A quarter century at The O

In the spring of 1985, I was a 32-year-old newspaper reporter. Married for 10 years, father of a 4-year-old boy and a 2-year-old girl and living in Salem, the state capital. Reagan and Gorbachev were leaders of the two most powerful nations on the planet and the Berlin Wall was five years away from falling.

The 49ers thumped Miami in the Super Bowl, the Lakers would beat the Celtics in the NBA Finals and, in the fall, the Kansas City Royals (the Royals!) would prevail over the St. Louis Cardinals in the Missouri World Series. Madonna launched her first road show and Rock Hudson died of AIDS at age 59, becoming the first major star to fall victim to the disease.

Tina Turner and Lionel Richie took top honors at the Grammys and "Amadeus" (a film I still haven't seen) won Best Picture at the Oscars.

And in 1985, I got hired as an assistant bureau chief at The Oregonian. Today I officially joined the 25-Year Club at The Oregonian. Wow.

In this industry, when it's so common to move to advance your career, I've been damn lucky to spend two and a half decades in one place at a great newspaper in a great city. I've been an editor, a reporter, a recruitment and staff development director, and an editor again, all while serving under three editors and working with an array of some of the most talented journalists in America.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Hilliard, below, the first and only African American to serve as editor of The Oregonian, for bringing me aboard. When I got hired just a few months after completing a humanities fellowship at the University of Michigan, it was the culmination of a job search that also featured interviews at The Sacramento Bee and The Seattle Times. I'm glad, for too many reasons to list, that the job offer came from Portland.

Today I was part of a group of 28 people who were treated to a fancy lunch in the 23rd floor restaurant of the Portland Hilton and individually acknowledged for our service by our new publisher, Chris Anderson. We all received the obligatory pin (above) and framed certificate and -- in a stunning display of randomness -- I also won the centerpiece floral display at our table, which I promptly gifted to a co-worker upon my return to the office.

An occasion like this is made for reflecting on how far the industry and I have come in 25 years, but that would be too easy. The technological changes have been breathtaking, as have the recent decline in circulation and advertising revenues (mostly because of the recession but also because of the emergence of online journalism and classified advertising).

No, I suppose what comes to mind is the difference a generation and an education can make. My dad -- who turns 84 next week -- was a manual laborer for all of his working days, including stints as a millwright at a pipe foundry and an all-purpose maintenance engineer at a hospital, where he ran the boilers, changed the light fixtures, served as a union rep and did everything else that needed doing. With a 7th grade education, he managed to buy a home in suburban San Francisco and give his three children a public school education.

As the middle child sandwiched between two sisters, I was the first in the family to go to college, get a degree and join the professional workforce. As a young boy, I remember my dad coming home after a day's work, plopping down in the recliner and reading the afternoon newspaper. It was The Daily Review, published in Hayward, Calif., but he always called it The Daily Dogpatch. Could his daily routine with the paper have been a subliminal message to consider journalism once I grew older? I'd like to think so.

These days, my dad still reads the local papers -- the Silver City Sun-News in New Mexico and "the big city paper," the El Paso Times -- and I've traded in my manual typewriter for a computer screen, keyboard and blogging software.

Twenty-five years at The Oregonian. Whew.

Photo of Bill Hilliard: blackpast.org