Click: delete. A newspaper dies....

I have just finished reading through the Advertiser's final edition and was sitting down to write a note to some of you, when I noticed the daily email digest of the weather from the 'Tiser and their top stories as well.

I started to click on "delete," and stopped. One little click, and it will be gone, cold-type hot-type victim of a digital dismissal. That's the way the world goes, or at least this part of it, these days.

It used to be there was nothing so old as yesterday's newspaper. Now there is nothing so old as last minute's on-line update.

It was a nice final edition, almost devoid of smug self-pity, generous in defeat, some really nice writing from so many of our former colleagues.

After reading "and others too numerous to mention" about ten times, my perusal of the farewell stories became a sad and vain (yes, both meanings) search for my name in the lists of the veterans and survivors.

Tom Kaser made it. I didn't. Is that my journalistic epitaph?

Ah, well. John Strobel et al gave me an excellent front page mock-up when I retired a few years back, and Bob Krauss gave me a full column send-off. It doesn't get any better in Hawaii journalism than to have been Krauss-ified.

And I'm in good company. Most of you didn't make it either.

And, unlike 400 other now former Advertiser employees today, I have a livelihood--or a facsimile of one that is still fooling some folks in the midst of the colllapse of the economy. Real estate was a great place to have your nest egg in 2005, but not so much today, when the yolk's on me.

And I didn't make it down to the building last night to say goodbye, so that tells a story, too. I was busy buying an iPad, and having a dinner at our place for three of my wife Jane's eight brothers and sisters.

I had only gone back to the building two or three times since leaving the paper, which suggests to me that something was superficial--me.

It will always be one of those if-only-I had memories.. Too late now, baby, it's too late.

I realized at mid-day yesterday that I hadn't carried out a task I had always planned, and actually arranged for in writing when I left the paper--going back to the morgue to retrieve the hard copies in my byline file, and diligently copy thousands of other stories I had written over 27 years.

I had thought I might someday write an autobiography--"The Haole of the Narcissus" is a title that comes to mind, with apologies to Joseph Conrad.

But maybe not. Sitting at dinner last night with Jane's family and some other friends, I asked one of them if he had any idea who his great, great, great grandfather was, and he said no. That's the reality for most of us, Ancestry.com to the contrary notwithstanding.

That ancestor, like mine more than a few generations back, has disappeared into a shadowy oblivion, as most of us will some day, having made whatever small scratch on memory we have made.

Islands in the stream, that is what I mean.

Or the glint of one or two of a million shards of sunlight bounced back from the ripples on the river flowing past Siddhartha Gautama when he sits on the shore and--enlightened--perceives our lives in true perspective.

The two people I was most pleased to see celebrated in the Advetiser's farewell edition were GC (you know, the guy whose last name was "Must"), and Thurston Twigg-Smith.

Reading the history of the paper made clear how influential George Chaplin and Twigg were in saving the newspaper, over and over and over again, until time and maybe talent and a shift from plantation day reading habits finally saw the Advertiser triumphant.

(And how the mighty are fallen.)

The history also made clear their were other giants--some of them with pygmy hearts--in the roll call of the Monarch of the Pacific dailies. And all for what?

For the joy of it, the fun of it, the good of it, the dollars, the little impacts on destiny.

When I first came to the paper in 1976, it was sitting pretty in the joint operating agreement with the Star-Bulletin. Managing Editor Mike Middlesworth said it was a money machine--we would get our share no matter what. "We don't HAVE to put out a good newspaper," he said. "We do it because we want to."

Like a beau geste, the seemingly pointless act that will make no difference in one's survival except for the quality of the moment, and the memories.

And we did it because GC wanted to, Buck Buchwach wanted to, Twigg wanted to. We all tried so hard to live up to the privilege of putting our gloss on the reality of the passing days. "THIS is the way it happened!" each story said, some more accurately than others.

Well, time to get on with the day. Did that OTHER paper arrive yet? It's -30- for the Star-Bulletin today too, you know.

Today--journalism in its finest hell-bent-for-leather scrapping fighting tradition. Tomorrow--The Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The King is dead. Long live the King. For many years to come, I hope, and for the sake of us all.

Click: delete.



Aloha,

Walt