’t say we were in constant contact, but Kay and I do remember fondly a long visit with Tracy and his wife Clennie at a party at the home of our friends and newspaper family members Frank and Cindy Smith not so long ago.
Tracy and I go way back, as we worked together at all three of my newspaper jobs, starting with The Odessa American in 1983 (he came a couple of years later), then the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News. He was an active, fun dude, and back when we were young and I was playing a lot of basketball, I remember Tracy joining me and my sports writing colleague Brett McMurphy for pickup games at the Odessa College sports center.
At the S-T, Tracy was a news and sports copy editor for much of the 1990s. When the paper instituted copy desks for its zoned editions in Arlington and NE Tarrant County in 1993, Tracy and I were part of the group that formed the NE Tarrant desk, along with Danny Vandegriff, the late Darren Nielsen, and the newly hired Paige Sanders. Sandy Guerra-Cline — who would join my colleagues and me on the DMN copy desk many years later — also joined our crack NE Tarrant desk crew part time to make up an extremely talented group. Tracy and I also worked on the S-T Sports desk together (and talk about talent!).
Tracy was part of the exodus of editors/designers who left the S-T for the DMN‘s copy/news desks in 1999, along with Paige, Darren, Cindy, Laura Riddle, and finally me in February 2000. Tracy became a stalwart member of the DMN‘s heralded Universal Desk under copy chief Joel Thornton (RIP), editing copy cleanly and efficiently just as he’d done at the Star-Telegram.
Tracy, caught up in one of the DMN‘s numerous rounds of layoffs as the newspaper business began failing, left journalism in 2006 to work as a financial consultant for TD Ameritrade for many years before moving into real estate with his wife. He was the exceedingly proud father of his adult son Cameron, his stepchildren and grandchildren.
We’re gonna miss you like crazy, my friend. 
