WHERE WE’VE BEEN
All roads lead from our time at the Tribune
in alphabetical order
Alan Berner
After the Columbia Daily Tribune, I spent 10-months in Muskegon, Michigan at the Chronicle as Graphics Editor.
Then onto the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson as Jack Dykinga’s assistant splitting time between photo editing and photographing. When Jack left, I briefly became the director of photography.
Attempting to hire Ann Yow to join the staff, she spoke of an opening at The Seattle Times and that good things were happening under Gary Settle’s leadership. I became a last-minute applicant and moved from the desert to a rain climate.
It became a ticket to the world. Photography already is, but the resources and interests of the paper led to over 30 countries.
The most unusual proposal was for an Earth Day anniversary where I pitched visits to 8 Earth trouble spots. It was rejected as way too expensive. But someone heard of a round-the-world airfare on Singapore Airlines costing about $2,500. Travel had to be done in two months. Seattle’s Denis Hayes coordinated; the first Earth Day was the local connection.
Enlisted a writer and we headed west knowing an environmental story could be found wherever we landed. A business columnist called it “Around the World in 80-K’s.”
We spent far less and produced a 4-page Sunday tease to a 24-page ad-free special section.
I wound up spending four decades at the Times including writing and photographing a feature column, Northwest Wanderings.
On August 1, I retired from the paper but not from photography.
Julie Lobbia, Martin Fennelly and Hal Boedeker at Steve Friedman's going-away party.
Hal Boedeker
The journalism professor who recommended me for the Tribune job warned, "It's Peyton Place over there." Well, wasn't Peyton Place more fun than 99 percent of towns? The Tribune was more fun than 99 percent of newspapers.
My tenure: August 1980 to March 1984. My duties included editing Hank Waters' editorials, Irene Haskins' columns, Steve Friedman's restaurant reviews and Jeff Leen's movie reviews. Most memorable moment: Phil Gottschalk blew up at me, then Carolyn White comforted me. Carolyn, what a mensch.
Phil, later my friend, was a standout in a room packed with characters. Two were pivotal in my professional life: Jeff and later Nancy Pate.
Following Jeff's example, I jumped to The Miami Herald (1984-1995). Duties included copy editor, arts editor and, for the last five years, TV critic.
Nancy enlisted me as TV critic for the Orlando Sentinel, where I logged 25 years before retiring in January 2020. Favorite interviews: Helen Mirren, Fred Rogers, Candice Bergen and Bob Newhart. I created the TV Guy blog and covered everything from Casey Anthony and George Zimmerman to the TV industry and hurricanes.
But the Tribune years were unforgettable. Did Peyton Place have characters as colorful as Irene, Phil, Ken Fuson, Kevin Gerrity and Forrest Rose?
Chris Conway
I'm a senior editor on The New York Times Opinion staff. Married for 34 years to Jennifer Preston. Two kids, boy/girl twins now 30 years old. Our son, Matthew and his fiance, Christine, live in NYC; our daughter, Grace and her husband, Federico, live in San Francisco.
As for stories about my time at The Columbia Daily Tribune, I will say this: It was a great four years. We did a lot of exceptional, amazing journalism in words and pictures, routinely punching way above our weight. Unfortunately, further details of my time there cannot not be divulged in writing for legal and reputational reasons and in keeping with good taste and propriety.
Jim Curley
Like Bill Marr, my initial entry to the Columbia Daily Tribune was photographing houses for the real estate pages at $5.00 a pop while in J-School at MU. Sometimes, I actually did get out of the car to find a better angle. That’s how I first met David Rees and some of the real photographers at the Tribune. I did a short internship-type stint at the Tribune in 1981 before landing my first job at the St. Joseph News Press and Gazette. It was the longest year of my life, and I was rescued from it when David Rees had a big hand in hiring me for an open position at the Tribune in the summer of 1982. While not the best-paying job, the four years I spent at the Trib were the most fun I’ve had in my working life.
After that came to a rather abrupt end in the spring of 1986 my wife, Mary Clerc, and I decided to stay in Columbia to raise our two daughters, Nicole and Anna. I ended up at MU—working in the College of Agriculture and Extension Information--primarily as a photographer with a little teaching in the Agricultural Journalism sequence mixed in. I worked there until 2006 when I retired to care for Mary, who died late that year—a victim of multiple myeloma.
