This is a column I wrote on Charley Hallman for the Star Tribune on June 13, 1997, on the occasion of his departure from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. When you look up "he was a beauty" in a collection of urban phrases, you will find a photo of Charley with his curly hair and an unfiltered cigarette:

SPORTSWRITER CHARLES (BUCK) HALLMAN and the St. Paul Pioneer Press recently reached a confidential agreement to end his more than 26 years of employment at the newspaper. That will not change Hallman's standing as the most unforgettable character I have worked with or covered in nearly three decades in the Twin Cities sports business.
Calvin Griffith, Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, Sid Hartman, Don Riley, Remarkable Mike Lynn, Jerry Burns, Billy Gardner, John Gagliardi, Clem Haskins and jockey Elbert Minchey also would be on the list of unique characters.
But when it comes to being unforgettable, Hallman is without challenge. So storied was his tenure at the St. Paul newspapers that those of us who were there can instantly recall the day it started:

Feb. 1, 1970.
There was a period (October 1970 into early 1974) when I had the pleasure of being Hallman's immediate supervisor. There were occasions during that time - perhaps after Buck had written one of his more imaginative leads to a story - that I would be inspired to make a speech concerning Hallman's employment.
This would come after consuming several gins at Luigi's, the saloon across the street from the newspaper office. Stealing from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the speech would start, "On Feb. 1, 1970, a day that shall live in infamy in the history of Twin Cities sports journalism . . ."
Some colleagues considered Hallman's greatest lead to have followed a North Stars playoff victory in Montreal. The Stars, huge underdogs, had done proud their green-and-white uniforms that night.And Buck presented the drama to the St. Paul readers thusly:
"They did. They did. They did. The little green pygmies went into historic Montreal Forum and defeated ..."
And who could forget Buck's report on an interview that he had conducted with the North Stars' Bobby Smith on a team flight? Wrote Hallman: "As we were cruising along at an altitude of 35,000 miles ..."
This seemed to confirm a long-held suspicion that Buck had a summer residence on the planet Neptune.
Hallman always wanted the teams that he covered to win games and draw large crowds. When St. Paul entered the fledgling World Hockey Association in the 1970s, he was given the beat.
Minnesota already had big-league hockey with the North Stars. A few St. Paul sportswriters considered the Fighting Saints to be a pain in the rear end, a team in a Mickey Mouse league taking up room in a sports section that didn't have enough space as it was.
Not Buck. He wanted the Fighting Saints to succeed, maybe with more passion than the team's owners. The Saints were in constant financial crisis. Many plans were hatched to rescue the WHA team, several by Hallman.
One winter, Hallman was sent to the All-Star Game to discover if the league had any schemes to take the Saints off life support. Within hours, Buck was calling back with the happy news that the Saints would be rescued for the long term with an infusion of cash from a Teamsters pension fund.
At midday, the editors' plan was to splash this scoop across the top of page 1A. By early evening, Hallman said the story should be softened a touch. It was moved back to the sports section, which I happened to be laying out.
At midnight, I received a frantic call from Hallman, saying the Teamsters story had to be yanked. Why? "Two burly gentlemen with open silk shirts, hairy chests and gold chains have advised me
strongly to kill the story," Hallman said.
The story was killed. Buck survived. The Fighting Saints did not.
Later, Hallman was assigned to cover the Golden Gophers. Priority No. 1 was football. He followed recruiting intensely and started publishing a national top 100. Invariably, the Gophers would land six to eight players on Buck's top 100, compared to zero players on the lists of other national recruiting experts.
Around 1980, Hallman started chronicling all matters Golden Gopher with a feature called "Gophers Notes." This gigantic daily report offered readers minutiae on every men's and women's sports team at the university. It became the inoperable cancer of the St. Paul sports section - spreading, spreading, until nothing else could live inside those pages.
"Gophers Notes" succumbed a few years back, although it was too late for some of us. In June 1988, I switched sides of the river, moving from the St. Paul Pioneer Press to the Star Tribune. A few asked why and were given a vague response.
Now, nine years later and with Buck Hallman also an ex-St. Pauler, I can finally give the honest answer:
"Gophers Notes."