Bidding my bite-sized boss good-bye

Jennifer McBride/Typewriter Tales

Sarah didn't want to write a good-bye column.

"I've only been here four months!" she said. The context being: "It's not as if anyone's going to miss me."

Was it only four months? It felt more like four years spent under the painful lash of that devious, if diminutive, editor. Just joking, Sarah. About the devious part, anyway.

It may have only been four months, but I can't think of anyone who's made so many changes in so tiny a time period. In the brief span she was in Lake County, she revolutionized the layout of the paper and helped make it more colorful, more legible and more user-friendly. She was like a pixie, and her magic wand made boring gray print pop into rainbow life. She was usually at the office late on Sunday afternoon, working hard to get the front page perfect, even though the paper wouldn't go to Kalispell for printing until Tuesday.

Considering the problems we had at the beginning of Sarah's tenure, four months is impressive. The first week Sarah came, we had a sudden rash of computer problems. Two memory cards became corrupted at the same time for no apparent reason and all the photos shot by another camera were in a format too advanced for our five-year-old software. It would have been enough to make me head for the hills.

Besides everything else, Sarah's first day was a Tuesday. She came in trying to create a new layout style while at the same time trying desperately to meet our Tuesday night deadline. I don't think I've ever seen anyone work so hard to make things line up to the fifth decimal point of a centimeter.

Though wasps could send her running and screaming out of her office, Sarah wasn't afraid to take a stand about issues she really cared about. Even if we disagreed sometimes, I respected her judgment.

Unfortunately for the Leader, Sarah did too well a job. She was promoted in-company to a job editing the Shoshone news press in Kellogg, Idaho. Or so I've been told — the last time I saw her, she was going into the back room with our publisher, who had a chainsaw-shaped bulge in his duffle bag and a wicked grin on his face. Come to think about it, that's when I last saw Zach Urness, too, and there were these mysterious patties in the company fridge labeled "Nate burgers" when I first came into the office last July. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

According to a database of historical myths run by the Nevada State Library, Kellogg's local legend has it a prospector named Noah Kellogg had a donkey that wandered off and was found near the silver/lead veins which would later become the Bunker Hill and Sullivan Mines. Thus Kellogg's town sign: "This is the town founded by a jackass and inhabited by his descendants."

Sounds like Sarah is going to fit right in.

Postscript: Our new editor, Danielle, who has some pretty small shoes to fill, will be writing her own introductory column soon. Look for it in next week's Leader.