In 2001 David Rees and I inherited the co-directorships of the Missouri Photo Workshop and together we guided from film and into the digital era; and eventually to its 70th anniversary in 2019. We were able to make our goal of having MPW document 50 different Missouri towns in those seven decades. Both of us still have an emeritus role and continue to help with the workshop a bit.
And I still have the trophy Jeff Truesdell awarded me as winner of the first (and only) Columbia Daily Tribune Cheesecake Classic in 1985.
Reid interviews Congressman Dick Ichord
Reid Detchon
After two years as the Tribune's first, last, and only Washington correspondent, I wanted to observe the system from the inside. I interviewed with Eagleton, Gephardt, and Danforth, but the 1980 election was a Reagan landslide, so only Danforth was hiring. I took over his public works portfolio (helping to protect the Irish Wilderness), working on environmental issues with Clarence Thomas(!). I was briefly Danforth's legislative director and even more briefly was planning a start-up magazine on home video (remember VHS tapes?), when Danforth's chief of staff suggested I interview with then-VP George H.W. Bush, who needed a speechwriter for his presidential campaign. I got the job, Bush got elected, and I moved to the Department of Energy as the #2 in the Office of Conservation and Renewable Energy - political spoils, but a good fit for me.
Chased out when Clinton got elected, I decamped to a DC lobbying/PR firm called Podesta Associates, and through an odd sequence of events, landed with Ted Turner's family foundation working on environmental issues. Two years later I shifted to another Turner philanthropy, the United Nations Foundation, where I stayed 15 years, both as Vice President for Energy and Climate and also running a domestic public policy project, the Energy Future Coalition, with the Foundation's President, former Sen. Tim Wirth. Covid and retirement called me home concurrently in 2020! I live in Bethesda, MD, with my spouse of 34 years, Louise Moody, and have two stepsons, three daughters, and three grandkids so far.
Ed Dorian
After leaving the Tribune in the spring of 1981, I ventured to the Middle East, where I completed a reporting project to complete my J-school master’s degree, a step left undone when I went to work for the Trib. After completing my master’s, I landed a reporting job at the Miami Herald, which I accepted, then turned down, so I could stay in New York and help my father launch a new business venture. My plan was to help him for a year, then return to journalism. The business, as it turned out, became my life’s work.
The business is an export management company, designed to help manufacturers grow their export sales. Originally focused on selling food service equipment in the Middle East, we expanded into other export regions and into other industries—automotive, hardware/lawn & garden, industrial and environmental. Today, still headquartered in New York, we employ a staff of 60 and generate $50 million in annual sales.
Over the course of my career, I have had the opportunity to travel the world to build relationships and open new markets. But the contribution I feel best about is the decision I made in 2002 to open the books and teach our staff how to read and manage the financials, a practice known as open-book management. Supported by a profit-sharing bonus plan, open book management improved our performance and helped us build a sustainable ownership culture.
I met my wife, Ani, on a blind date in 1991 (we were neighbors on the Upper West Side of Manhattan). We married a year later, had the first of our two sons, Nick, in 1994, our second, Kenny, in 1997, a year after we relocated to Riverside, CT, where Ani and I still reside.
Nick today is completing his doctorate in biology at Tufts University, where he has focused his research on solitary bee population growth and survival and pioneered the Tufts Pollinator Initiative, dedicated to pollinator conservation and community education. Kenny graduated Wash U. in St. Louis in 2019 and landed a job as a software developer in the Advanced Scouting Department of the Atlanta Braves. His work for the 2021 Braves earned him a World Series ring. He left the Braves this summer to join the New York Knicks.
With our sons pursuing careers outside the family business, I decided late last year to sell my company. I sold it to our employees in the form of an ESOP—an employee stock ownership plan. The sale was more of a beginning than an ending; we now must do the work to ensure the ownership transition produces a win for all.
Leigh Elmore
I’m the Zelig in the picture; lurking around the edge, basking in the glow, working at the Kingdom Daily News in Fulton, the one link in the Tribune’s newspaper chain. I moved to Kansas City in 1980 with Lorraine Colbert, who became my wife later that year. We’re still married 42 years later. Thanks David Rees for the pic of us at the Trib picnic, 1978 or ‘79.
I’ve worked in local and regional news my whole career in Kansas City, with a 10-year detour as the Media Relations Manager at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City during the Clinton years. Cannon fodder you might say.
