My last boss in the newspaper game, David Mitchell, has gone west. He was 90.

Dave found me roaming the streets back in the summer of 1988, about six months after I got laid off by a chain of weeklies in the north-Denver metro. I was one raggedy-ass mutt back then, but he must have seen some potential I didn’t realize I had, because he hired me to work the copy desk at The New Mexican and afterward gave me the run of the newsroom until he himself got the shove in 1991 for pissing off the big boss, owner Robert McKinney.

I was running out of options and unemployment compensation when Dave summoned me to Santa Fe for an interview. A job I thought was mine at the Ventura County Star-Free Press in California had gone to somebody else, and while New Mexico was short on ocean views, I was in no position to be picky about locale, or much of anything else.

So I was decked out in my best looking-for-work kit when I walked into Dave’s newsroom, coat, necktie, the works, hoping to make a good impression. He was clad in Santa Fe casual, gives me the up-and-down, and says, “You didn’t have to get all dressed up for us.”

Well. Shit. Lost dog comes home.

Dave wasn’t just a newsman, he was a “news” man. As in “Fuck a bunch of features, bring me the news.” Old school. Tough but fair, and hard to impress, especially when he had one foot on your chair and was leaning over you like a ton of bricks getting ready to fall, daring you to feed him some weak line of bullshit.

I think I managed to impress him exactly once, when I was still on the copy desk. A story about a potential school-superintendent hire seemed oddly familiar to me, and then I remembered where I’d seen it before.

“This is from a Marx Brothers movie,” I told the city desk. The city desk didn’t believe me. The library was just down the street. I was right. A school-board member was having our reporter on. Dave gave me a $50 bonus and another long look, the kind that you’d give to a little green man who just stepped out of a flying saucer parked on your lawn.

When the Ventura paper got back in touch to offer me that job I’d been so sure was mine, until it wasn’t, I said thanks all the same, but Dave Mitchell pulled me off the breadline when I had nothing in my pockets but a pair of hands, and I’ma dance with the one what brung me.

I eventually escaped the copy desk and just sort of wandered around the newsroom, working for Pancho Morris on the sports desk, and Denise Kusel at the weekend arts magazine Pasatiempo, dusting off my reporting chops to write some cycling copy, taking some snaps with a camera Pancho laid on me, even helping with a redesign of the newspaper that introduced me to the wonderful world of Apple products.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slowly working my way towards a whole new career, as a freelancer. And shortly after McKinney sacked Dave over a series of stories looking into environmental hazards at Los Alamos National Lab, with my mom slipping into dementia up in Bibleburg, well … I got right after it. Herself and I had been married less than a year, the publisher had been asking pointed questions like, “Are you still here?” and I figured it would be best for all of us if I were not.

I was already freelancing cartoons and copy to VeloNews in Boulder. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News came next, co-founder Marc Sani being a Santa Fe riding buddy. These steady gigs lasted for a lot longer than they should have, and they led to other work too, like my stint with Adventure Cyclist, whose editor Mike Deme brought me aboard not for my touring expertise — I didn’t have any — but because he liked the way I wrote.

So, thanks, Dave. I don’t know where I would’ve wound up if you hadn’t taken a chance on me way back when. But it sure as shit wouldn’t have been here, happily married, safely retired, and with a couple bucks in the bank too, typing up some memories on a Mac in New Mexico.