Feels like it was all just yesterday, wasn’t it?

Today, Jan. 27 of 2023, marks the 53rd anniversary of my employment at this newspaper I call home.

I consider this the first 53 years and I hope there are 53 more, but you never know what the Good Lord has waiting just around the corner.

Three years ago some very kind people put together a celebration that I will treasure for the rest of my life. The upshot of that, however, is that in the last three years I've been stopped hundreds of times by people asking me how I'm enjoying my "retirement," which was never part of the deal. Over these last three years, not only have my job duties continued, but happily for me, they've actually grown.

As I wrote on the occasion of my 50th anniversary, which seems like last week, I never had a 5-year plan or a 10-year plan or, heaven forbid, a 50-year plan. If it works for me today, I'm happy. I’ll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.

One of my favorite roadside signs is the one I’ve seen numerous times outside a small tavern near Brookings on the southern Oregon coast. "Free beer, tomorrow," it says.

Tomorrow never comes, of course, because it’s always today.

That’s the way it is in the newspaper business, too. You’re only as good as your last story or column or headline. The news of the day fades fast, to be replaced by something even more compelling. That’s why they call it “news.”

There’s nothing worse than reading a day-old newspaper. You may think you’re “catching up,” but even as you read it, you’re falling further behind.

As I look forward to the next 53 years, I remain more convinced than ever of the value of a local community newspaper, especially one published by people who live in the very town where that newspaper lands on people's driveways. In our increasingly divided and compartmentalized society, a local newspaper can be the glue that speaks to our togetherness.

After all, we all root for the Blue Devils and the Aggies. We all vote in elections that are frequently heated. We are all proud of our local heroes who go out in the world and do great things, whether that means being the recipient of a Nobel Prize, being an ambassador in a distant land or winning the Hawaii Ironman.

We have authors and artists and actors and activists and musicians and teachers and dedicated volunteers and world

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experts in a million fields. And we also have those brave souls who gave their lives in service to their country and to our town.

And you can read about them all in the pages of The Davis Enterprise.

The other day a friend asked me about my memories of working for The Hub, the excellent newspaper put out by students at Davis High School, my alma mater. I never wrote for The Hub. I never wrote for The California Aggie either.

In fact, during my freshman year at UC Davis, the powers that be at our great local university required me to take a remedial, non-credit course called Subject A — better known as “Bonehead English” — before allowing me to enroll in Real English.

If you had told me then that I’d spend 53 years writing for a newspaper, I wouldn’t have believed you. Heck, if you’d told me I’d spend 53 minutes writing for a newspaper, I wouldn’t have believed you.

But there I was at 5 a.m. on Jan. 27, 1970, sitting at a desk in a cramped newspaper office, completely terrified as I stared at a poster on the wall that declared “A deadline is a writer’s best friend.”

No, no, no, I thought, a deadline is a terrible thing, something that will control and eventually ruin my life. But, as I began to punch out my very first story on the large and clunky manual typewriter in front of me, I quickly realized that without a deadline, I’d never get to leave the office and go home, which is desperately where I wanted to be.

In 1970, the entire operation of The Davis Enterprise was wedged into a small building directly across the street from our current location.

The front office, circulation, advertising, composing, management, the pressroom and the entire newsroom were all present and accounted for.

In the open newsroom, reporters’ desks were all pushed up against one another, with one writer’s mess spilling onto another’s workspace. There was a distinct smell from an odd mix of cigarettes and all-day coffee and ink from the pressroom that would bring spontaneous tears to my eyes if I experienced even a whiff of that aroma today.

The noise in that building was overwhelmingly exciting. Ten manual typewriters all being pounded simultaneously at 60 miles an hour by 10 dedicated reporters. People yelling back and forth over the clamor as the mighty press roared into action just feet from the newsroom. Combine all that with a passing freight train less than a block away and it’s amazing that any of us still have our hearing intact today.

It was an unequaled thrill to stand at the back of the presses and snatch the day’s first newspaper, much like pulling a loaf of freshly made bread from the oven.

You were always warned by the able pressmen to not touch the equipment, lest a loose shirt tail would get caught up in the rapidly moving machinery and make your body and blood literally part of that day’s edition.

“The press stops for no man,” they would say.

Over the years, this job has exposed me to so many wonderful people and events and joys that I never would have experienced otherwise.

For some odd reason, people named “Bob” keep popping up in my life through this job, giving me unexpected experiences to write about.

I got to hit baseballs off the great Hall of Famer Bob Feller, introduce the legendary Bob Hope as he appeared in Rec Hall, and trade groundstrokes with Wimbledon champion and world-class hustler Bobby Riggs.

And I’ll always cherish one unforgettable night at the Vets Memorial where I stood arm-in-arm on stage with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans as they sang “Happy Trails to You.”

Then there was the time, in 2008, when I was able to report from New York as Pope Benedict moved down a ramp into the barren pit that was Ground Zero to embrace and pray with family members who had lost loved ones on 9-11. It’s a scene I will never forget.

I have loved to write about the many experiences life brings to all of us. Memories of mom and dad, of taking my oldest daughter off to college and of meeting the Red-Headed Girl of My Dreams in a steamy laundromat in Northern Idaho.

I never wanted to be a journalist. But I have always been in love with newspapers from the day I was old enough to read.

Of course, I always went to the sports section first. I especially liked the page with all the box scores in small type. So many numbers to pore over and wonder about.

Did Wilt Chamberlain really score 100 points in a single game? Did Willie McCovey really get two triples and two singles off the great Robin Roberts in Willie’s first day in the majors? Did Harvey Haddix really pitch a perfect game for 12 full innings only to lose everything in the 13th? And who was this guy Paul Hornung, winning the Heisman Trophy on a team with a 2-8 record?

I’d then turn to the weather page, again attracted by all those numbers neatly arranged into highs and lows and inches of rainfall. It’s where I learned to spell tough names like “Phoenix” and “Albuquerque” and “Juneau” and “Tallahassee” and my alltime favorite “Sault Ste. Marie.”

I loved to follow the always-changing time of sunrise and sunset from one day to the next as we picked up nearly two minutes of daylight each day between Dec. 21 and June 21, then gave it all back by the time Dec. 21 came around again. I still love to do that.

And no day would be complete without checking the high temperature in Death Valley and the low temperature in Duluth.

On that late January day in 1970 when I first walked into The Enterprise office, Richard Nixon was president; Spiro Agnew was vice president; Ronald Reagan was governor of California; Vigfus Asmundson was mayor of Davis; gas at Al Hatton’s Chevron station on the Fifth Street curve was 36 cents a gallon; a three-bedroom, one-bath East Davis starter home cost considerably less than what a minimum-wage worker in 2023 makes annually; the Kansas City Chiefs had just defeated the Minnesota Vikings in Super Bowl IV; and Dave Rosenberg was a first-year law student at UC Davis.

When I started here, I could only dream of one day having a family. I now have six kids and six grandkids, enough for my own football team, plus a punter.

Looking back with great fondness, I have much to celebrate.

I celebrate having had a job for the last 53 years. I celebrate the truly great and talented journalists I’ve been blessed to work with. I celebrate the many people, places and issues this job has exposed me to over all these years. And most of all, I celebrate getting to live in a town I love and raise my family here.

To borrow a line from my favorite baseball movie, Field of Dreams, “Is this Heaven?”

No. It’s Davis.

— Reach Bob Dunning at bdunning@ davisenterprise.net