I WISH I had a dollar for everybody who's said at one time or another, "Walton, you should write a book." I figure I'd have, oh, two or three bucks by now. So in the interest of brevity, and hopefully honesty, this will have to do as I step back from 42 years in this remarkable business.

A fellow traveler, Bill Moyers, once noted that journalists are professional beachcombers strolling the shores of other people's wisdom. And so it has been with me. I cannot count how many people have imparted their wisdom over the years, and while I didn't always absorb it, I am grateful for their efforts.

I've met presidents and movie stars, heroes and cowards, millionaires and homeless, scoundrels and crooks, and even a king and queen. I found them all fascinating, just not for the same reasons.

I watched from 30 feet away as rescuers pulled a toddler from deep in a backyard well in California. I remember watching in awe at the Johnson Space Center in Houston when Wapakoneta's Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon, and Israeli and Arab journalists slapped each other on the back in unrestrained excitement.

On the whole, I would not have traded being a witness to history for any other job I could imagine.

Certainly I need to reflect on four decades of working for the same family. I guess that makes me an anomaly in an age when many people change jobs about as often as they change hair styles. I've had opportunities to move on, and every time, something stopped me.

It's no secret that newspaper ownership in America has contracted dramatically over the years. There are fewer truly independent newspapers than ever, and fewer publishing families willing to buck economic downswings and the overtures of the big corporate newspaper chains.

I have no way of knowing if those overtures came to the Block family, but I am grateful that the Blocks have remained true to their mission, which is to publish the best newspapers they can, unbeholden to outside interests and committed to the welfare of their cities - Toledo and Pittsburgh.

Disagree with me if you like, but if our newspaper had been owned by the big boys - say Knight-Ridder or Gannett, where investigative enterprise is often viewed as one more unnecessary expense - would Toledoans' daily newspaper have pursued the Tiger Force story and won a Pulitzer Prize? Would "Coingate" have been uncovered? In fact, would we have won a Pulitzer Prize and been a finalist two other times in the last seven years without a strong commitment to investigative journalism?

Would Toledo have a strong-mayor form of government? Would the Valentine Theatre have been saved? Would Jeep have stayed in Toledo? Would Fifth Third Field have been built? How about the Veterans Glass City Skyway Bridge? Would a movement toward a smoke-free society have been launched, clearing the air for us all?

That's what kept me from leaving. I look back with great pride on having a part, even if peripherally, in those achievements, and I hope John Robinson Block and his family know how much I appreciated that commitment.

Somebody asked me a while back to pick the most memorable stories I covered as a young reporter. It's tough to narrow the list, but these certainly have to be there: the Xenia, Ohio, tornado of 1974, which leveled half the town and prompted a visit by President Nixon; the shotgun murder of an employee at a Westgate area store in 1966, a slaying I witnessed from three feet away; and Toledo's race riots in the summer of 1968.

The best assignment of all was Apollo 11 in July, 1969. The Blade sent me to Houston and the NASA space center to cover our first lunar landing. It was an exciting and almost overwhelming experience, and one that attached special sadness for me to the Challenger and Columbia disasters years later.

I also include the 1975 sinking of the lake freighter Edmund Fitzgerald. Though I did not cover the Fitzgerald tragedy, I mention it because I served one shipping season as a crewman aboard the Big Fitz in 1963, and because one of the 29 men who died when the great ship went down in Lake Superior was my uncle.

And how can I not mention the horrifying events of 9/11? The Blade was one of the few papers in America to publish a special edition on Sept. 11, and I was immensely proud of our staff for working through their shared despair to produce it.

There were much happier stories, too. I was at Detroit's Metro Airport in 1968 to cover the triumphant return of the Detroit Tigers after winning the World Series earlier in the day in St. Louis. But the mob of excited fans at Metro forced officials to divert the Tigers' plane to Willow Run. The crowd's exuberance denied them what they had come to see.

