I have only had to do two job interviews in my lifetime.

Well, that statement is not entirely accurate.I mean that I have only had to be the job seeking interviewee twice. I have been other job seekers’ interviewer when I was hiring someone so many times I would never be able to count them all.

The two times I was the job seeker the interview was, well, let’s just say they were both a long way from normal.

One was a bit over 15 years ago, here in Blue Earth, when I interviewed for this job as the managing editor of the Faribault County Register. The two people in the room, besides me, were Lori Nauman, the publisher/general manager of the Register, and Bruce Fenske, the regional publisher of Ogden Newspapers in Minnesota, and the publisher at the New Ulm Journal.

I had never met Lori before, but Bruce and I had known each other for many years. He and I spent most of the interview time chatting about newspapers, the Minnesota Newspaper Association, people we knew in the business, in New Ulm, and well, you get the idea. Yes, there were some perfunctory questions about the editor’s position, but well, most of it was about other things, including current sports, people and events.

My other job interview happened many years earlier, in 1971, when I interviewed for a newspaper internship job at the Lake Region Life in Waterville. I was interviewed by the owner/publisher of the newspaper at the time, Allan Wilcox.

That time I was a young, fairly nervous, college student, but the interview went much the same way. Allan and I chatted about newspapers, sports, and life in general.

After a while I asked him if we were going to start the actual interview soon and he said something like, “No need. You’re hired. Can you start tomorrow?”

Allan had me write stories and editorials, sell ads, take photos, lay out the pages and even drive the completed pages to be printed in Waseca – and haul all the completed papers back to Waterville. Heck, I even stuffed the inserts inside the papers and hauled them all to the post office to be mailed. I look back and realize that Allan had found some cheap labor.

But, I was immediately hooked on small town newspapers.

A year and a half later, Allan and I, and two others, bought a newspaper together in North Dakota and my wife Pam and I ran it. After a few years I became a partner with Allan at the newspaper in Waterville, and then in eight or nine other newspapers located in several states.

It was with Allan on a business trip south to Texas that we stopped in Blue Earth at the newspaper office here (when it was in the Blue Earth Graphics building) and I met the publisher, Bob Tuff. I am pretty sure that was my only time in downtown Blue Earth before the now infamous job interview in 2007. And, I can’t for the life of me recall why Allan wanted to stop at Blue Earth’s Post Ambassador.

Allan and his wife, MaryAnn, eventually moved to Texas. And we stopped buying newspapers together and I went off on my own. And then Allan had a really bad stroke around the time he was 60, and I was 40.

I mention all of this because Allan Wilcox recently passed away in Texas. I had not seen him in a long time. The stroke had left him in tough shape, but he lived a long time with it.

He was the person who got me into this crazy business of small-town newspapers. He was my mentor, my boss, my partner and my friend. He taught me an awful lot, not just about newspapers, but about philosophies of life.

He was one of the most interesting and smartest persons I have ever known.

One example is that he stayed in his home office/den one time for days back when computers were brand new. He taught himself how they worked and how to do computer program coding.

He created a program for doing all the work in tracking, creating labels and billing newspaper subscriptions – a program we used at our newspapers for many years.

Allan had a way of looking at life in interesting ways no one else did. He somehow knew a whole lot about just about everything. The stroke sadly took most of that away, however.

In typical Allan fashion, there will be no funeral, memorial service or any other gathering.

But, never the less, I have been remembering him and all the many “interesting” adventures in newspapering we once had.

It was quite a ride.