We moved to the Mission Valley in 1979 to raise ewes, lambs and, within a few years, two equally frisky boys.

My first job was milking cows, back when the valley was home to several dairies. Because my grandparents had milked a small herd in Missoula’s Orchard Homes in the 1930s, I felt qualified. Turns out I wasn’t. Showing up at 4 a.m., and receiving a sharp kick from an irritable cow just as cranky about the process as I was, made me reconsider my vocation.

So I applied to the Mission Valley News and have been making newspapers ever since.

The small weekly, produced and printed on Dublin Gulch Road, was owned by Dwight and Mary Tracy. I showed up Tuesday afternoons to update their small but devoted list of subscribers on an ancient machine called the Addressograph (technology circa 1896). I left the shop on Post Creek around 4 a.m. Wednesdays after the last newspapers were pulled off the Goss press, bundled and stashed in mailbags for Dwight to deliver to post offices in Ronan, Charlo, Mission and Arlee.

My duties slowly expanded. I learned to edit copy before turning it over to our speedy typesetter (person, not machine), and how to construct headlines, design pages on slant boards, and then burn those pages onto metal plates that Dwight would fit on the press.

Eventually, I started to write a few stories. One of my earliest was the tale of a pregnant high school student who challenged the local American Legion Auxiliary after they revoked her trip to Girls State due to her “unseemly” condition. She won, and so did my story – marking my first-ever award from the Montana Newspaper Association.

When Dwight and Mary sold the MVN in 1987, they urged the new owners, Todd and Carmine Mowbray, to hire me as editor. My new bosses never thought to ask whether I had a degree in journalism – or any other discipline. I don’t.

After five years helming the Mission Valley News, the Ronan Pioneer and, in 1992, helping merge those papers and the Flathead Courier into the Lake County Leader, I stepped away. A friend and I launched Lively Times in 1993; the statewide arts and entertainment monthly thrived until advertisers began to discover social media and COVID temporarily squelched live events. It lives on, under different ownership, as an online arts calendar.

Since returning to the Leader in 2022, I’ve experienced the same satisfaction and frustration that all weekly editors know. The pleasure of interviewing people whose stories are the heartbeat of this valley; the challenge of covering countless public meetings and trying to wrestle many voices into one story; and the satisfaction of tugging those strands together each week into one, hopefully cohesive newspaper.

Akin to those flying hooves in the dairy barn long ago, I’ve experienced sharp kicks from our readers when we get it wrong (or they think we did), or when they object to an editorial position or think our coverage lacks balance.

I’ve also experienced the frustration of seeing legitimate news constantly labeled “fake,” of Artificial Intelligence consuming and regurgitating the very real intelligence of countless writers, reporters and editors, and of our constantly shrinking attention spans, barely capable of digesting headlines, let alone an entire article.

The publisher of the Daniels County Leader, a hundred-year-old family-owned newspaper that will publish its final issue July 30, told a reporter with the Montana Free Press that social media is apt to become the Eastern Montana community’s primary news source.

A friend had told him, “We read it on Facebook, and we find out if it’s true in the Leader.” It’s a loss, and not the first this year. The last issue of the local Valley Journal rolled off the press recently, and the Anaconda Leader – in print for 55 years – closed last month.

Wednesday, July 1, marked the first day since 1987 that I no longer had the title “editor” affixed to my name. That honor/chore now belongs to Emily Messer, the UM Journalism School grad who’s been honing her licks here for the past year as a reporter. Trust me, you’re in capable, conscientious hands.

I’ll still show up on these pages, invisibly editing copy or visibly writing a few stories. But it’s time for the title and responsibilities to slip on to Emily’s shoulders, and for me to drop the demanding yoke of deadlines.

Please keep reading, because there’s nothing artificial about the reporters who attend meetings and community events and write stories about them. Real people still make newspapers; to survive, we need real people to read them.  

Thanks for the thousands of opportunities you’ve given me over 40-plus years to listen and write about the tragedies, triumphs and milestones that mark our lives. It's an honor to tell those stories week after week.

And now, let the goofing off begin!