An editor looks at 40

  When our current publisher, Kyle Sims, took over what was then called Creative Loafing several years ago, I wanted to lay down the law. There may be a new sheriff in town, I thought, but Judge Jim’s court was still in session.

So I told him, “You know, I don’t want to still be here doing this when I’m forty.”

Kyle was curious and amused. “Why not?” he asked.

“A newspaper like this needs a younger editor,” was my breezy reply. “There are alternative papers all over the country with 50 and 60 year old editors. Pathetic. Those granolas need to move on.”

Well, I turned forty this past Feb. 19, with the commensurate amount of hoopla. And apparently I’m still here, though not quite at granola status yet.

Kyle, quite rightly, still teases me about that conversation, that “Mick Jagger moment,” as he calls it — a reference to the sixty-year-old Stones frontman’s famous and now completely inoperative quote, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.”

Still, for some reason I’ve never felt younger, at least in spirit if not entirely in body. I guess I’m one of those people who thinks like an old person when they’re young, and gets more youthful in outlook as they get older. Or at least I keep telling myself that.

I would hope that if one day I get really, really bad at this job — like, oh say, tomorrow — I would have enough of a clue to move on. Probably, though, I’ll hang on to the bitter end like everyone else, like one of those aging quarterbacks that ends a good career on a different team than the one he broke all those records playing for — first as a struggling starter in an unfamilar uniform, and then as a clipboard holder on the sidelines.

Speaking of careers, brilliant and otherwise: Despite working in journalism in this town off and on for nearly twenty years, I’ve still managed to miss out on being in all those cheesy year-end features the Savannah Morning News does to highlight self-absorbed young white people — uh, I mean “up-and-coming movers-and-shakers” — in our fair community. God knows I’m as self-absorbed as the next white boy. There’s no justice, I tell ya.

For example, I missed getting in “Thirty Under Thirty” by a mile. And the deadline for “Forty Under Forty” just passed — though considering I’ve been editor of their competition in the interim decade I probably stood next to no chance of making the cut.

(Savannah’s daily still has a vaguely Kremlin-style policy of never directly mentioning our paper’s name in their pages. Occasionally, Diversions will slip up and include it, but generally we are referred to as “a local weekly newspaper.” Tom Barton, God love him, was really thinking out of the box recently when he referred to me in a column as editor of Creative Loafing — four years after we had become Connect Savannah. )

I don’t reckon they’ll ever do a “Fifty Under Fifty” series, but hey, if they do I want to go ahead and put my hat in the ring now. Don’t worry, Morning News folks — you can still call it “a local weekly newspaper” if you really want to.

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