In March of 2003 a man stopped in a doorway, said my name like it was the answer to something, and set the direction of my next twenty years. I spent eight months reporting my way toward whether that was a gift.
He stopped in the doorway of the wire room on a Tuesday in March of 2003 with a paperback in his hand and said my name like it was the answer to something.
“Tackett.”
I was twenty-five. Three years of obits and cops briefs.
“You’ve got the Wexler thing on the budget for Sunday.”
“It’s four hundred words.”
“It’s not four hundred words.” He put the paperback down on the shelf by the printer. “It’s about a county that decided it didn’t want to know something. Read this and then come tell me what the story is.”
“When?”
“Thursday.” And he was gone down the hall, and I could hear him doing the same thing to Rennick about something else before the door shut.
That paperback is on my desk right now. I have read it four times.
My name is Delia Tackett. I am forty-eight. I spent thirteen years on that paper and since 2018 I have run a nonprofit newsroom that does statewide accountability work with nine people and grant money, and my whole professional life is built on the position that you do not assert a thing you cannot support. I am going to be doing that in here, and I want to warn you now that it is also going to be doing something to me.
Vance Sizemore is seventy-two. He hired on at that paper in 1976 at twenty-two years old, ran the metro desk from 1994 to 2016, was passed over for editor in 2011, and retired at forty years. Somewhere between fifty and seventy people came up under him. I have confirmed forty-one by name and I have spoken to eleven.
He has never been accused of anything. I want that established early and I want it to stay established, because a piece that begins with a woman investigating her mentor sets up an expectation, and this piece does not meet it. There is no money in this and no harassment and no plagiarism and no lie. He was, by every account I have gathered including the two hostile ones, exactly what he appeared to be, for forty years, to everybody.
The sentence I have carried since I was twenty-seven runs four words. I was special to him.
In March of 2005 I was going to quit. I had an offer to do communications for a hospital system that paid eleven thousand more. And Vance wrote me a letter. Two pages, by hand, on the paper’s stationery, and I got it in my box on a Friday, and I did not quit, and I have that letter in a folder in a fire safe in my house in Lexington and I have read it, I would estimate, two hundred times.
On page one forty-one of that paperback, in the margin beside a paragraph about the sheriff’s brother, there are four letters in Vance’s handwriting and a question mark.
Twenty-three years. Four readings. I look things up for a living. I never once looked those four letters up until this June.
ENFJ Traits: What He Did in a Doorway
He did it standing up, always, and he did it in a doorway or beside your desk with one hand on the back of your chair, and it took between forty seconds and two minutes. I have that timing from four people independently and from my own memory, and the four people offered it unprompted, which is the kind of corroboration you almost never get.
The structure was consistent, which I did not notice for twenty years because I was inside it. He named you. He named a thing you had done that you did not think anybody had registered. Then he said what the thing you had done meant about what you were going to be able to do, and the second half was always bigger than the first half by a factor of about ten, and then he left before you could respond.
None of that is a criticism yet. Careful here, because everything I am about to describe worked.
There is a thing this type does that I have never seen set down properly, and it is that the attention is not general. He was not warm to the room. He was warm to nine people in the room and businesslike with the other forty, and if you were one of the nine you experienced that newsroom as a place where somebody was watching you closely, and if you were one of the forty you experienced the same newsroom as a place run by a busy man who knew your name. Both of those are accurate descriptions of one floor on one Tuesday.
That man moved me off obits at twenty-five and I have been doing the only work I have ever wanted to do for twenty-three years, and there are at minimum nine other people I can name for whom the same sentence is true.
The building had a composing room until 1987. I never saw it. What it was: a floor where the paper was physically assembled out of hot metal, lines of type cast one at a time in molten lead, made up into pages on steel-topped tables called stones by men who could read type upside down and backward and who were not permitted to touch the words. The room was gone eleven years before I got there and the vocabulary was not. People still said put it to bed. People still said the stone. A whole floor of a building can disappear and its language will go on running the place for another thirty years, and nobody who arrives after will know why they are saying what they are saying.
ENFJ Relationships and Compatibility: The Letter
The letter is two pages. The first page is about a story I did in 2004 on a jail in a county I am not going to name, and what he says about it is specific and correct and nobody else in that building had read it that closely.
