As part of Roll Call’s 70th anniversary, we’ve asked several notable alumni to reflect on their time working for the paper. We’ll run these columns throughout the summer.

I am loud. 

Always have been.

But I never realized how loud I was — on the phone especially — until I took a job as a young reporter for Roll Call back in the early 2000s.

At the time, my desk was sandwiched in between Susan Crabtree and John Mercurio.  They tolerated my, um, volume.

But, behind me — at an alcove in the corner of the room — was a reporter named Damon Chappie. Damon was blind — or very close to it.  Which meant that my voice was even louder for his heightened hearing. 

Unless you are a real Roll Call oldhead, you probably don’t know Damon. He died in 2004 at the age of 40 of congestive heart failure. (Damon contracted a fungal infection during a trip to Mexico in 1997 and, while he lived, it cost him his sight — and led to a series of related health problems.)

For those of you who don’t know his name, here’s what I can tell you: He was the best investigative reporter I ever had a chance to work with. Damon specialized in investigations of members of Congress — and, over the years, he led or played a key role in devastating stories centered on then-Ohio Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant and then-Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Bud Shuster.

Which would have been a major accomplishment for ANY reporter. But, again, Damon was blind.  And this was the early 2000s. We were still, largely, a profession of print — reams and reams of documents that any investigative reporter would have to pore over to find the needle in the haystack.

And technology then wasn’t technology now! There weren’t all sorts of fancy text-to-voice options for someone like Damon. But, he figured it out — somehow.

I never totally understood how it all worked but, basically, Damon found software that would read web pages to him. “In spite of his blindness and other ailments, he went back to work, armed with special software that scanned documents into his computer and read them back at an auctioneer’s speed,” read the Washington Post obituary of him.

Which brings me back to where I started: I am loud. And Damon was relying on an automated voice operating at “auctioneer’s speed” to sort through the thousands — literally — of documents involved in just one of his investigative pieces.

And so, I became a very careful reader of Damon’s sighing. If I heard one sigh — and then no others — I knew I was loud but in a tolerable way.  I would dial back on the volume slightly and Damon and I would both go on with our days.

Two sighs — especially if the second one was louder and longer than the first — meant that a) I was louder than normal and b) Damon was more annoyed than normal. If I heard two sighs during the course of a phone interview or source call, I would often end the call — sometimes abruptly.

Why? Because I feared the very rare three-sighs calls or even the times when Damon would say in his polite-but-deeply-exasperated way “Chris, can you please try to be a little quieter?”

When he sighed three times or said something to me, I would be chastened — for a little while at least.  Loudness would always creep back. And Damon would always rein me in.

To be clear: Damon did not hate me (as far as I know). We would talk regularly — we sat about five feet apart — and I learned that he was quiet, yes, but wry and funny as hell.  He liked me, I learned. He just wished I wasn’t so damn loud all the time. (Damon and my future wife had this in common.)

The longer I worked with Damon, the more I learned to read his sighs — and to preempt them. I never got quiet on the phone —  it just isn’t in me — but I got way less loud.  I learned that if he was in the middle of going through some key documents, I would go to an empty office to make calls. (This was the pre-cell phone era.) When I did have to do an interview and he was in the midst of reporting a story too, I did my best to keep it quiet(er).

I never really told Damon this when he was alive but I respected the hell out of him.  And not because he was blind doing the job. After a while — and I know this sounds weird – I sort of didn’t think all that much about his blindness.  No, I admired Damon for how dogged he was. How he could think his way around problems. How unafraid he was of the politicians he was — oftentimes — having very heated phone conversations with before his most recent blockbuster story went to print. 

He taught me a ton — mostly by osmosis. Being around him, watching him work, observing how he conducted himself — fairly, unbiased ― made me understand what it meant to do this job right. To be tough, yes. But also to be open to new facts and new information. To never assume you know everything there is to know. To always be humble in the face of praise. And open-minded in the face of criticism.

I got a chance to work with a whole bunch of amazing reporters and editors during my time at Roll Call. Some of them I remain friends with today. But none of them influenced me as much as Damon.

And there are still times when I think about him — and how seriously he took the charge of journalism — and miss him.

To be honest, I miss that whole Roll Call newsroom. It was where I realized I loved journalism. And a lot of that is thanks to Damon.

Chris Cillizza spent four years at Roll Call. HIs finest hour was (badly) losing a three-legged race with his now-wife at the Roll Call-sponsored Congressional Baseball Game, which was then played at the Bowie Baysox stadium.