I was going to try to temper the tone of this column but I can't.

Sunday night, in requesting permission to go on land to do some personal photography, I learned a person from my journalistic past had died and I think his death bears noting.

That person was Bryan McClure, the former economic development director of Northampton County, who in the early 1990s announced the county was recruiting a company called ThermalKem to build a hazardous waste incinerator there.

Thus began a nightmarish episode of headaches, long meetings, protests and neighbors pitting themselves against each other, sides being chosen and local reporters being scrutinized as to what side of the issue they were on.

If the opponents to the facility irritated you, the proponents irked you just as much. There were clear lines drawn and keeping your objectivity was the most challenging thing to do. Go talk to an opponent and you were labeled. Talk to a proponent and the same thing happened.

All I wanted to do was cover crime stories and court cases but much of that was sidelined as, being the Northampton County reporter, I was thrown into fiery furnace of this issue without a say in the matter.

It was an issue that lasted several years, as the county commissioners in Northampton finally rejected it and then it moved on to the town of Woodland where even more time was spent on the matter.

In covering this story from the first day to the end, I was reminded Sunday night of the morning I had to call McClure on discrepancies in his expense reports and phone records. One of the commissioners advised him to resign and thus I earned a notch in my notepad.

What was learned from the protests, the controversy, the long meetings is something I still see today as the Roanoke Rapids Theatre issue weighs on.

Rural communities are hungry for economic development and it seems will bite at any chance for it. In doing some quick research for this column, however, I see the possibilities of what Northampton or Woodland could have been left with as South Carolina officials continue to grapple with the environmental mess ThermalKem left in its wake.

It is much the same mess, only in an idealogical way, that Roanoke Rapids is trying to contend with after Randy Parton was escorted from the theater nearly four years ago.

The last time I talked to McClure was for an anniversary piece I did on the issue. He still believed he was trying to help the county by recruiting a company that was going to bring jobs and help struggling counties like Northampton and Halifax.

He was somewhat of a visionary, having tried to put a plan together for outlet malls off Interstate 95 and I often wondered why he didn't pursue that instead of recruiting something that became so divisive I understand that as recently as four or five years ago there are still families and friends torn apart by the incinerator issue.

The obituary mentions nothing of the consternation that was caused by this issue and it appears upon his departure from Northampton he did well. Obituaries don't do that much, they are written to help ease the pain of family members and give information as to the time of services. There was only a brief mention about his job in Northampton County.

In this case, and I guess I should feel bad for bringing it up, what Shakespeare wrote, and I paraphrase, is true, that the bad people do lives after them while the good is often buried with them.

In writing this it has to be remembered that all it would have taken was for the commissioners to say no but there was a split and the issue wasn't resolved until later. It took a clean sweep in Woodland to rid the town of the issue so to fully blame McClure would be wrong just as it is wrong to fully blame Rick Watson and the Northeast Partnership for the theater fiasco. The city council could have said no but that didn't happen.

Still, reading the accolades in his obituary, I can't help but think of a time when my journalism world became a nightmare and neighbors and families became torn apart over an ill-conceived idea in which, years later, the government is still trying to figure a way out of. Sounds spookily familiar, doesn't it? — Lance Martin