The second page is about me.
I will not be reproducing it. What I will say is that there are three sentences on that page that reorganized my life, one of which contains a prediction about what I would be doing at forty, and that prediction was accurate to the year and to the substance. I was forty in 2018 and in 2018 I incorporated a newsroom and hired the first two people, and Vance drove up and spoke at the launch.
In September of 2024 I was in Nashville and I stopped in to see Micah Overstreet, who came up under Vance six years behind me and who runs a data desk there now.
There is a letter framed on the wall of his office. Two pages, by hand, on the paper’s stationery.
I read it standing there with a coffee in my hand while he was down the hall. The first page is about a story Micah did in 2010. The second page is about Micah.
Three of the sentences are the sentences.
Not similar. The same words in the same order, with a name changed, including the one I would have told you under oath was written about me at a specific desk on a specific Friday because of a specific thing that had happened to me.
I stood in that office for about four minutes and then Micah came back and I said something about the Titans and we went to lunch and I did not mention it, and I have gone over those four minutes more than almost anything else in my adult life.
Here is what I could not get past on the drive home. It was not that the letter existed. It was that I could reconstruct, from my own two pages, exactly which parts had been written for me and which parts had been shipped — and the parts that had been shipped were the parts that had done the work. The first page, the one about the jail story, is entirely mine and I could not give you one line of it from memory. The second page is the one I have read two hundred times.
I have since confirmed nine of those letters, by seeing seven and having two described to me in enough detail to count. There may be more. Two people declined to discuss it with me and I have decided to read the declines as yes, which is not a thing I would let anybody on my staff do.
Forty years of this across a table, rather than thirteen across a desk, is his wife’s account. Nadine Sizemore has not given it and I did not ask her, and it should be noted that the only reason I did not ask is that I could not construct a version of the question that was not cruel. And a household and a newsroom will not put this to the same use.
ENFJ vs ESFJ: October 2008
Twenty-six positions went on a Wednesday morning in October of 2008 and nineteen more the following March, and everybody who was in that building will tell you the same thing about who took care of people, and they will name two women and one man, and the man is Vance and one of the women is Loretta Hignite.
Loretta was assistant managing editor for news operations for thirty-one years, which meant she ran everything that was not the words. She has sung alto in the same church choir since 1975 and cannot read music and has never learned and does not intend to.
Vance placed nine people in about a fortnight. He made calls to editors in four states, and the calls were not favors, they were arguments — he could tell another editor what a specific person was going to be able to do in three years, and he was right often enough that his calls got returned. He sat with Priya Raghunathan, who was twenty-six, for an hour in the stairwell and told her exactly what to do next, and she did exactly that, and she runs a bureau in Washington now.
Loretta did something else and I did not understand what it was at the time.
She knew that Dale Overby’s wife was on the paper’s insurance and had a thing coming in February. She knew whose COBRA would lapse and when. She sat down with eleven people and did their paperwork with them, at her own kitchen table on weekends, and she took food to four houses, and she got a woman in classified into a state job by knowing who to call at the cabinet.
And she stayed with the ones who did not land. I mean that literally. Ardith Combs told me that Loretta Hignite called her every Sunday evening for eleven months in 2009 and 2010 and had nothing to offer her on any of those calls, and did it anyway, and stopped only when Ardith asked her to.
That is the whole difference and it cost me eighteen years and eleven interviews. Each of them reads a room and neither asks permission first. Where each one aims it is the thing that differs. Loretta’s is aimed at the condition of the person now, in particulars — the insurance, the February, the kitchen table. Vance’s is aimed at where the person is going, and it moves them toward it, and it is extraordinarily good at that.
And where there is nowhere for a person to go, the apparatus has nothing to do.
Put Loretta on those nine placements and there are no placements. Futures are not a place she operates; eleven people would have had correct paperwork and no work. And put Vance on Dale Overby’s insurance and it does not get done, because a policy lapsing in February is not a future, and it would not occur to him to ask.
Six people did not land in 2009. Vance stopped calling them. I have confirmed that with four of the six. He was not cold about it. There was nothing for the machine to work on, and the machine is what he has.
