R-G Reunion
Part celebration, part wake, the event represented a fitting closure to me
ON SATURDAY, JUNE 29, I parked my pickup in my old space at what was once The Register-Guard on Chad Drive. I walked through the same back doors that I’d walked through for nearly two decades when I worked for the paper. And I walked into the same lobby from which I would, five times a week, ascend the stairs to the second-floor newsroom to begin work.
Only this time was different.
In the lobby were dozens—eventually more than 100—people who used to work in that newsroom. Many with gray hair. A few with canes. But all with stories of having worked at a newspaper that in the 1970s emerged as one of the finest mid-sized dailies in the nation.
Clearly, I’m biased; I was part of The R-G for 25 years as a features writer, features editor, columnist and associate editorial page editor. But with a circulation roughly ten times what it is now (9,706) and the paper routinely beating out The Oregonian in the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association general excellence category each year, its glowing reputation ran deep and wide.
I was proud and privileged to have worked there.
Officially, the four-hour event was called The R-G Golden-Era Reunion, but it was more than that. It was a celebration of sorts, a collective gathering to remind ourselves that, within these walls and those at 10th and High before we moved north in 1996 because we’d outgrown our press, we’d produced some fine journalism.
And, I suppose, given the death of The R-G as we once knew it after the sale to GateHouse/Gannett and given the 60 people on the “In Memoriam” list, also a memorial service of sorts.
“It’s more of a wake,” said Jim Godbold, who served as features editor, editor and executive editor. “It’s as if we’re the Irish looking at a coffin while singing ‘fill to me the parting glass.’”
With Godbold’s reference to a Celtic song rooted in a 400-year-old Scottish poem, I was reminded of one of the side benefits of working at the place—routinely being treated to such rich utterances. Godbold’s Monday mornings critiques of our weekend feature sections were legendary, an occasional nitpick wedged amid lavish pats on the back, all knit together with metaphorical mirth. Goodness, his “I’m-going-on-vacation” memos should have been collected and turned into a book.
Time, of course, can polish even the most jagged rocks; life at The R-G wasn’t all bliss. I remember meltdowns. Showdowns, most involving management-guild disagreements. And letdowns.
But for the most part, to work at The R-G was to be part of a journalistic team in which the idea-to-print process enhanced whatever contribution you offered up. Editors caught your mistakes and added succinct—and often funny—headlines that you could never have imagined. Designers, in particular assistant director of graphics Tom Penix, amplified your words, in his case sometimes with a zany 20Below dog he invented. And photographers accented it all with images that told stories all their own.
Graphic design magician Tom Penix with copy editor Michelle Nelson.
At the reunion, two Pulitzer Prize winners—Doug Bates and Jacqui Banaszynski—mingled among the group; a third, Brent Walth, didn’t attend the reunion and a fourth, photographer and graphics editor Brian Lanker, died in 2011.
For the most part, however, those who showed up were ordinary people who had extraordinary talents, drive and journalistic instincts.
I reconnected with longtime editorial page editor Jack Wilson, for whom I worked two years (2016-2018) as an associate editor and loved almost every minute of it; he’s now writing editorials from his home in Corvallis for papers such as the Miami Herald and the Seattle Times. Paul Neville, working on a second novel after the successful launch of his impressive debut, The Garbage Brothers. And Eric Mortenson, now a Substack columnist whose lede about the 1998 Thurston school shootings I still use in writers’ workshops to illustrate the benefits of brevity: “It happened here.”