EDITOR’S NOTE

sports,” Agness told me (see my full interview with him as well as his book excerpt starting on page 18). It wasn’t too far away from my first job, where I was a one-man sports department at a six-daya-week community paper in California’s San Joaquin Valley.

I’m a little younger than Agness, who was born in the 1950s, so I was part of the generation that transitioned from traditional print newspapers with no online presence at all, to the new age of websites, subscriber-only paywalls, instant news posted online and the dreaded murky depths of the social media cesspool.

And while I’m as guilty as anyone of utilizing the internet for work-related information – not to mention staring at that tiny little screen just for fun – I terribly miss fall Sundays and picking up my newspaper off the front porch and physically reading stories about the previous day’s college football games.

Even years before I ever dived –perhaps foolishly? – into a career as a print scribe, my earliest newspaper memory probably isn’t reading the comics but the weekly fishing report written by famed California outdoors writer Tom Stienstra in the respected afternoon San Francisco Examiner. Now, I rarely if ever throw a few quarters into a machine to read what has mostly become watered-down editions with skeleton crews trying to keep the slow-dying print industry afloat.

As for Agness, he eventually left the news industry for a long career at EastmanKodak. And while he had reverence for his jack-of-all-trades assignments he covered during his news and sports reporter gigs in western New York, we both scoffed at not just the layoffs and reduced newsrooms, but also the partisan politics that define the business nowadays.

“I do miss (those days),” he told me. I agree.

But I will say that talking with Dave offered us both a nostalgic trip down our own memory lanes. -Chris Cocoles

Longtime