Reflections on decades spent working for a decent person

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About every person retiring from a newspaper, stories will be told. About elusive news and gargantuan efforts to get it. About personality quirks. About brilliance and missed calls. All depend on who’s doing the telling.

We journalists, it turns out, are not so different from other people. At the heart of our work are our daily interactions with colleagues.

Scott Gillespie is just seven or so years older than I, but given our workplace dynamic he’s always been to me like one of those just-out-of-college teachers I had in high school — authority figures who were easy to get along with. Scott has been my boss in some form or another for about a quarter-century, the last 17 as editor of Star Tribune Opinion.

Friday is his last day. On Monday I’ll take over as interim editor while a search for his permanent successor continues.

Let’s hope my tenure, however long or brief it is, has a better legacy than another I carried on from Scott, and one I believe he himself had been bequeathed from his predecessor.

In the Star Tribune’s old building at 425 Portland Avenue, the editorial page editor occupied a corner office with many windows. That sounds more fabulous than it was. The whole place was a dump, even after the interior had been remodeled to a fresh beige from an earlier den-of-Satan milieu. But that office had great light.

And in one corner, near a small conference table, was the happiest philodendron you’d ever see. It was a well-rounded 5 feet tall. When Scott called meetings at the small conference table in his office, the leaves would brush people’s shoulders like a friendly cat.

When we moved out in 2015 to make way for the new Vikings stadium and its environs, the philodendron was to be left behind. Our shiny new office-tower digs had rules about personal effects. So I took the plant home. I figured it needed a name, too, so I called it Kip.

Rest in peace, Kip. Your four years in my less photosynthetic living room were ones of diminishing returns.

Scott, on the other hand, has been a survivor at the Star Tribune, holding his post through several changes in ownership and in the leaders and leadership styles above him. I think it was because he was honest with those leaders but kept their confidence with discretion. I think it was because he gave his employees the discretion to do their jobs. Because he fostered a workplace atmosphere that leavened the stress of daily journalism. Because he was open to challenges but knew, as a top editor must, when to pull back on the throttle.

Scott and I had scattered disagreements over the years but only one argument I can recall, perpetrated by me. It was about a letter to the editor that I wanted to publish and he didn’t. He was completely clear about that, but I pressed and pressed some more. Finally, calmly but with unmistakable firmness, he told me that he was responsible for running the department and this was the call he was making. He’d shown me where the limit was, the point after which a decision is made and is to be carried out.

My first job out of college was at a small daily. A top editor there was, by reputation and in practice, a yeller. He once gathered us in a conference room and steamed up the place, the embodiment of a cartoon stereotype, threatening to be rid of us if we didn’t live up to what may or may not have been a vision of his.

I could only watch in amusement. I was young and had nothing to lose. Not so for the midcareer journalists with families and obligations, who had given that paper their all for many years and who needed their jobs very much.

I did move on not long after that, ultimately winding up at the Star Tribune for now 30 years — the bulk of it, as mentioned, either directly or indirectly under the supervision of Scott Gillespie.

That is to say, the bulk of it working for a fundamentally decent person. No small privilege, that. Nothing that should be taken for granted.