Good luck, John

Today was a sad, tough day. My crew of four and a half reporters had to come up with enough copy to fill four days of newspapers because of the three-day weekend. Oh, the four-and-a-half reporters. Yeah. Well, one of them left early. For good. My staff is now down to four
But that was the sad.
Because the staffer who left was so much more than just a staffer. Much more than just a reporter.
John Driscoll was a veteran of 11 years at the Times-Standard. But even that doesn’t explain my loss. John was our natural resources reporter. He knew Humboldt County and the issues that affected Humboldt County better than most of the people in the county. John easily could have worked at The New York Times or The Los Angeles Times. But John loves Humboldt County and wants to stay right here. He is staying. He is now working in the Eureka office of Rep. Mike Thompson.
But it goes even deeper than that. John could cover anything. And he did. He covered the cop beat. He filled in on the politics and elections, even while expressing his dislike of politics. He wrote a weekly column. He could write in an instance. And his copy was always clean. Almost always.
And it goes deeper than that. John could talk to anybody in the county and make them like him. He had personality. He could get the answers from the most unanswerable people. He had a phone list that covered the entire county.
But really, it goes farther than that. John was a leader. He was liked and respected by everybody in the newsroom – along both ends of the newsroom, the photographers, every reporter, the managing editors through the years, the city editors through the years, the night desk, the copy editors, the publishers.
And John left at 5 p.m. every day. Unless we really needed him. And then he came back. And he worked with us and among us and for us and beside us.
He had a great sense of humor, a great sense of news, a great way with words, a great sense of urgency, a great sense of camaraderie.
We will miss him, the newspaper will miss him, the readers will miss him. I will miss him.
Yeah, we all move on. And now John has moved on. But he left an awful lot behind.