Often in these meanderings from our back yard I have quoted for Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under ‘the heaven.” It is, for me, the season and the time to say farewell. By my time of life — with over 42 years in the editor’s chair — the urge is overwhelming to stand aside and let others with more enthusiasm and younger ideas take over. I have become an antiquity in the backshop of a printing office, and anyone who can remember what it was like a half century ago to produce a newspaper has outlived his usefulness in the modern era of electronic communications. Back then newspapering was hot, hard and dirty work; 70-hour weeks were not uncommon; and those of us who labored in the quarry of the printed word were fascinated by the dominion that was literally at our fingertips. The job eventually became a way of life for me.

Early in my apprenticeship I accumulated printers’ ink under my fingernails and gained respect for a broom. The printers’ ink is long gone; but I have emptied wastebaskets and wielded a broom to this day... to remind me whence I came and that so long as my hands could fit a broom my head would not get too big to fit a newspaper editor’s hat.

Dirty hands and brooms, I have discovered, tend to keep one humble.

Along the way I acquired a rather select vocabulary of profanities, because those mechanical wonders of my time — a Merganthaler Linotype and single-revolution, hand-fed Babcock Press — were contrary creatures and would respond only to a skillful dressing-down or to a blacksmith’s hammer. The more profanities, the better they performed.

Or so it seemed.

But those days are ancient history. Now we utter silent, and some not-so-silent, profanities when the electronic wonders of our time — computers, bits, bytes and megabytes – go haywire and won’t respond even to pleas for divine intervention... although a blacksmith’s heavy touch is a fetching idea.

All things change, but not very much.

Perhaps because our family comes from common Scotch-Irish stock, my father raised me to always identify with and stand in the midst of common people; and I have been in good company.

While demands of my profession have at times alienated many readers, some might think it appropriate, as I compose my valedictory, to say “I’m sorry” if I have bruised their sensibilities. I can’t do that. I ask only that they understand why I did what I did: That my actions were dictated by no mean intent but rather by a desire for truth and fairness. Those, after all, are the only markers by which a newspaperman ought to be measured.

These words do not come easily; of the millions that have formed opinionated narratives on this page over the years, these are the most difficult to write. If they seem strained and lack continuity, it is because I have so much to say and so little space and time in which to do it.

My back yard beckons.. with my wife Mary, a woman who has tolerated my lifelong love affair with this newspaper; with Tess, our canine companion; and with Lida Rose, Patch and Bailey, our felines who keep us entertained.

I am forever indebted to our readers and advertisers for providing me with a canvass upon which I could paint with the printed word and relate small and simple things that are the essence of one’s existence.

Were I given the opportunity to relive my life, I would have it no other way than it has been.

Over the years our readers have made a profound difference in my life, and I hope I have been able to make a difference in theirs. I know the editorial page and the newspaper will be in good hands.

Few men have been so privileged in their lifetime... to earn a living doing what they love to do! It has been for me a happy experience, truly a labor of love. And the task has been made easier by my erudite cohorts on the news side, Bob McKee and Dave Marner.

Whatever successes that have come my way in this profession can be attributed to the staff and employees here upon whom I have relied over the years. My failures, numbering more than a few, are solely my own doing, however.

In those days long gone by, of which I have been fond of remembering on occasion, when the Linotype operator finished a news story he set a line of type — for the folks in the backshop who composed the pages — that contained only four characters and indicated this was the end of the story:

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