Labors of love brought me to Sequim Gazette

The late columnist Mary McGrory of the Washington Post said she always felt vaguely sorry for people who don't work for newspapers.

I have to second that emotion.

I've written and edited for companies that published news and features by putting ink onto paper for most of my working life. They've ranged in size from a hole-in-the-wall suburban Chicago weekly to six-digit circulation dailies in Ohio and Texas.

Their common characteristic is that they've all been fun places to work.

By way of introducing myself to you as the Sequim Gazette's new editor, perhaps accompanying me on a quick trip down memory lane will explain who I am and how I arrived here.

The story starts at the Park Ridge Advocate in its namesake northwest suburb of Chicago.

Ethics weren't its strong suit.

Our publisher, a state senator, was an advanced alcoholic who often couldn't make it from under the table to the celebrity photo op.

Therefore, we kept a file of his pictures and cut out his head and shoulders with cuticle scissors to paste into a photo of a group from which he'd been absent - long before electronic picture-editing systems like Photoshop.

As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.

My first daily newspaper was the Sun in my college town in Springfield, Ohio.

This being the late 1960s when civil rights activism flourished, the few African American students on my campus walked out one day after issuing the familiar "non-negotiable demands."

When I brought my story back to the office, I learned that the paper's top editor had written an opinion that they were "the pawns of a communist conspiracy."

This editor received an honorary doctorate for this and similar services at the same ceremonies in which I graduated. I wanted to vomit on my diploma but I'd worked too hard to earn it.

Attitudes like his were what made me seek employment at the Dayton Journal Herald, the morning paper in a blue-collar city of about 250,000 people, many of whom worked directly or indirectly for General Motors subsidiaries such as Frigidaire and Delco.

In the fall of 1972, Richard M. Nixon visited to dedicate the Air Force Museum at adjacent Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a building so huge it could house an entire B-36 bomber, which I think remains the largest craft the Air Force ever flew.

It would have been just another political tub-thumper had the White House staff - then headed by John Erlichman -- not "sanitized" the crowd by summarily detaining objectionable people in unlit, unventilated semi-trailers parked in the sun on a hot September afternoon.

Those arrested included most anyone with facial hair, anyone who drove a car with a McGovern bumper sticker, two uniformed nurses nearing retirement age and a father with his mentally retarded sun.

Telling the truth won me a wave of letters calling me a liar and a communist. Shortly thereafter, the Internal Revenue Service began auditing my short-form, standard-deduction income tax returns, and mention of the story and Ehrlichman's profane response was made during the Watergate hearings.

In 1976, my boss in Dayton became executive editor of the Everett Herald and invited me to join him as a columnist.

I wrote three times a week for more than five years. Among the first columns were a trio for the 60th anniversary of the Everett Massacre.

In that event, specially deputized shopkeepers and mill foremen raked the steamship Verona with rifle fire, killing an unknown number of labor agitators, including ones who fell overboard and tried to swim to safety.

Blue-collar readers loved the columns. The town's upper-crusties hated them - especially after they won first-place in a four-state writing contest.

From Everett I went to the Olympian as its features editor, then took a similar position with the much larger Corpus Christi, Texas, Caller-Times.

In coastal south Texas I learned that willful ignorance of other cultures was a competitive sport among Anglos (who'd be called whites in northern states).

Yes, it's a challenge to pronounce names like Gutierrez properly the first time, maybe the second or third.

No, it's not acceptable to mangle the names of people with whom you've gone to school and worked all your life.

A dispute over working hours and job description led me to leave the Caller-Times in 1995, when I became an instructor in business communications at a technical/vocational school.

There, I learned more than I taught, lessons like the courage that brought a 50-something woman who'd lost her job making trousers back to school to become a medical assistant.

Coastal Texas with its 90-degree temperatures and matching humidity took its toll, however, and my wife, Dana, and I sold our home in 2004, bought a 38-foot Winnebago and headed - jobless - back to the Northwest where we knew we belonged.

I tell people that I'm a native Northwesterner who had the misfortune to be born in Chicago.

We stopped in Everett, where no employment opportunity emerged, so drove on to Port Angeles. There, I joined the Peninsula Daily News as its county government, medical and tribal reporter in October 2004.

By December, I'd discovered via the Tse-whit-zen/graving yard story that Clallam County wasn't immune to racism. Reporting the murder of Melissa Carter, I learned the county had its share of drug addiction and homelessness too.

Still, a quiet moment spent staring at the mountains or the strait reassured Dana and me that we'd come home.

As for the PDN, I'm proud to have worked there and for its publisher, John Brewer.

However, I'm at least equally proud to join the Sequim Gazette and its talented news staff.

Tip O'Neill, the late speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, once said, "All politics are local."

Much the same can be said of the content of community newspapers.

You can go to any one of innumerable sources to learn the latest news from Faroffistan or find out what the sesquipedalians are up to in Los Angeles, but you must turn to the Gazette to discover what's happening between McDonald Creek and Diamond Point.

For all but a very few of us, this is the stage on which we act out our successes and failures.

And it's here where the Gazette is the audience, cheerleader, critic and town crier, the place to look for pats on the back and to find shoulders to cry on, the chronicler of everything from duplicate bridge scores to acts of heroism.

Putting all of this in ink onto paper - and in bits and bytes onto sequimgazette.com - is an exhilarating, humbling, frightening, heart-rending, heart-warming and rib-tickling job.

Mary McGrory was right.

This has been so much fun so far that we'll all do it again next week.

Jim Casey is the editor of the Sequim Gazette. His column will appear when he is sufficiently stimulated or provoked. He can be reached at 683-3311 or editor@sequimgazette.com.