I got back on the right side of the editorial desk in 1998 as Managing Editor of Kansas City Magazine and Kansas City Home Design, then became editor of Kansas City Magazine, 1999-2004, when it sold without me. My freelance career ensued with a 13-year stint as the travel writer for Spaces Magazine, also in KC. I became editor of Discover Vintage America in 2012 and retired from there in 2020, a day before Covid lockdown. I still exercise my history gene as the president of the Friends of the Rice-Tremonti Home in Raytown, MO, an 1844 home built on the Santa Fe Trail. It’s been a 25-year labor of love and we’ve saved the old house from destruction and operate it as a museum and event space.
Lorraine and I recently returned from a memorable trip to Peru where we visited Machu Picchu and spent four nights on a riverboat on the upper Amazon. Getting Covid in Iquitos was a trip and a half. All’s well that ends well somebody once said.
Mary Ann Gwinn
Mary Ann Gwinn grew up in Arkansas. She got a master’s in journalism from the University of Missouri, then worked at the Tribune from 1979 to 1983 as a reporter, feature writer and columnist.
In 1983 she left the Tribune and moved to Seattle for a job at the Seattle Times.
In 1989 she covered the Exxon Valdez oil spill with three other Times reporters, and the four won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for their work. In 1998 she became the Seattle Times book editor, a job she held until she left the paper in 2017. She was a jurist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was the co-host of a national books and authors television program for five years.
Today Mary Ann freelances for the Los Angeles Times and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. She lives in Seattle with her husband. She has two grown sons, a novelist/teacher and a book designer, and (last but not least) George Smiley, a Cardigan corgi.
Mike Jenner
I was the last Tribune employee to join the staff of the Philadelphia Inquirer. I left in April of 1982. In August of 1983 I married Jan Winburn. In April of 1984 we moved to Hartford, CT. I took a job as assistant managing editor of the Hartford Courant, and became managing editor in 1986. In 1989, we divorced and I lost my job.
For about 3 years I worked as a consultant to newspapers. My biggest consulting gig involved working with Bill Marr and David Griffin to redesign the San Jose Mercury.
In 1993 I took a job with the Bakersfield Californian as managing editor. After 6 years I was named executive editor. In 1999, I married Jean Falter. In 2010 I left the Californian to become an endowed chair at the Missouri School of Journalism. During my time at Mizzou, I served for 18 months as interim editor of the Missourian, and as a faculty group chair for 5 years. Jean and I have two sons, Joe (21) and Andrew (18). Both are currently students at Mizzou. Neither aspires to be a journalist.
Nick Kelsh
Above, Nick’s entry to Saturday Night Live’s Anyone Can Host contest in 1978
David LaGesse
I almost flunked out of Mizzou’s J-School. So Carolyn hired me. She and the Trib crew taught me journalism, including that reporters drink their coffee black. “Who ordered theirs with baby shit?” she asked.
Two Trib years meant three beats: county, features, and higher ed. I later covered banking, technology, science, drug policy, and immigration. My Spanish still sucks. I reported longest for the Dallas Morning News and U.S. News & World Report, and from New York, Dallas, and Washington, D.C., and now back in St. Louis. I liked the variety and mobility.
U.S. News laid me off for the second time in 2010, this time when the magazine folded. We took the hint. I met Laura, a graphic artist, at the Dallas newspaper, and she left the Washington Post after 20 years for our own comm business – words and graphics. We help scientists tell their stories and rich old people publish their books, mixed with corporate internal pubs, nonprofit web design, and journalism as more of a hobby now.
We’ve two boys at Mizzou studying journalism, and other things, both with Maneater bylines. We’ve warned them. But we like that they’re getting a taste of news, and I describe myself as a recovering journalist. I’ve the Trib to thank.
Jeff with Steve Friedman
Jeff Leen
Jeff Leen oversees The Washington Post’s Investigative Unit, which he joined as a reporter in 1997. He led a team whose examination of D.C. police shootings won the 1999 Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service, the paper's first since Watergate. He became deputy investigations editor in 1999 and took over the unit in 2003. Previously, he worked as an investigative reporter for a decade at the Miami Herald, where he co-authored a 10-part series on the Medellin Cartel that was later turned into a book with Guy Gugliotta, Kings of Cocaine (Simon & Schuster, 1989). Jeff joined the Herald as a reporter in 1982, working in the Naples, Delray Beach and West Palm Beach bureaus before becoming a general assignment reporter covering the Miami drug trade in 1985. As a reporter or an editor, he has contributed to investigations that have been honored with 10 other Pulitzer Prizes, including examinations of Hurricane Andrew’s impact on South Florida, abuse in D.C. group homes, child deaths in D.C., the Sept. 11 plot, the Jack Abramoff scandal, Dick Cheney, the Snowden documents, fatal police shootings nationwide, the Roy Moore scandal and the Jan. 6 attack. He is also the author of The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds and the Making of an American Legend (Atlantic Monthly, 2009).
