WILLIAM O. GOGGINS SPENT 10 YEARS at Wired, the last five of those as deputy editor. On his final day on the job in June 2005, he bid farewell at a morning meeting held in our conference room, with its signature neon-pink door. He opened with a quote from Marshall McLuhan: "I may be wrong, but I'm never in doubt."
The line got quite a laugh because of Bill's reputation for passionately held opinions. He also hated to lose an argument and would wear down opponents with dense, free-form soliloquies that came to be known as Billibusters. The man was a seeming force of nature – intense, hilarious, hyperintelligent, inexhaustible.
So his sudden death at age 43 came as a deep shock to his countless friends and colleagues. Bill was running the San Francisco Marathon on July 30 when he collapsed after passing the 24-mile mark, just 2.2 miles short of the finish. A superb, natural athlete who had been running most of his life, he was on pace for a time under three hours and 15 minutes – good enough to achieve his goal of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
Bill had an inestimable impact on this magazine. If you have read an issue of Wired in the past decade, you have felt his presence – in the witty headlines and captions he wrote, the innumerable mistakes he corrected, the stories he saved from lack of clarity. He was a mentor to a generation of younger journalists who passed through Wired, and the lessons were always the same: economy of language and uncompromising commitment to correctness in each detail. Every copy editor and fact-checker during his tenure experienced a moment of dread as he briskly approached their desk, story pages in hand. "Shouldn't this be ... ?" came the query. Most times he had already fixed the problem. Editors kept a watchful eye on him, at his ever-immaculate desk, as he deftly improved copy with precise strokes of his red Rollerball.
The kind of unique, instantly recognizable voice most writers only yearn for came naturally to Bill. He wrote a series of blisteringly funny pieces for Suck.com in its mid-'90s heyday, under the pen name Bartleby. His droll skepticism – about the tech bubble, presidential politics, public education reform – helped create a style that is now widely imitated throughout the blogosphere (a term he detested). But in the past few years, he stayed mostly behind the editorial curtain. His specialty was writing headlines – which he elevated to high art – and sharpening stories as they reached their final stages. We referred to him as "the closer."
From headlines for feature stories to the pithy phrase that accompanies the date on every Wired cover – known in-house as the jingo – every bit of copy he crafted resonated with his sensibility. To meet his standards, a jingo had to operate on at least three levels and have a touch of irreverence. For a story on synthetic diamonds, for example, he came up with "Like a Rock." The future-of-TV cover had Jon Stewart with a remote control shoved in his mouth and came with this warning: "Watch It, Buddy." And for the issue featuring gaming guru and Sims inventor Will Wright, the quip was "Original Sim."
But as economical as he was in type, Bill was loquacious in conversation, which he treated as an art and an obligation. His stream-of-consciousness banter could be tough to follow. But if pressed, he could retrace every allusion and patiently explain how, say, the previous night's episode of elimiDATE connected to the latest round of Middle East diplomacy. His brain worked faster than almost anyone else's.
He was known for turning emails into what one writer referred to as "small literary events." Even Bill's away-from-the-office announcements sparkled:
To: Wired
From: Bill
Subject: Gone fishing
Out of the office and off the grid Monday through Friday, toting the barge east for a tour of riverside speakeasies and other cool coolie stamping grounds. Back lifting bales Monday 9 August. Not a showboat, but I play one on my mouth organ, B. To: Wired
From: Bill
Subject: Gone shooting
Out of the office and off the grid Friday – heading to Big D, with at least a moment of silence to be spent in the Book Depository overlooking Dealey Plaza, to be followed, curiously enough, by knocking one back at a bar called Cuba Libre. Getting grassy like a knolling stone, B.
Bill was always at least two steps ahead of the rest of us – so much so that he even wrote his own obituary three years ago in an email to a friend:
GOGGINS, WILLIAM O. – Editorial sanitation engineer, public transportation enthusiast, and beloved friend of the DVD rental industry, died unexpectedly on April 3, 2003, when his head spontaneously combusted. He is survived by his parents, his two sisters, ... and an elderly Chinese American gentleman in the back stairwell of the 30 Stockton bus yelling "Backdoor!" Memorial gifts may be made to the Alpha Centauri Repopulation Project, 520 Third Street, San Francisco.
The address, of course, is Wired HQ. The gifts are surely unnecessary. Bill already gave us more than we could ever repay.
– The editors
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Gone Fishing