ENFJ Strengths and Weaknesses: The Interviews
The strength is not in dispute and I am the evidence for it.
He is right. That is the thing nobody who writes about this gets to skip. The read is not flattery and it is not a technique — he looks at a twenty-five-year-old doing obits and he sees, correctly, at a level of specificity that I still cannot account for, what that person will be able to do in fifteen years. He was right about me to the year. He was right about Priya. He was right about Micah, and he was right about a man named Kevin Sutphin, who Vance told in 2006 that he would be better outside a newsroom than in one, and who is a public defender in Owensboro now and told me it was the single most useful sentence anybody ever said to him.
And the accuracy is not a party trick, which is the part I keep having to say to people who want this to be simpler than it is. What he was doing with Kevin Sutphin was telling a twenty-eight-year-old that the thing he was working at was not his thing, which is a sentence almost nobody in a workplace will say out loud to anybody, ever, at any cost. Vance said it four or five times a year for twenty-two years, and as far as I have been able to establish he was wrong about it once.
Now what I did in 2025.
I worked it. That is the honest verb. Over eight months I contacted seventeen former Sizemore people and interviewed eleven, two on the record and six on background and three of them twice, and I built a spreadsheet, and I told most of them it was for a personal essay, which was true in the way that a thing can be true and still be the sentence you chose.
Ardith Combs is fifty-five and lives in Ashland and was one of the six who did not land in 2009 and has done medical billing since 2011. I called her in April of 2025 and she did not want to talk about Vance Sizemore and said so twice, and I stayed on the phone, and I used a thing I teach, which is that you go quiet and you let the other person fill it and then you name the emotion you are hearing and you wait again. It takes about ninety seconds and it works on almost everybody and it is why I am good at my job.
She talked for forty minutes. There are about forty seconds of that recording that I am never going to use and that I cannot unhear, in which a woman who has done nothing to me tells me what it was like to be dropped by a man who had told her what she was going to become.
I got that with a technique, from a private person, about a seventy-two-year-old who has not done anything wrong, to service what happened to me in a hallway in Nashville.
The weakness in him and the strength in him are the same instrument and the same is true of me and I would rather have written a different section.
ENFJ Careers: Twenty Careers in a Dying Business
He made careers in a business that was ending, and that arithmetic belongs on the page because nobody ever puts it there.
The paper had two hundred and eleven people in the newsroom in 1998. It has thirty-one now, counting the two who work out of Louisville. He placed nine in 2008 and eleven more across the following six years, and the great majority of those placements are out of journalism now as well, because there was nowhere to place anybody to.
Which raises a question I have not resolved and am not going to resolve in here. A man who can see where a person is going, correctly, in an industry that is contracting nine percent a year, is a man with an extremely accurate instrument pointed at a shrinking map. Six of the eleven interviews I did were with people who took the advice, and it was good advice, and it worked, and they are doing something else now anyway. Two of them thanked me for asking and one of them said the conversation had been useful, and the eighth said something that will not be appearing here.
The count, since a figure is doing work in this section: one of the rarer ones, on the order of two or three in a hundred, and thinner among men than among women. Any other percentage you come across I would send back to the sample before running it, because nearly every one of those tables was assembled out of people who volunteered to be measured or whose employer bought the seat, and a roster of volunteers describes volunteering. My newsroom does not publish figures sourced that way and I am not starting in here.
How an organisation prices that ability, and what a whole career of the price adds up to by seventy-two, belongs to whoever drafts the job descriptions, and I draft four a year now. And the same gift for developing other people, carried in by two different employees, will be given entirely different amounts of room to use it.
ENFJ Under Stress: The Spring He Was Passed Over
They gave the editor’s job to somebody from outside in March of 2011 and I was in that building for all of it.
He had been the internal candidate for six years. Everybody said so, including two of the people who made the decision, one of whom told me in 2025 that the reason was that Vance had never once run a budget and had never wanted to, which is true and which I had never thought about until she said it.
What I expected was that he would be gracious in public and bitter in private. What happened was the reverse of what I expected and it is the only time in twenty-six years I have seen that man be unpleasant.