He was a Stanford Fellow in 1988-1989.
He has a son, Lee Shank, who is a salmon fisherman out of Kodiak Alaska.
He lives with is wife, Lynn Medford, former Post Style editor and Magazine editor, outside Annapolis. They have two cats: Bob, who was given to them by Carolyn White, and Elbee, who they found in a church parking lot.
Sarah Leen
My brief but very special career at the Tribune began in the back shop with Phil Gottschalk leaning over my shoulder blowing his cigar smoke and whacking his pica pole on my desk as he announced our looming deadlines while I tried to place tiny, waxed agate type into the sports scores. So much fun. It could only go up from there.
Len Lahman and Nancy O’Brien were my introduction to the Trib. I also met the Editor Carolyn White, who was a friend before we were ever colleagues. It changed my life.
Inspired by the great work being done at the Trib I set my sights on becoming a photojournalist. With Len’s initial support and guidance (and then so many others, too many to mention) I worked my way through graduate school at the University of Missouri J-School, became the first female College Photographer of the Year, had an internship at the National Geographic magazine and landed my first staff photographer job at the Topeka Capitol Journal.
Then Carolyn and David Griffin lured me into coming back to Columbia and to join the photo staff. How could I say no? I had the great pleasure and honor of working with and learning from Nick Kelsh, David Rees, Keith McMillan, and David Griffin (who had taken Bill Marr’s position) and the rest of the crazy, wonderful, and oh-so-talented newsroom who contributed to my growth as a journalist and became friends. You know who you are.
When Carolyn left for the Philadelphia Inquirer, her wake swept a lot of us along and I was lucky to be one of them. Working with CW and Bill at the Inky Sunday magazine was a gift. But I still wanted to fulfill my dream of working for the National Geographic. So, I quit the Inquirer and freelanced for 20 years doing 16 NG magazine stories and five covers, then I became a Nat Geo staff senior photo editor, and finally the Director of Photography of National Geographic Partners. What an amazing journey.
Along the way my relationship with Bill Marr evolved from friends, to colleagues to life-long partners, married now for 33 years. I am so blessed.
I left Nat Geo in late 2019 to start my next chapter teaching photo editing, working with individual photographers on their projects, editing photography books, jurying contests, giving portfolio reviews, mentoring and serving on the Board of the International League of Conservation Photographers. I also started the Visual Thinking Collective with a few other independent women photo editors, teachers and curators for mutual support and some team projects.
Bill and I left DC for Maine and instead of downsizing as you would think at our age, we upsized from a DC condo to a house, six acres of woods and two cats, Zuzu and Buzzer Bean.
Bill with Nick Kelsh
Bill Marr
My first pictures for the Tribune were two-inch house ads for the classifieds, taken out the car window, if possible, for $5 each.
Len Lahman opened the door for me at the Tribune in 1976. As Len and Roman Lyskowski were both winding down their time on staff, news editor Jimmy Gentry gradually hired me on as staff photographer to join the wonderful and ever-patient Keith McMillin.
Then came the roller coaster. Carolyn White.
The timing couldn’t have been better. I became interested in picture editing and page design. I don’t recall ever having spoken about a goal to help create one of the best small papers in America. We all just wanted to do great work. There was no finer place for words and pictures. Thank you, Carolyn, and the amazing team you pulled together. Too many photographers, writers and editors to mention all, but some in the early days: Alan Berner, Dave Rees, Nick Kelsh; John Gagnon, Jim Herwig, and Frank Rossi, who memorably opened a profile of a local grave digger: “Romie Rugg is the last man to let you down.” Of course Carolyn’s and Jan Winburn’s editing allowed words and pictures to find their voice on the pages. And Donna Walker was untiring in helping create all those pages.
After a four-month canoe trip down the Missouri River with Andy Maykuth in 1980, I left for Everett, Washington, to join the staff of The Herald as a photographer/designer. While there I learned to sail. Carolyn enticed a number of Tribune veterans to follow her to Philadelphia in 1982—I was hired as art director of their Sunday magazine. In 1986 Nick Kelsh and I partnered in a photography/design studio for editorial and corporate work. Six years later I took a position as a designer at National Geographic magazine, leaving in 1998 to freelance on my own. I crossed the Atlantic on a 45-foot sailboat in 2000 with the boat’s owner and three other crew.
