“Newspaper men work from day to day. They cover the day’s news, write the day’s editorials on current issues or events, complete the newspaper for the last edition; then everything in it passes and another newspaper is made the next day. Possibly there is a campaign for a few weeks or a few months, and then interest in the issues or events fades. The newspaper man himself forgets what interested him so intensely at the time. His life is absorbed by a continually changing scene which, if he is enthusiastic, excludes everything else for the moment. He doesn’t note the passage of time, until he finds himself old, weary and disabled and steps aside for younger men who know their own times better than he. He may have accomplished what he wanted to accomplish, but what is done has vanished like a dream. The new generation know him only as a figure more or less dim in the perspective of journalistic history.” – from Orrick Johns’ “Time of Our Lives” (1937), paraphrasing his father, longtime Post-Dispatch editor George Sibley Johns.
Roland Klose 