He got small and precise about things that did not matter. He rewrote leads that were fine. He held a meeting about the Sunday budget that ran an hour and eleven minutes and in it he took apart an argument Loretta was making about staffing, point by point, in a way that was technically correct and had nothing to do with anything, and he did it in front of nine people. It was the first time I ever heard him raise an actual logical objection to somebody, and it was the meanest thing in that room, and about four months later he apologized to her in a way that she told me in 2025 she did not think of as an apology.
What that was, near as I can work out: a man whose whole equipment is reading and moving a room got handed a verdict from a room he could not read or move, and the only thing left in the drawer was the one tool he has almost nothing of, which is cold argument, and it came out badly aimed and at somebody who did not deserve it.
One thing flatly, because I watched five weeks of it and told myself it would pass. It passed. Suppose it had not: the same man still like that in the fourth month, no sleep, the meanness come loose from whatever caused it. That has stopped being a temperament, and no colleague gets at it and nothing written here does either. Take it to a physician. Take it to a licensed counselor. Nobody was ever hurt by hearing that early.
ENFJ Behavior: Berea, June
I drove down to Berea on the eleventh of June and told him I was writing something and asked if he would talk to me, and he said of course, and he made coffee, and we sat on a screened porch for two hours and eleven minutes.
I did it properly, which is to say I did it the way I would do it with a subject. I laid it out in order and I did not editorialize and I gave him every chance to correct the record. Micah’s wall in Nashville. The nine letters, with dates where I had them. The three sentences. The count. I read him the three sentences off my phone and asked whether he recognized them.
He said, “That’s mine.”
He heard the whole thing out and never once got defensive. He said, “That’s right.” He said he had probably written thirty of those over the years. He said he could not tell you which was which.
Then I said what I had driven two hours to say, which was that when I found out, in Micah’s office, with a coffee in my hand, I could not breathe, and that I have not been able to look at that letter since, and that I have had a folder in a fire safe for twenty-one years.
He was quiet for a second. Then he leaned forward and he put his hand on the arm of my chair and he said:
“Delia. Do you know what you just did?”
I said I did not.
“You went and confirmed it. Nine of them.” He was not smiling, he was doing the other thing, the one where he gets very still. “You could have decided not to know and you didn’t. That’s the whole business. That’s what it is. I could see that in you when you were twenty-five and I want you to understand that everybody I ever wrote one of those to, I wrote it because I could see something, and with you it was that. It was always going to be you that came down here and asked me.”
I knew what was happening while it was happening. I could name it. I was sitting on that porch watching the machine run on me in real time and I could have written the structural analysis of it on a napkin.
I drove back up 75 and got home at about six-thirty and I felt better than I had felt in nine months.
What Is the ENFJ Personality Type: Page One Forty-One
I got the paperback down and looked at page one forty-one on the sixteenth of June, twenty-three years late. It is rare on both sides of the national ledger — about one in forty, and among men fewer than two in a hundred.
E — everything he has is pointed outward, and the material it works is people. Conversation is the medium; people are the job.
N — and what it registers is not the person in the chair. It registers where that person is going, whole, early, off very little, and it is not a guess. I have checked it against outcomes for eleven people and the hit rate would embarrass most instruments I use professionally.
F — a matter is settled by the effect the answer will have on a person, which is why the delivery is calibrated to the individual even when the words are not.
J — and matters close. A person is an open item, open items get worked and shut, and Ardith Combs shut in 2009.
Those four come ranked by allotment, and here the outward work and the forward read take almost the entire grant. The physical present sits third, which is why none of it ever happened sitting down. And the last one, the cold instrument that would let a man stand outside his own operation and check it, was issued to him in trace amounts.
Which is the answer to that porch.
He was not managing me. He was not evading. He agreed with every factual thing I said, immediately, without a fight, and then the only apparatus he has turned on and produced the correct sentence for a person in my condition, and the sentence was true, and he meant it, and it was also the ninth iteration of a thing he has been running since 1979.
Loretta gave me the word for it in February, on the phone, when I told her about Micah’s wall. She said, “Well, honey. It’s boilerplate.”
