In the summer of 2009 I was a new, nervous Style intern.

The altweekly had a full staff back then, and I found the Tuesday news meetings — where story ideas for the week were pitched and, just as frequently, shot down — stressful. Sitting in the breakroom after one such meeting a friendly man walked in, introduced himself, and offered to make me a ham biscuit.

The man was Edwin “Eddie” Slipek, and those breakroom sandwiches launched the friendship of a lifetime. Eddie died on Monday after a short illness. He was 75.

A resolute Richmonder, Eddie was raised in Ginter Park as one of six siblings. His mother was a southern socialite and avid painter; his father was a civil rights lawyer. These influences were evident in his care for manners and his care for others.

After a stint at Boston University, Eddie transferred to Virginia Commonwealth University where he was editor of the Commonwealth Times, the school newspaper. In 1973 he joined the staff of The Richmond Mercury, a hard-hitting tabloid paper that served as a foil to the very conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch and Richmond News Leader. Garrett Epps, Frank Rich and Harry Stein were also on staff.

When the paper folded in 1975, Eddie was hired by retailer Best Products Inc., becoming its director of public relations. Company founders and philanthropists Sydney and Frances Lewis had been investors in the Mercury. At Best he was instrumental in curating the visual identity of the company and participated in the company’s commission of groundbreaking buildings by architects James Wines (SITE) and Robert Venturi. He also co-founded the arts and culture magazine Clue in 1984, featuring an interview with architect Philip Johnson, among others.

In 1990, Eddie was director of “Monument Avenue Alive,” a year-long centennial celebration of Monument Avenue. Trying to bring the city together despite the Confederate history of the boulevard, Eddie organized a mile-long block party that was billed as “the world’s largest croquet match.” He also played a crucial role in getting 1981’s “My Dinner With Andre” made; he was the one who suggested the then-dilapidated Jefferson Hotel as a shooting location.

Eddie began writing for Style circa 1990, becoming its senior contributing editor and architecture critic. I once overheard a colleague trying to describe Eddie’s importance to Style; the colleague accurately called him “the heart and soul of the place.”

“From my perspective, Eddie was probably the most beloved writer we’ve ever had at Style Weekly,” says Editor-in-Chief Brent Baldwin, who worked with him for years as his editor and described it as both a privilege and a joy. “You always learned something interesting from his stories.” Baldwin adds that he used to have to type up Slipek’s stories from handwritten pages, which added time to the process, “but I was willing to do it because we loved and valued his writing and his voice so much.”

As kind as Eddie was in person, he could deliver a smackdown on the page. One such piece concerned James J. Kilpatrick, the Richmond News Leader columnist whose segregationist columns appeared in newspapers throughout the South. “No individual had ever done more to diminish my hometown’s moral spirit,” he wrote in a sour obituary titled “Poisoned Pen.” Through his writing and activism, Eddie fought to save buildings like West Hospital and Second Baptist Church from the wrecking ball.

His journalism racked up countless awards from the Virginia Press Association, as well as honorary membership in the Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects. In 2023, he was awarded the Branch Medallion from the Branch Museum of Design. At the time of his death, he was putting the finishing touches on a book about W. Duncan Lee, an architect who did the majority of his work in Richmond.

In 2021 Style was shut down by hedge fund Alden Global Capital. Before VPM was able to swoop in and save us from oblivion, Eddie began writing a column for Richmond BizSense. When Style relaunched, it was Eddie’s decision to continue writing for BizSense, no matter how much we pleaded for him to return to us.

Eddie also taught generations of students at VCU, Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, and VCU’s continuing education series the Commonwealth Society. He loved engaging with young people and was open to their ideas. When some of his high school students questioned his professed support of public transit, he promptly sold his car and rode the bus for the rest of his life. [Editor’s note: One of his students was successful singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, who Slipek had planned to visit in Los Angeles this spring and had agreed to write a story about the trip for Style.]

In recent years he’d partnered with the architect Don O’Keefe, a former student, to create ArchitectureRichmond, a nonprofit online repository of the city’s architectural gems. Eddie joined O’Keefe’s architecture firm, O’Keefe & Associates, a few months ago. He also played a pivotal role in the lives of many architects and former students, including Emma Fuller and Chris Snowden. Fuller and her partner Michael Overby have had their work featured in Dwell, The Wall Street Journal and Architectural Record. Snowden is one of the city’s leading modern architects.

We were all Eddie’s children, and he helped us in ways that we could never repay.

Personally, it’s hard to overestimate the impact Eddie had on my life. He was my friend and guru rolled into one. I bought my first suit to attend cocktail parties with him. He was my own personal Auntie Mame, and life was definitely a banquet when we were together.

He was open to the world in ways that I’ll never be. More than once we came back to his place for a nightcap and found a crew of Navy guys sleeping on his floor. He’d befriended them somehow and told them they could show up whenever they liked, unannounced.

He could also be hard to get in touch with. He never carried a cell phone, his home answering machine was always full (he once admitted that he didn’t know how to check it), and he only truly began using email after the pandemic hit. “Readers were constantly telling us how much they loved his stories,” says Baldwin. “Also many people were often trying to reach him at the Style offices, so much so that we used to lovingly joke that we were his personal secretaries.”

He was also, to the annoyance of many friends, a one-man city beautification squad who would pick up every piece of trash he came across.

Often, after a vodka tonic, he’d gaze into the middle distance and ask, “What does it all mean?” It was never morose; it was Eddie pondering the cosmic questions. He always wanted to find the hidden tendrils that hold society together.

The advance of years never diminished Eddie’s sense of fun. You simply couldn’t keep him down. He could also still surprise. I don’t think anyone saw it coming when he had the Best Products logo — a bold red B-E-S-T written in ascending letters — tattooed above one of his shoulder blades a few years ago.

Richmond will never have another Eddie Slipek.

He was the heart and soul of the place.

What does it all mean?

Eddie, if anyone is going to figure it out, it’s you.