I will never wrestle a Bengal tiger, but Dick Youngblood did. I've been writing a column for three months. Dick did it for 27 years. He was younger than I am when he launched his column, and for his first 15 years he wrote two or three times a week.

Yikes!

Dick's last column ran today. Before Dick turned to column writing he was a pioneering business editor. Because of Dick, the Star Tribune was one of the first metro dailies to publish executive compensation figures. This was decades before the web and Edgar, and it did nothing to ingratiate Dick with Minnesota's CEOs. The former chief executive of Pillsbury upbraided him for publishing a "kidnapper's list."

I joined the Strib in '98, shortly after Dick's first retirement. I'm grateful to have had the privilege of working alongside him until his second.