She meant it the way the composing room meant it. Matter cast once, in a plate, shipped to every paper in the chain, and every one of them ran it identically. And the thing about boilerplate — the thing that took me four months to say out loud — is that boilerplate is true. It says a true thing. It says the same true thing everywhere, and it is not less true in Nashville than it was in Lexington, and that is exactly why it is unbearable.
In July I called Ardith Combs back. I told her I wanted to make sure she was comfortable with our conversation from April, and I asked whether she would be willing to say on a recorded line that she understood how the material might be used, and I had the sentence written down in front of me before I dialed.
She said yes.
ENFJ Cognitive Functions: What He Was Actually Looking At
First comes the outward work, and there is very little of him that is not that. He does not have conversations, he conducts them, and the conducting is not manipulation — it is the only mode available. He has never in twenty-six years asked me a question he did not already have a use for. For the record: extraverted feeling leads, introverted intuition second, extraverted sensing third, introverted thinking fourth — the wire room ran on the first two.
The second part is the forward read, and I have spent more time on it than on anything else in here.
He was never looking at me. Precision matters here, because I am going to be accused of ingratitude and I have earned some of it. In March of 2005 there was a twenty-seven-year-old woman in that building who was frightened and broke and about to take a hospital communications job, and Vance Sizemore looked at her and saw, correctly, a woman who would be running a newsroom at forty. And the woman he wrote two pages to was the forty-year-old. The twenty-seven-year-old was the raw material.
I got there. That is the part I cannot put down. He was right, I did it, and it took twenty-two years, and I arrived at the exact coordinates a man had been looking at since 2005, and when I got there he was looking at a twenty-four-year-old in Nashville.
The third part is the physical present, which is the doorway and the hand on the chair and why none of it ever happened sitting down.
And the fourth is the auditing, and he was issued none of it. Calling that a flaw in his character misses what it is. It is the shape of the thing. He cannot be told what his effect was. Not because he will not hear it — he heard every word I said on that porch and agreed with all of it — but because there is no instrument in him that converts your effect on me was X into anything except more of the operation.
A line on what the instrument is actually worth, in the voice I use with my own staff: the four underlying measures replicate, which is more than most instruments manage, and the last move — four measures into sixteen named kinds of person — has never been sourced. I would not run it as a fact. I would run it as a thing people say, attributed, and I would keep reporting.
And a write-up of this kind is an aggregate of strangers. The place where it stops covering you is the one thing in it carrying your name, and I would work that place the way I work a discrepancy, because a discrepancy is where anything ever is.
ENFJ Personal Growth: The Ledger
The growth material for this type is about boundaries and about letting people be who they are. I have been through a good deal of it by now. My professional opinion is that it was written for the mentees.
There is a ledger. He showed it to me on the porch, not to make a point — he got it out because I asked how many people there had been, and he wanted to be accurate.
Every person he ever hired, by date, in a column, going back to 1979. Beside each name is one word. Mine is Tuesday. Micah’s is gate. Loretta’s is yes. Priya’s is stairs, which I could construct a theory about, and Ardith Combs’s is cardinal, which I cannot. I asked him what they meant and he turned it around and looked at it and said he did not remember, and I have decided that he was telling the truth.
What I can vouch for as growth does not belong to him, is four months old, and does not amount to much.
In February, Loretta Hignite, who I believed disliked me for thirteen years, told me on the telephone that she had never disliked me and that what I had read as coldness was that she thought I was fine and had eleven people who were not. I have not been able to make that fit and I have not stopped believing the original version either.
I have named the mechanism. I can describe it in four hundred words. And I sat on a screened porch in June and got operated on by a seventy-two-year-old man while narrating the operation to myself, and drove home feeling better, so I would ask anybody who has got this far not to mistake naming a thing for being outside it.
Yesterday I wrote a letter to a twenty-five-year-old on my staff named Court Bledsoe, who is going to leave us in about two years and who does not know yet what he is, and who is about to turn down the wrong job for the right reason.
Two pages, by hand. The first page is about a piece he did on a water district in Perry County.
In the third paragraph of the second page I used one of Vance’s sentences. Not a version of it. The sentence, the words in the order he put them in, and I was fully aware of what I was doing as I put it down, and it is the truest thing on either page.
I put it in his box on my way out at about ten of six.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.