We’re celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Inter Lake as a newspaper in today’s edition, which got me thinking about another important milestone.

It was 30 years ago this year when former Managing Editor Dan Black drove to Missoula and bought me lunch at what is now the Edgewater hotel to talk to me about a potential job at the Daily Inter Lake.

I had returned to Missoula in late 1983 from a failed experiment in big city journalism at the Los Angeles Daily News and was hoping to find work somewhere within the sacred confines of the Montana state border. My preference was to hitch on with the Missoulian, since I had gone to graduate school at the University of Montana and already had good friends and better drinking buddies there. Plus I was a devoted leftist in those days, and thought it would be fun to work for the liberal rag.

But Mr. Black had other ideas, and he was fairly persuasive, as anyone who has ever met him knows. In those days, I was a wire editor, putting out the front page and the world, national and state pages. The Inter Lake had lost a wire editor a few months before, and Black was doing his own job, plus that one, so he was desperate to bring someone on board.

His desperation, as it turned out, would rewrite my destiny.

Even though I was in the running for a job as assistant city editor at the Missoulian, I gave in to Black’s pleas and told him I would “help out” for a week or two. He needed the time off, and I needed the money. Plus, I’d never been to Kalispell, and my future boss had good things to say about it.

So, on Jan. 24, 1984, two momentous things happened. Steve Jobs and Apple unveiled the Macintosh personal computer and I showed up for work at the Daily Inter Lake for the first time, where 30 years later I am writing this column on a Mac Mini.

I would be lying if I said I remembered anything about that first week, because I don’t. I do remember liking Dan instantly, but why wouldn’t I? He was letting me stay rent-free in a cabin on his property in Kila and feeding me dinner with his family every night. Everything else is a blur, but kind of a warm, fuzzy blur, not the other kind.

Anyway, when the week was up, I found out that I didn’t get my “dream job” at the Missoulian. It was either head back to Missoula and hope a job turned up in Wolf Point or Glendive, or turn my temporary job into a permanent one, so I somewhat reluctantly accepted Dan’s offer to become wire editor at the Inter Lake. And because Dan was worried that I would be out the door as soon as another position opened up in Missoula, I assured him that I would give him at least one year.

Well, 30 years later, and 15 years after Dan retired to try his hand at other ventures, I’m still here in the same newsroom, and I can’t imagine being anywhere else. If you do the math, I’ve been at the Inter Lake for nearly a quarter of the time the paper has existed. It makes me feel invested, if you know what I mean — which is why writing about the history of the Inter Lake in a story that appears elsewhere in today’s edition was a labor of love.

Spending time in what we used to call the newspaper’s morgue (but now colorlessly call the editorial storage room) to hunt down photos and stories about the old days in Kalispell, Demersville, or the rest of Flathead County is to me the equivalent of rummaging through boxes of family photos and love letters from grandpa to grandma.

In fact, if I’m away from my desk for more than a couple of hours, there’s a pretty good chance I’m on a ladder in the morgue poking through old negatives or looking for a bound volume from 1979. It’s been great fun the past couple of years helping to put out books devoted to the history of Northwest Montana, but what you learn after you work at a newspaper for a while is that history is made every day by every one of us.

This story is just a little bit of mine to throw in the mix. Maybe some editor doing research for the 200th anniversary of the Inter Lake will find it and get some use out of it. At the very least, maybe Dan Black will read it this Sunday and get a chuckle. I hope so.

Thanks, Dan, for the job, the career, and the community. It’s meant the world to me.