In 2005 I took a position as Creative Director for NatGeo working for the new editor-in-chief, Chris Johns, who came up as a photographer working at The Topeka Capital-Journal while we were working at the Tribune. It was the most challenging, consuming, yet rewarding work I’d done. It lasted 10 years.
Jan Walker and I divorced in 1985; we have a son, Walker, who has three beautiful daughters. They live in Florida. Jan and her husband Gene live nearby.
I married Sarah Leen on New Years Eve in 1988. After Sarah retired from NatGeo in 2020 as director of photography, we moved to Maine where it’s rarely hot and mostly beautiful. We will stay.
Andy Maykuth
I was part of an exodus of Tribune journalists to the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1982 along with Carolyn White. There were at least ten of us, counting the gifted writer Frank Rossi, who arrived earlier and who died in 1992. I was among the last of about 10 ex-Tribune staffers hired during the Inquirer’s 1982 expansion. I’m the only one still there after 40 years.
I owe my career to Carolyn’s generous recommendation, which put me on track for the adventurous life as a correspondent, back when newspapers like ours had national and foreign correspondents. I was deployed frequently in the 1980s to Latin America to cover conflicts with rebels and narcotraficantes.
After I married my wife, Amy Blackstone, I became a national reporter, based in New York for four years covering everything from the first World Trade Center bombing to the disastrous Waco siege. After a stint in business news, I was sent to Johannesburg for six years for the Inquirer and Knight-Ridder newspapers to cover the emergence of South African democracy, followed by the war in Afghanistan. I later had gigs in California and as “foreign correspondent at large” based in Philadelphia, the newspaper’s last foreign news reporter. Now, I am back to covering business news.
One of the many lasting memories I took from Missouri was Bill Marr’s instruction that reporters and photographers must work together to tell stories in words and pictures. It’s a lesson of partnership and collaboration that served me well, especially now as we migrate to an online world.
Jeff Munzinger
Where did the decades go? I left the Trib in April, 1982, moving to, and remaining in, Springfield, MO, the home to Brad Pitt and conservatives like John Ashcroft.
Since then, I’ve been a successful business owner, and an unsuccessful office-seeker. From Missouri’s third-heaviest voting district, I ran three times as a Democrat for the state's House of Representatives, motivated when, in 2004 our daughter came out to us and legislators rejected the MO Non-Discrimination Act after telling me it was a good bill but they’d never vote for it.
My effort took the better part of five years, but I moved the district forward, getting 44 percent of the vote in 2018. The campaigns, and our daughter’s coming-out, opened my eyes to a lot of injustices, and I’m a better person for the experience.
My first job after departing The Trib took me to 49 states and Europe, working as sales and marketing manager for a small manufacturing company. Kathy worked alongside, and together we spent 10 years there while raising our kids. We parlayed the experience into our own business, Munzinger & Co., a sales agency that we operated for 25 years, representing manufacturers of various products, mostly for the boating industry.
I enjoy telling people about the 1970s Tribune, and how we were the best small-market publication in the U.S., and how many of my contemporaries went on to well-known publications. Friends ask if I missed it, and I admit that I always missed the business—just not the constant stress. And although I never reported again, my family tells me I continued to interview new acquaintances.
Through the years I have enjoyed passing along tips to journalists, and later seeing the stories come to life. The most interesting was a tip I passed along for a story that went viral. In early July of 2012, a letter signed by a Jane Pitt appeared in the Springfield News-Leader, blasting President Obama for his stance on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. I knew it was the mother of Brad Pitt, so I contacted a leading LGBTQ advocate, who in turn passed it to ThinkProgress, from which point it went viral with the angle that just weeks before Brad had publicly endorsed the president.
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Sad Fact: Apparently I was one of the last people to visit Irene Haskins before she passed, not realizing she was in her final hours when I departed the hospital.
Fun Fact: Can I claim at least partial responsibility for getting Jenner to the Trib? Mike as an MU undergrad had worked with me on the Tribune sports staff in 1974-75, where I’d been hired in December 1973 right out of J-School. After Mike graduated, he went to work in Hattiesburg for a couple of years and returned to the Missourian for the masters program. Caroline didn’t know Mike, but had heard of him, and she knew that I knew Mike, so she asked if I would go over and lobby Mike to come our way.