The most fun I ever had on a story: flying with the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels, and "performing" as Mother Ginger in the Toledo Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker."

Along the way on this journey I've been honored to meet every president since Lyndon Johnson; space heroes Neil Armstrong and John Glenn; Ansel Adams, probably the greatest nature photographer who ever lived; Titanic discoverer Robert Ballard; pioneer American labor leaders such as Walter Reuther and George Meany, and countless others.

Just as important were the people who never got their 15 minutes of fame, people whose only appearance in our paper may have occurred when they were born, married, or passed away. They constantly reminded me of an old saying: At the end of the chess game, the king and the pawns are returned to the same box.

But the folks who mattered the most were the co-workers who labored in the journalistic vineyards with me and whose professionalism and friendship sustained me on good days, bad days, and going-half-mad days.

Especially the talented people who've worked so hard on our editorial board over the years, including Ralph Johnson, Richard Paton, Eileen Foley, Tom Wellman, Herb Knowlton, Bill Brower, and Pat Green, plus my current compatriots, David Shutt, Rose Russell, Marilou Johanek, Kirk Walters, Anne Abate, and Margarita Duran.

There were many others, but I promised no book.

It was my good fortune to be Editor for several years at the Monterey Peninsula Herald, at the time a Block Communications newspaper in Monterey, Calif. I remember sitting down once with Clint Eastwood to determine if The Herald would endorse him in his bid to become mayor of Carmel. We did. He won. I hope we made his day.

That's part of our job, of course, to recommend candidates for public office, though we are sometimes vilified for our choices. If we had only wanted a good batting average, we'd have backed the likely winner every time. Instead we always sought to identify the candidate we thought was the better choice, regardless of his or her chances to prevail.

I've heard it said many times that more quality people would run for office in Toledo and northwest Ohio if only they didn't have to face The Blade's scrutiny. To me, that was a handy excuse, nothing more. Would you prefer a newspaper that only offers up happy-talk stories and bland, indifferent editorials, or one which keeps shining a flashlight in the dark corners?

It would be difficult to be a crooked politician for very long in Toledo, in part because The Blade is watching. I say that's a vital public service.

Mark Twain once wrote that he was not the editor of a newspaper, adding that he would "always try to do what is right and good so that God will not make me one." There were days I knew what he meant, but I still think he should have given it a try.

I marvel that a kid who once delivered The Blade on a bicycle in Sycamore, Ohio, could one day end up in the editor's chair. I ponder the people who've sat here - the great Grove Patterson, and more recently, my predecessor Bernard Judy - and I am humbled that I was entrusted, in some small way, with their legacy.

I am humbled, too, that my partner in this adventure, my wife Dianne, shared the journey. She once got up in front of an American Society of Newspaper Editors convention and read a poem she'd written called "I Married the Newspaper." She made a thousand people laugh, something most editors need to do a lot more of.

I truly believe that The Blade's editorial pages are the liveliest and most provocative in the state. For that we make no apologies. I always answered my own phone and took the derisive hoots that occasionally emanated from the other end. And I respected every Blade reader, especially those who took such a proprietary interest in our Pages of Opinion.

I'm proud that the volume of mail to the Readers Forum has tripled over the last several years, a reflection of reader passion and the instant gratification of e-mail.

Every letter was important, but my favorite came from the gentleman who added this P.S.: "Mr. Editor, yesterday I tossed my subscription renewal check at The Blade entrance in a driving rain. I trust it landed at least as close to your front door as your paper does to mine."

Sir, got your letter. Thanks for writing.

It was Bernie Judy who once told me that every newspaper editor has a book inside him "and that's where it should stay."

And so it shall. But like Bill Moyers, I hope I still have a lot more shores to stroll. This time there had better be sand between my toes.

Thomas Walton will retire June 30 as Editor and Vice President of The Blade.

First Published June 12, 2007, 9:08 a.m.