My friend and longtime correspondent Wilma Mathews worked at AT&T for many years. During a dark period in the early 1990s, she was known in AT&T circles as the "Angel of Death," because the company was closing plants and it was her job to go to each one and put the elaborate, top secret plant-closure communication plan together. As a cub reporter at Ragan, I profiled Wilma in 1992, and when I asked her how this kind of work affected her emotionally, she said she often spent weekends after a plant closure curling up with her best friend, Jack Daniels.

It was then that I got the notion that AT&T was a place where interesting communicators could work. (And lots of them; someone will correct me if I'm wrong but at one time I think I remember hearing that AT&T had 750 PR types on the payroll.)

Anyway, Wilma sent me a note last week telling me that one of those AT&T communication characters is gone. Former AT&T speechwriter Carl Kelly died suddenly of a heart attack on Feb. 18, at 64.

Kelly wrote speeches “for every major CEO of AT&T and Lucent Technologies over three decades, and taught writing to hundreds of other professionals in this close knit public relations community,” according to the obit in the Newark Star-Ledger. “His wit, humor and clarity of thought marked both his well-known speeches and his dealing with his colleagues.”

From a string of e-mailed tributes from his colleagues, we learn that Kelly was also fast, accurate—and colorful. Former Kelly colleague and Bruce Brackett is now a freelancer. He tries to write to music but finds he can’t, and every time he turns the music off, he thinks of Carl Kelly “in his illegally smoke-filled office in our speechwriting group at Basking Ridge, banging away at his computer while wearing a set of headphones with a Def Leppard tape cranked up to the max. Needless to say he was producing wonderful stuff, all too often under ridiculous pressure.”

Carl Kelly, RIP: We’ll take it from here.