Whoa! Isn't this too long to print?

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.

A letter to Gary Rust

By that time, the winds of change in the newspaper business were already stirring, and the company -- lock, stock and barrel -- was sold. That's when I wrote to Gary Rust, whom I had met at several newspaper-industry meetings over the years and admired because he was the only other publisher I knew who wasn't afraid to speak his mind. I said to myself: "He sounds a lot like me."

Thanks to Gary and the late Wally Lage, I came to Cape Girardeau in 1994. The 16 years my wife and I have been here is the longest stretch we've stayed anywhere. We have no plans to move.

Speaking of my wife, who regular readers of this column already know is featured a lot in this space: I could write a million columns thanking all the masters of newspapering for helping me along in my career, but no one deserves more credit than the person so many of you know and love: my Marge. It would be embarrassing to list for you all the times she has uprooted her own career so we could move on -- and up -- to another newspaper assignment. And our two sons also deserve special commendations for their endurance.

Two quick stories, both true, about our sons.

When older son was about 10 years old, he liked to answer the phone at home, knowing that often it would be an irate subscriber or advertiser wanting to rail at his father. He became an adept assuager of angry callers. This is, word for word, one call he took:

"Hello? Yes, my dad is the publisher of the newspaper. No, he can't come to the phone right now. Could I take a message?"

Pause, as he listens to the caller.

"Yes, ma'am."

Another pause.

"Yes, ma'am."

Another pause, longer this time.

"Yes, ma'am."

Another pause. Then:

"No, ma'am. My father is not a goddam sonofabitch. He's a goddam newspaper publisher!"

And he hung up.

Younger son also liked to answer the phone, but his second-grade education left him guessing at how to spell many of the words he wrote when taking messages. These scraps of paper would be left on the island in the kitchen, next to the phone. My wife or I would find the scribbled communications -- and then spend several minutes trying to unscramble them. Occasionally we collaborated. Sometimes we had to go to the source and watch as younger son tried to make something out of his own notes.

OK, so I'm proud

These are the two sons we are so proud of, the MIT and K-State grads who do amazing grown-up things with their knowledge and acumen and determination. If my wife and I have any reason for pride over the last 45 years, it would be the remarkable men our sons turned out to be.

Over those years, I have trained about a hundred aspiring journalists, mostly young men and women with no formal training but with a passion for gathering information and passing it on to readers in useful ways Among them is my best college friend, Giles Lambertson, who went on to key editor posts at several newspapers and became one of the most recognized conservative voices in North Carolina. He is the godfather of both our sons.

And Darrell Delamaide, who went from Jesuit philosopher to newspaper reporter in a flash, used his experience to land a job with the Associated Press covering a war in Lebanon and became an authority on international finance and economics, authoring highly regarded books on those topics.

And Scott Williams, who is the most persevering reporter I've ever known, who spent the entire time he was at the Blue Springs Examiner trying to get hired by the Kansas City Star by having his photograph printed on matchbook covers with the inscription "Need news? Hire Scott Williams." He wound up at the Milwaukee Journal.

And there was Chris Stanfield, who attended Southeast Missouri State University and had an amazing eye for storytelling photojournalism. I hired Chris to be the Southeast Missourian's photo editor when other folks thought he was too young and too inexperienced. He went on to be photo editor at the Columbia Daily Tribune, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Milwaukee Journal and Atlanta Constitution. Well, at least he has a decent resume now.

Speaking of the Daily Tribune: I affectionately call it our Columbia bureau. With the recent departure of Rudi Keller, another fine reporter, the Tribune now has five news staffers all hired from the Southeast Missourian. There's a sixth Southeast Missourian alum in Columbia: Laura Johnston, a wonderful and competent editor who joined the faculty of the University of Missouri School of Journalism a few years ago and works with student reporters at the Columbia Missourian.

On top of all that, I wish you could meet everyone in the Southeast Missourian newsroom today. Those bright, energetic, young journalists I mentioned? There they are, doing their best to keep this newspaper abreast of all the latest gizmos and doodads.

In conclusion ...

So, here's how I sum it all up.

I began writing a column, sometimes twice a week, in 1971 in Idaho. Since them I've churned out 2,184 columns. Some of them were worth reading.

I started writing editorials in 1978 in Maryville, Mo., and claim authorship of 14,196 of them.

In addition, I managed to squeeze in countless corrections. I tried to figure out how many, but my calculator broke.

I have tried to have fun along the way. In Maryville I took bribes (Hershey bars) from a judge who was hellbent on winning my annual Best Pothole Contest. He won. As far as I know he's still a respected member of the judiciary.

For better or worse, Cape Girardeau is, thanks to me, left with a downtown golf tournament, a better appreciation of the noble fruitcake, a growing cadre of readers who share my loathing of squirrels and endless tales of a spoiled cat who will never be the grandchild we are still waiting for but who is nonetheless worming her way into our wills.

What more can I say? I've had a blast. I have loved coming to work all those days (16,380, but who's counting?). What's left for me to do?

Well, this may or may not be good news for some of you, but look for my columns every Friday. I'll write them as long as my geezer brain lets me.

Or until I start some new career. Maybe hang-gliding. Or computer repair. Or not.

To paraphrase Oscar Stauffer: Count the day lost that you haven't done something you like.

Finally: Thank you.

jsullivan@semissourian.com

Reception for Joe Sullivan: 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday at the Southeast Missourian, 301 Broadway. Please stop by to say hello. There probably won't be any fruitcake.