Hello, dear School Zone readers, and welcome to my final column. After more than six years at GV Wire, and 42 years before that working for newspapers here in Fresno and across the nation, I’m ready to hang up my reporter’s notebook and cross over into the Land of Retirement.

It has not been an easy decision.

Anyone who has ever gotten one of the increasingly rare newspaper/news media jobs will tell you that it’s the best job they ever have had or ever will have, even when we were slammed with pay cuts, furloughs, freezes on pension plans and 401K matches, and layoffs.

Clearly, it wasn’t about the money. As a news reporter and editor, I was fulfilled knowing we journalists are responsible for keeping our community informed, comforting the afflicted, afflicting the comfortable, and writing the first version of history. There are so very many stories that I am invested in and could keep reporting on, which makes it harder to cut the cord.

Many Memorable Stories

I’ve lost count of how many stories I’ve reported, written, and edited, but they likely number in the tens of thousands. Some were painful to report and write, like the obituary of an up-and-coming photographer who worked with me at The Record in Stockton and who lost her life in a car crash en route to the Grand Canyon. Others were tough because of recalcitrant sources, such as when the then-superintendent of the Duval County schools system in Jacksonville, Florida, tried to force me off the beat by refusing to return my phone calls for over a year. (Kudos to my bosses for having my back.)

And then there were the stories with impact, such as my reporting project in Stockton on how the California Youth Authority was using psychotropic drugs to control some wards, which sparked new California laws, and being project editor and working with the team of Fresno Bee reporters and photographers digging deeply into the city’s substandard housing crisis.

My earliest stories were on the crime beat (where most green reporters get their start), but I’ve written my share of local government, courts, education, military, civil aviation, transportation, prisons, sports, business, and features stories.

That includes covering federal, state, and local elections. I remember how when one City Council race in Oak Forest, Illinois ended in a tie, the candidates tapped me (presumably as the only independent person in the room) to pull one of their names out of a hat in the tiebreaker. (I was an inexperienced reporter just a year or so after graduating from J-school at Northwestern University and didn’t have sense enough to decline the “honor” — and to avoid becoming part of that news story). I’ve covered speeches by presidential candidates and presidents (Jesse Jackson, Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and George W. Bush) and was the pool reporter for Bush’s visit to Stockton.

I’ve written about protests at Florida’s death row, was on board a Navy ship off the coast of Florida for the first sea-based launch of a Trident missile that went horribly awry, and I was the first reporter to track down Stockton’s congressman after the 911 attacks in New York and Washington for The Record’s special edition that horrible morning in September 2001.

And then there were the fun stories: I rode in an F/A-18 Hornet jet with the Blue Angels in Jacksonville (and flew two aileron rolls all by myself!), covered the Iditarod sled-dog race in Alaska, shot photos in the pits at the Daytona 500 (where I photographed George H.W. Bush and Barbara Bush and was photographed next to their limo), and traveled to Texas to write about the 2024 eclipse.

I spent a night on the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier for a story on how some sailors believed it was haunted by a ghost named George. And I teamed with a reporter on a story about a suburban Chicago dog whose owners had trained it to say “I love you” when offered a cookie (it sounded more like Scooby-Doo saying “I ruv roo,” but even so — it was pretty freaky!)

Adapt or Die

During my career I saw many changes in the industry as newspapers folded, restructured, shifted from print to digital publication, and struggled with revenues. Newspapers were in trouble long before the arrival of internet: I was in Jacksonville when the Jacksonville Journal, an afternoon paper, folded in 1988 because of declining readership, leaving only the Times-Union operating.

A few years later I was working for the Anchorage Times when it shifted from afternoon to morning publication. We were engaged in a vigorous newspaper war with our crosstown rival, the Daily News, and we reporters benefited from good travel budgets and healthy paychecks, right up until we didn’t — we learned the owner was closing the Times the day before it happened.

After Anchorage I worked for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, which was published in the afternoon. A few years after I left, it switched from afternoon to morning publication in an effort to build circulation.

And those changes came long before the internet began gobbling up newspaper revenues and hedge funds gobbled up struggling newspapers. Newsrooms that had previously been stuffed with staffers began looking like ghost towns.

Needless to say, it has been a wild journey for me, and after 48 years in the news biz I’m ready to call it quits. I will miss the people, the community connections, the “being the first to know,” the challenges of tackling big projects, the satisfaction of helping to keep my community informed, and yes, the fun.

I will always be grateful to my bosses at GV Wire for hiring me to cover education, which allowed me to remain in Fresno where I had finally put roots after working at so many newspapers over the years (Oak Forest Star-Tribune, Daytona Beach News-Journal, Florida Times-Union, Anchorage Times, Lawrence Journal-World, The Record in Stockon, and The Bee).

And I am equally grateful to all my readers for their feedback, their bouquets and their brickbats, and for keeping me on my toes. My thanks to each and every one of you.

I bid you so long, farewell, auf wiedersehn, adieu, adios, sib ncaim, and …

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