To Caroline: Thank-You! To Mike: You’re Welcome, buddy!
Greg with Kevin Gerrity
Greg Rasa
I flowed through the pipeline of Tribune alums to the Everett Herald in 1985 and Seattle Times in 1987, where we had earthquakes, landslides, a 49-day strike and won some Pulitzers (including MAG’s). I held several jobs, grinding out the paper for 30 years. It went by fast.
When revenue tanked, ST management began a festive holiday tradition of annual Christmas RIFs. I took a buyout in 2016. Mary Ann left the previous year, Tom earlier. Haberstroh split decades ago. Mark Harrison died. Alan was first in, last out.
I’ve been with Autoblog/Yahoo for five years now. A fun second act, and for the first time in my career, at an outfit that pays a living wage.
My wife, Alicia Shankland, is a J-School grad who went on to get an MBA but ended up subsidizing journalism anyway by marrying me. We’ve had a good life, with golden retrievers.
Alicia was diagnosed months ago with a rare cancer and underwent a stem cell transplant in May. Recovery will take months more, but the cancer seems to be gone.
Our daughter, Hope, is, yikes, an editor of her high school newspaper. She’s beautiful, clever, sarcastic, 3.9 GPA. When we suggested applying to Mizzou, she laughed.
I thought I’d miss newspapers, but don’t. I did my part. We’ve all sacrificed for this profession and for a generally ungrateful public. But it’s been a privilege to work with smart, talented, funny people – and it started with this group right here.
David Rees and Chris Marshall
David Rees
I worked at the Columbia Daily Tribune for nine years (1977-85) as staff photographer with Bill Marr and then David Griffin and when they left for greener pastures became the photo editor, which also meant designing the massive number of pages that Bill and David had gotten control of - Front and Second Front, Show Me Missouri, Perspectives, Scene, food pages, etc., etc. It was an impossible job, made possible only by the stalwart “paste-up artist” Donna Walker (Browning). As everyone else at the Trib then, I was overworked and underpaid, and loved it, the working, anyway.
As a photographer, I relished the partnerships with writers like Frank Rossi, John Gagnon, Jim Herweg, Mary Ann Gwinn, Ken Fuson, John Schneller, Steve Friedman and many others. It was great being an equal partner in the reporting. There were many excellent photographers to work with and learn from: Nick Kelsh, Ann Yow, Tom Reese, Rick Perry, Dale Blindheim, Earl Richardson, Jim Curley, John Trotter, and others. Keith McMillin, who remade himself and his photography in order to “keep up” was really a paragon of insightful visual reporting,.
Carolyn White inspired the Tribune call to excellence, aided by good and loyal henchmen like Jan Winburn. “Standards” were upheld throughout the Tribune, not just the newsroom. In composing, Jimmy Ruth and Spencer Galloway held the line on the 1.25 pica spacing and would rather be late to press than allow uneven legs of type. Press room chief Bobby Hall, seen by some of us as almost a dark force, got the presses and his crew to produce amazing reproduction of photos on newsprint.
When I left (was fired) from the Trib I began freelancing and taught photojournalism at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Being fired was probably the best thing that ever happened to me (in retrospect) because I loved teaching and working with students; I co-directed the Missouri Photo Workshop for 20 years (with Jim Curley) and directed Pictures of the Year for six years and helped to create the Angus and Betty McDougall Center for Photojournalism Studies. I retired from MU after 32 years in 2018.
The love of my life, my wife Christine Marshall and I have two children; Annie, who lives in Washington, D.C., and is a podcast producer for Politico, and Alan, who lives in Columbia and works at Clovers. Chris and I were married for 43 years; she died from ovarian cancer in 2020.
Now I play tennis five days a week, stay connected with the Missouri Photo Workshop and the McDougall Center for Photojournalism Studies at MU and take pictures now and then.
Paul Roberts
For 355 days, I have uncommon job flexibility. But in winemaking, we get one shot annually — ten intense days of harvesting and crushing grapes — to make what we sell. It’s just my wife Nadine and me, and in 2022, the Tribune reunion came smack in the middle of our 26th vintage.
It was while at the Tribune that my wine interest budded, volunteering during “crush”at two small nearby wineries. Immediately post-Tribune, I went back home to the Bootheel as press secretary in the 1986 Cryts for Congress campaign, but afterward, I went all-in: Napa Valley. (A movie, “Bottle Shock,” chronicles events where I apprenticed.) Still, without proper education or connections, steady employment in California wine looked even more unlikely than in the contracting newspaper industry. So, I opted for directing a publishing program at a Pittsburgh history museum.
