After 123 years, the Tampa Tribune is no more

 I typically use this blog to talk about what I have been doing with FEMA, the Red Cross and the Civil Air Patrol and occasionally other things that I think are interesting. But today I'm writing about something else.

I wrote a letter to the publisher of the Tampa Tribune after Mary and I moved to Tampa, Florida from Silver Spring, Maryland. Denise Palmer must have felt my pitch warranted a second look, because she referred my offer to help the paper over to opinion editor Joe Guidry, who took me to lunch with editorial writer Jim Beamguard.

And so in 2009 began my time with the venerable Tampa Tribune, editing letters to the editor and writing occasional weekday columns and Sunday opinion pieces. I was also tasked with suggesting names for a reader panel, sitting in on editorial board meetings and writing up many of them as Q&A features, reaching out to everyone running for office in Hillsborough County to let them know someone would be contacting them about meeting for an interview for consideration of an endorsement, etc.

Joe always had his door open for me and one of my crazy opinion piece ideas. When I decided to apply for a master's degree program, he wrote an enthusiastic recommendation and I was accepted.

Jim became my lunch buddy and we probably dined at every possible restaurant in the area a dozen times, discussing politics and world events to the nth degree.

William Yevlerton was my go-to guy for all my internal newspaper questions, especially regarding how to work the dodgy computer system. (Ask him about our back-and-forth joke about FLDE.)

And Jeff Stidham, our resident attorney, kept me on the straight and narrow when my snarky headlines and copy pushed the envelope too far, which was often.

My high point was going to Taiwan for a week and coming back to write a Sunday opinion cover piece contrasting China's relationship to Taiwan to the U.S. relationship to Cuba. (Two superpowers and two small islands, one Communist and one democratic, but reversed.) I received an award for that.

I think Joe's favorite was my piece about readers who write letters to the editor. He had it nicely framed and presented it to me at my farewell lunch (because Mary and I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona for her career), which was about three years after I first started helping in the opinion section.

I was at the paper a very short time compared to most others, but my memories of some really great times will last forever. I will always be grateful for the opportunity and I will always be sad that it ended this way for the Trib.



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