I was lucky.

The newspaper that hired me at 23 was in its glory days.

There was a big turnout for the reunion.

So many familiar faces, soft-smiling, creased and puckered, like apples kept over winter.

Many gone of course, and some about to go, I guess. One had cancer of the larynx and spoke with a speech valve. Two or three were in wheelchairs.

“I still have a front page from 1970 with the headline GET OUT OF VIETNAM NOW”, said one.

That was just one month after the shootings at Kent State.

There was Bill, our publisher back then, a man from a dirt poor background, whose father sold wood and watermelons off the back of a truck, who wrote high school sports news for his local paper, where an employer spotted him and put him through college and on to Harvard Business School, which led to an internship at the White House and a career among the movers and shakers.

I remember Bill as calm as a buddha with a steel-trap memory, the first publisher not from the bloodline. There he was now, still with a good head of hair, filled out and huskier, with a loose-hanging suit and the young and old clustering around him. (I found it hard to believe what I read later — that he suffered depressions, which he controlled with medication.)

Then there was Tom, now well into his 80’s, Tom who had hired me, Tom who had always dressed out of GQ, Tom who played honky-tonk piano, Tom who never asked for the top job, yet performed like he was born to it, then retired like he was made for that too.

At one point in the evening Tom stepped over to the big piano and played “Those Were The Days, my Friend”. They wanted more but he just played that one tune.

Tom loved good writing and sometimes let his favourite journalists do long takeouts with long Faulkner sentences. He used to ask me about Latin American writers: what did I think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Maria Vargas Llosa or Borges? Sometimes chatted with me about them after our conference calls.

At one of those he turned me on to John Updike’s Rabbit novels. In 1990, a year after he retired, when Rabbit at Rest was published, he sent me a card that said: “this is the best one of all.”

(I meant to ask him what he thought of Cormac McCarthy but I forgot.)

Many spoke about the man who was the last of the family dynasty that built the paper, dead now these fifteen years, the man with the perfect blonde pompadour, the surfer guy, who seemed just out of personal pride to want to build a great newspaper just like he aimed to surf the biggest wave, just like he set out to track and kill the rarest and hardest-to-kill species.

I was only a minor player then, working in the foreign bureaux set up in those heady days. Our stories weren’t what sold the paper either. That’s why they often jumped a few times, winding their way through the so-called gooney bird sections between the real estate and shoe stores and Sears Roebuck and Howard Johnson’s ads in a paper that weighed more than a new-born baby.