After a half-dozen book projects and 60 quarterly journals, I’d seen enough city life and my professional Pittsburgher wife equally recoiled at putting a breast-feeding daughter into day-care. So, the same year Ava was born, we bugged-out and built a house (winery in cellar) 100 miles south at 2,500-feet elevation in the Appalachian Mountains. I wrote a book about the experience. (Don’t wait for that movie.)
Still unchronicled is our seven-year “Democracy Workshop” experience. I was a registered lobbyist; the non-profit we founded paid for my apartment in Annapolis. Some did as much but no one did more to ban “fracking” in Maryland.
Donita (Thomasson) Naylor
You knew me as Donita Thomasson, copydesk chief after Sue Weston left. I was married then to David Thomasson, editor of the editorial and op-ed pages, and when he got a fellowship at Brown University, I felt confident of getting hired at the Providence Journal-Bulletin. I had been a Newspaper Fund editing intern in 1977 on the Bulletin desk. I was the first hire after a freeze, and I rose fast to section editor handling two to three suburban editions each night. I bought a horse and had a house built. Turned out David Thomasson had no interest in home ownership, rural living or having kids, and the marriage ended. I think he lives in Washington DC now. In 1993-94 I met and married David Naylor. His sons landed on our doorstep in turmoil that was constant until 2003, when he formed an escape plan with a married woman in our church.
I had moved to dayside in the Sunday department to facilitate family life, but I became a target for refusing to be complicit in violations that should have been addressed when I brought them to light. I was sent home on six months paid leave, which I used to reach toward my dream, of becoming a writer, a dream so dear I couldn’t say it out loud. I did the 13-week “The Artist’s Way” in a facilitated group and asked to return as an entry-level bureau reporter. A reorganization without bureaus put me on the “jump and run” breaking news team. Inspiring, heart-wrenching or heart-warming stories began to seek me out. I only write well by rewriting, and I’m slow. Cutbacks required me to turn in hack work, unless I could write all night instead of sleeping. I retired suddenly in July because a complex sleep disorder stole about 60 points off my IQ and my ability to concentrate. I had brain fog, narcolepsy, unacceptable behavior like someone with Tourette’s, and in my fog I turned in gibberish. I got out as the editors compiled evidence to fire me.
I’d love to mingle by phone if anyone feels like calling me (401) 837-2986 during a social time, or if you want to tell someone all about it when you’re back home. It really was an amazing time, and we were just kids.
What do you think about TribairB&B, where we’re willing to share our homes to others in the group who might want to vacation in our area. I’m about a half hour from the beaches, 40 minutes to Newport, 90 minutes to Boston, a train ride to NYC. I just don’t drive. At least we could recommend good places, be a guide and point out where major news stories happened.
Tom Reese
I’m not sure my newspaper career could have ever quite matched the expectations I internalized during formative years at the Tribune, but all in all it has been pretty swell. I left Columbia for Seattle, where I have been ever since, working at the Everett Herald and then for 19 years at The Seattle Times with the great fortune of colleagues and pals Alan Berner, Mary Ann Gwinn and Greg Rasa. I left the Times voluntarily about 12 years ago for freelancing and personal projects. Married, a son who’s eight years older than my Tribune self. Friends and family gained and lost, of course. A book, “Once and Future River: Reclaiming the Duwamish” published with the University of Washington Press; another in the chute and a couple more meandering hopefully at the gates.
tomreesephoto.com
Mike Reilly
I am executive director for communications at the Texas A&M University System, which means I write speeches, press releases and TV scripts and pitch stories to news outlets.
I moved to Bryan, Texas, in 2018 after taking a buyout from Berkshire Hathaway Media, where I had been Vice President for News and Executive Editor of the Omaha World-Herald. I oversaw the World-Herald newsroom and advised for publishers and editors at newspapers in 11 states.
One of those was The Eagle of Bryan, Texas. I’m now engaged to be married to the former editor there, Kelly Brown.
In my decade as top editor in Omaha, the newsroom shrank from 200 to 100 journalists. I tired of laying off people.
I started at The World-Herald in 1990 as city hall reporter and had various reporting and editing roles. Regardless of my other duties, I always kept a hand investigative journalism. I’m proud of the work done there on my watch.
I also served as board president of Media of Nebraska, which fights for access to government meetings and records.
