New editor of The Peninsula Gateway is no stranger to Gig Harbor or journalism

When I was asked to become editor of The Peninsula Gateway, I thought to myself, “Home is the sailor, home from the sea.”

Some strange eddy in time and tide had brought me back to the very place I was living when I began my daily newspaper career more than 45 years ago.

I grew up in Tacoma, but I had always loved Gig Harbor, and I was a little wacky about boats. So when I joined The News Tribune as a young reporter in 1973, I decided to make Gig Harbor my home — in a very eccentric, maritime way.

I lived in a battered old tugboat moored behind Pete Darrah’s curio shop on Harborview Drive.

The tugboat sank (it’s a long story) but I stuck around, eventually renting a house on the upper end of the harbor.

I think I was paying $450 a month — for waterfront.

How long ago was that? So long ago there were still Skansies living in the Skansie house. The Avalon and the Veteran still rocked at their moorings in the harbor. Borgen Lumber would sell you almost anything you needed. There was only one Narrows Bridge, and it was free.

I worked for The News Tribune for eight years, covering the eruption of Mount St. Helens, among other stories. Then the wanderlust took me, and I became the journalistic equivalent of a tramp steamer.

I wrote for the Seattle Times, the Seattle P-I, did a stint overseas for NPR and was city editor of a couple of small dailies.

I fetched up for a time at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, a down-at-the-heels old Hearst paper, where I did some investigative reporting and achieved the exalted status of assistant city editor (nights!)

While at the Her-Ex, I had been put in charge, rather offhandedly, of hiring and training interns, and I discovered I had a knack — and a love — for teaching young folks how to write. I still do.

So here I am, gray-bearded and a bit weather-beaten, back in the harbor like the Ancient Mariner and facing a new challenge.

If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you know of the parlous state of print journalism these days.

The internet has nearly sucked the lifeblood out of the business, and everybody — including the Gateway — is struggling to survive.

Yet print still has an important place, I believe, especially in places like the Peninsula, where the weekly paper is part of our way of life.

There’s nothing quite like sitting down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the paper.

I’m fortunate to have inherited a small but talented staff — the energetic young Jake Gregg, the kindly and ubiquitous Hugh McMillan, a talented cartoonist, Don Snowden, and a quartet of columnists well plugged into the harbor and Key Peninsula.

I’m going to be working with them to double down on our city, county and school district reporting, to do more issues reporting and lots more profiles of interesting folks.

We’re also going to try to bring back some of the things that people expect in their community weekly — the birth and death notices, the new business openings, the building permits and calls for bids, the mug shot of the kid who won a scholarship or the volunteer in the Coast Guard Auxiliary who just made coxswain.

You’ll find my email address in the masthead, and I’d love to hear from you about things you’d like to see in your hometown paper.

I’ll be dropping anchor here for a while.

This story was originally published July 1, 2019 at 1:02 PM.