Whoa! Isn't this too long to print? Part one

This is the column I never thought I would write.

If you had asked me 45 years ago, when I got my first newspaper job, to look into the future to the day when I might retire, I would have given you a blank stare. When you are young, you think retirement is for old people. And young whippersnappers never intend to grow old.

Call it what you want, but last week I officially became a geezer.

And next week, as the calendar flips from September to October, I will become a retired geezer.

Over 45 years of churning out stories, columns and editorials, I can recall missing only three days due to illness. That doesn't mean I was superhealthy. It means I seldom let the flu or other maladies keep me from going to work. I wonder how many illnesses among my co-workers I caused over all those years.

Oh, and there was the one Friday I called in sick when I wasn't. That was 45 years ago.

I was a brand-new reporter at the Kansas City Star. The day I started work as a summer intern I had to ask my boss, assistant city editor Tom Eblen, if I could take the following Friday off. To get married. His response: "You need the whole weekend?"

A few weeks later, my wife started teaching at Oak Park High School in the North Kansas City School District. One of her teacher friends, Ann, her husband Bob, my wife and I piled into our Volkswagen bug and headed for the Lake of the Ozarks late one Thursday. On the way, Ann and my wife concocted excuses why they would not be in their classrooms on Friday. Ann settled on pink eye. My wife chose breaking her tooth while eating a caramel apple.

I am not making this up.

We spent most of Thursday night looking for a place to stay, and it rained the rest of the weekend. You think God isn't watching?

So we reformed, all of us, and showed up for work every day as scheduled. Is that generational? Do geezers have a better work ethic than the smart, talented, ambitious, creative youngsters who are taking over the world and reinventing journalism?

I can't tell the future. What I know is that newspapering is going through some radical changes. I have had a charmed and blessed career as an old-school journalist. Tomorrow's journalism, all the new-school stuff, will have its own marvels. But it's time to let those with a vision for online, cell phone-and-iPad-delivered texting, raw video, e-mail alerts, tweets and friends take over. As if they haven't already.

My charmed career

When I say my career has been "charmed and blessed," I mean it. I have had the best journalism teachers in the world. They were all working stiffs who took me under their wing and showed me how to check facts and ask the right questions and write as if the words I typed were precious jewels to be polished -- and not squandered.

In addition to Tom Eblen I could list so many more editors and fellow reporters who set examples for me and demanded that I meet the high standards that prevailed through my years as a reporter, editor and publisher. Among them would be Jo Hoffman at the Star, who I was pleased as punch to see is being inducted this year into the Missouri Newspaper Hall of Fame. And Doug Kneibert, also at the Star, who shared my Southeast Missouri roots, having grown up in Poplar Bluff and whose father was my mother's doctor for all those years. And George Berg and John Colt, the executive editor who saw fit to hire me as an intern even though all the intern slots had been filled for that summer of 1965. Maybe it was the peanut-butter sandwich I insisted on eating at his desk on Memorial Day that convinced him.

Then there were the lions of journalism at The Wall Street Journal, both in the Dallas bureau and in the New York headquarters, who kept pushing me to excel. Who could forget the memo editor Vermont Royster posted on the newsroom bulletin board after a reporter used "upcoming," a word forbidden by the Journal's peculiar stylebook, that said: "The next time I see 'upcoming' I will be 'downcoming' and someone will be 'outgoing.'"

And there was Ted Stanton, a Journal colleague who left his lifelong New York City home and took a job at a small daily in Moscow, Idaho, and then called to invite me to join him. My wife and I had never been to Idaho, so we went. Ted was one of the best editors I've ever worked with, and he happily shared enough of his amazing talent to qualify me for the editor job at the Daily Mail in Nevada, Mo. Ted later became an academic and eventually the head of the journalism department at the University of Houston, where he is still revered, even after retirement, as a teacher and mentor.

The Daily Mail was owned by Stauffer Communications in Topeka, Kan., and there, too, I was immersed in standards and practices that required the best, both in performance and in ethics, from everyone involved in producing daily newspapers. I learned from masters like Ben Weir Sr., and Ken Bronson and the examples of men named Stauffer who upheld the ideals of founder Oscar Stauffer. It was the Stauffer organization that thought I had potential and made me the first-ever management trainee a couple of years before I was named publisher of the Daily Forum in Maryville, Mo. I later was publisher of The Blue Springs Examiner in suburban Kansas City before being named editor of the flagship newspaper, the Capital-Journal, in Topeka.

Editors note: Part two of this column will be in the Thursday, Oct. 7, edition of The Nevada Daily Mail.