In 1983, I graduated from Mizzou in political science. I studied journalism and was editor of the Maneater in 1982, but I never finished a journalism degree. That’s because I was offered a summer job at the Columbia Daily Tribune in 1982 as a general assignment reporter. I thought it would be smarter to get paid working at the Tribune than to pay tuition to work at the Missourian.
At the Tribune full-time from 1983 through 1989, I covered higher education, city hall, state government and politics and eventually became the city editor.
Jeff Truesdell
I scoffed at my best friend who left the Tribune to edit an alternative weekly, and later at a BBQ at Virginia Young’s, I sneered at a People magazine editor guest-teaching at the j school. Then I spent 12 years running an alternative weekly in Orlando, and 17 years (and counting) at People.
Previously I’d followed a Tribune contingent (Leen, Boedeker, Sante et al) to the Miami Herald, where despite living in Palm Beach, I never lost the feeling that a beep of my horn would yield a gun to my head (see: Leen & Gugliotta, Kings of Cocaine). Home beckoned in the form of the St. Louis Sun, the last effort in America to birth a metro daily from scratch; that was a wild 60 seconds, and then it was on to the rest.
I’ve been a college professor, a student newspaper advisor and produced a documentary on juvenile injustice that premiered in Berlin and won honors from Stockholm to Santa Fe. Today strangers stop to say they know me from true-crime TV.
The adventure of which I’m proudest is the 34 years with my husband, who I believed to be a Spaniard from the Canary Islands until, after we’d been together 27 years, a letter arrived that exploded his biography and launched us both on a journey of joy and wonder. Until he abruptly died in May, we lived a glorious life. Now I don’t know who I am.
But I’ve no complaints about the professional path y'all inspired with your insane talent. And I’ll always be the one who declared Jim Curley as the deserving winner of the 1984 (or ’85 or ’86, who can recall?) newsroom Cheesecake Classic.
Kirk after The Human Race
Kirk Wessler
Kirk Wessler came to the Tribune in September 1977 to work in sports. His primary beat was MU basketball. He became sports editor in 1981 and managing editor in 1984. After getting fired by Hank in January 1986, he spent a year as deputy sports editor of the Dallas Times-Herald, then returned to his hometown of Peoria, Illinois, serving as sports editor, then as sports columnist until 2018, when he took a buyout. His wife, MaryFran, wouldn't let him retire, so he worked three years in marketing for OSF HealthCare in Peoria, finally retiring for real in January 2022.
During his newspaper career, Kirk won numerous national and state awards for sportswriting. He served as president of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association in 2013-14 and was named to the USBWA Hall of Fame in 2018. After leaving the newspaper business, Kirk refocused his creative energy into songwriting and now performs regularly in Central Illinois as a guitarist/singer. He's working on an album of original songs that he hopes to release next spring. MaryFran, who worked for a couple of years as a copy editor at the Tribune, retired in June from teaching high school. She and Kirk have five sons, four daughters-in-law and nine grandchildren.
Jan Winburn
The Trib was the best Petri dish a young journalist could ever encounter. The talent and passion I got to know there fueled my aspirations, and also helped me always remember what professional generosity looks like. We were truly all for one and one for all.
When I speak of my love for narrative writing, I often say it was ignited in the mid ‘70s in a small-town newspaper — a kind of journalistic commune. Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll? Yes! But also a passion for storytelling and for discovery. I owe you all for a professional life that has been joyful.
Formers: CNN Digital, the Atlanta paper, Baltimore, Hartford , Philly. These days I teach in a low residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction at the University of Georgia.
I live in Atlanta, where I get to watch my daughter Ella every morning on the CBS affiliate, where she is a meteorologist.
Virginia Young
Virginia Young covered the Missouri state capital for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and stltoday.com for 26 years, the last 10 as Jefferson City Bureau Chief. Her articles on tax credits, public retirement systems, nursing homes and the gambling industry led to changes in the way state government handles business subsidies, pension benefits, nursing home inspections and programs for problem gamblers. After taking a buyout from the Post-Dispatch in 2015, she taught investigative reporting, public affairs reporting and newswriting as an adjunct instructor at the Missouri School of Journalism, where she had been on the faculty for five years before joining the Post-Dispatch. She co-edited a book, published in 1991, called “Women on Deadline: A Collection of America’s Best.” She has been married since 1983 to Joe Holt, who still works full-time as an attorney. They spend a lot of time visiting their five far-flung children, taking biking trips and playing with their golden retriever, Greta, on their farm outside Fulton.