Thirty-three years and four months — a third of a century almost to the minute — are quite enough, thank you. On the second Monday of August 1981, I reported for work in the tiny, semi-subterranean offices of Book World, the Sunday supplement of The Washington Post. Those offices moved all over the building in the years to follow, and indeed Book World itself eventually dissolved into bits and pieces of other sections, but I stayed the course, never missing a day’s work, plugging away book after book after book, to the somewhat numbing total of about 3,000 reviews.
As of the first Sunday of December 2014, I’m out of here. The choice to leave is my own: I am more than ready to retire, as I will explain below. But for me this has been a happy time, and ending it is a sad one. I had wanted to work for The Post from the day I left the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in June 1961, and though it took me two full decades to get here it was — for me, at least — worth every minute of the wait.
It was not until near the end of almost 5 1 / 2 decades of professional journalism that the full extent of my good fortune dawned on me. Not merely was I permitted to spend two-thirds of my working life at this newspaper, but I spent it in the Golden Age of American newspapers. The stops that I made — at the New York Times, the Greensboro (N.C.) Daily News, the Miami Herald, the Washington Star and at last The Post — gave me a grand tour of the decades in which this country’s newspapers were at their peak. It was a time when newspapers were not really challenged as the primary source of serious news and commentary; when they were crammed with advertisements that made some of them rich enough to send correspondents wherever the news might occur and to pay many of their employees better wages than had been par for the journalistic course; when American newspapers used all these resources to make themselves, for a while, the best in the world.
Full Article:
Jonathan Yardley Retiring
Attribution: Jonathan Yardley, washingtonpost.com
