Since 1998 Dick Youngblood has been writing about small businesses once a week. Until now. In a second stab at retirement, Dick's final column runs today.
Youngblood, 74, started at the Minneapolis Tribune as the newspaper's North Dakota correspondent in 1963, and moved to the Minneapolis newsroom the next year as agribusiness reporter. By 1968, he was an assistant city editor and a year later became business editor, a position he held for 14 years.
In 1983, he gave up his editing responsibilities to become a full-time business columnist, writing three times a week for the now-combined Star Tribune. He retired for the first time in 1998, but quickly agreed to write once a week.
Youngblood, who covered some of the most important agriculture stories of his day, became a master of the first-person feature story. Those skills were on display in August 1970 when he agreed to wrestle a tiger at the Minnesota State Fair.
"How do you go about wrestling a 432-pound, 5 1/2-year-old purebred Bengal tiger?" Youngblood wrote. "With your teeth gritted, that's how. But wrestle her I did."
