Mary Lou Forbes has died at 83. A friend told me she was gravely ill, but still the news was unexpected. As it always is when someone you thought of as a constant is gone.

Mary Lou was a newspaperwoman, but not the kind who gets bylines. Or gets to ask questions at presidential press conferences. For a quarter of a century, she edited the op-ed pages – yes, pages , plural – of The Washington Times. Even in these straitened economic times, she tried to give the reader his money’s worth of opinion. Her pages stood out not just for their amplitude but their quality. She was, quite simply, the best op-ed editor in the country.

Mary Lou couldn’t run as many columns as she would have liked after newspaper budgets began shrinking, but she fought as long and hard as anyone could to squeeze the most quality out of the least resources. And she was working on her pages until just days before her death.

Her name may not be familiar to readers across the country because she was one of those who work behind the scenes, like copy editors, to keep us columnists from embarrassing ourselves even more than we do. They check our facts, give us ideas for columns, and try to teach us grammar and something more. Something beyond the obvious dos and don'ts. Something that’s understood rather than spelled out. Call it taste, a faculty that can’t always be put into words. As Louis Armstrong said of jazz, if you have to have it explained, you’ll never understand it.

To educate some bullheaded opinionators, or at least get their attention, other editors needed a two-by-four. But all Mary Lou Forbes had to do was utter a sad sigh. Coming from her, with the authority of her years and reserves of tact, a sigh fell with the weight of a sledgehammer.

Mary Lou didn’t just look over the wire and pick out whatever would fill an allotted space in the paper. She went deliberately searching for talent, especially the young and promising kind. At the other end of the spectrum, she’d be the first to notice when some old hand at columnizing was just going through the motions, checking off the days till retirement. Or when some real talent in the business went just plain Westbrook Pegler nuts and needed to be ushered gently off the stage. Pity she wasn’t around when a Walter Lippmann or Joe Kraft began approaching terminal dullness; she might have saved them from writing long after they had anything to say.

Promising writers are out there by the gross; the editors who can make them worth reading are rare treasures. Without them to separate the gold from the dross, their copy just runs together into one muddy stream of semi-consciousness. Without a Maxwell Perkins, there would have been no Thomas Wolfe, or at least not the well-watered and pruned one we meet in American literature. (Even there he tends to erupt like a field of orchids out of control.)

There was a time when Lionel Trilling could describe American conservatism, all too accurately, as less a movement than a series of “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Mary Lou was one of those few, largely unheralded editors who presided over a revival of thought in conservative opinionating. Her pages came like a refreshing downpour after a long dry spell. And readers all over the country would profit by her editorial judgment, energy and persistence for 25 years. It was no small service she rendered.

Even though we were in contact via e-mail and the occasional phone call, I would see Mary Lou only on a rare trip to Washington. Once we talked about how the civil rights movement had stopped moving years ago, and been transformed into just another special interest demanding its place at the public trough. She’d won her Pulitzer in 1959 for covering the civil rights movement in Virginia, back when it was simply The Movement. We spoke about the unrecognizable thing it has become since, a kind of high-rise chamber of commerce for race hustlers. See Sharpton, Al. Or Wright, the Rev. Jeremiah. Or whoever is now the demagogue du jour .

We could only shake our heads sadly at what’s happened to what once was the bravest and brightest of popular movements. A shared sense of loss, of disappointment and betrayal, of nostalgia for a vision lost … all that can form a powerful bond.

Whether they knew her name or not, readers all over the country bonded with Mary Lou Forbes.

© 2009 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.