A departure for today… instead of a poem, a reminiscence of our friend and former Sacramento Bee colleague Walt Wiley, who died July 13. Sending much love and gratitude to him and to his many loved ones, especially his devoted family.

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I cannot quite wrap my head around two facts: that next month it will be 20 years since Walt Wiley, one of the best journalists ever to pound a typewriter, retired after about 37 years as a reporter and columnist for The Sacramento Bee. And the fact that his old journalistic friends like me must now put a -30- around Walt’s name—the newspaper code for the end of a story.

Walt Wiley died in Sacramento at age 86 on July 13.

I am certainly not one of Walt’s oldest buddies or colleagues, though I met him when I worked at The Bee as a copy editor in the early 1980s. And I was not a regular at the too-early breakfast gatherings Walt and other former Bee folks (Steve Gibson as well as my partner Dick Schmidt, among others) convened in the last 15 years or so at the Tower Café and Café Bernardo—though I did make periodic appearances as a former “girl reporter” (my term that made them laugh; these thoughtful feminists would never have used such an chauvinistic phrase).

But I was a great admirer of Walt’s writing, especially in his Roads West days, when he’d travel through western states looking for unusual stories and even more unusual people to profile for The Bee. And in Walt’s last three years at The Bee, writing a weekly column that consisted of smallish “items,” I was delighted to be one of his sources when the well was running, if not dry, then low.

Walt compared his job to the Greek myth of the boulder-pushing fellow named Sisyphus, telling former Bee colleague Bob Walters that a columnist must start rolling the rock up the hill every Monday, only to find it at the bottom the next week.

I was teaching journalism and advising the student newspaper at Sacramento City College when Mr. Wiley (as I loved to call him) would ring me at my old-fashioned desk phone and say, “Haag? Wha’cha got goin’ on out there? I’m suckin’ wind here.”

This never failed to make me laugh, knowing that he needed another item or two for his column, as he checked in with sources all over town who might have just the right tidbit. I was delighted when I could offer him some campus-based ideas.

Naturally, I invited him to the college every semester to talk to my journalism students, who loved his Texas twang that Walt never quite lost, along with his great stories. In return, they’d share some of what they’d dug up on campus—and quite a number of those pieces became items in Walt’s column.

So it was, when Walt’s last column ran in the Bee on Sept. 1, 2005, I was surprised and touched to find my name in a who’s who list of local folks who had offered him potential items from time to time. I can’t recall a journalist printing the names of people who’d offered those precious snippets of information—some of which worked for his column, some of which didn’t—but there was Walt naming more than 20 of us.

I’d been a journalist at newspapers, an international wire service and a magazine, and I’d never thought to compile a list of sources, much less to thank them publicly. But that’s the kind of classy guy Walt Wiley was.

He was also a fine writer, as well as a careful reporter, though he pooh-poohed that. From a story he freelanced to The Bee eight years after Walt retired about spending a summer as a volunteer campground host at Lassen Volcanic National Park:

“…My last day on the job a German shepherd ventilated the back of my blue jeans (and the underlying flesh) just as I was preparing to head home.”

That’ll make you want to read on, right? (Also “ventilated” is a pretty nifty verb.) I also got to hear Walt read when, on many occasions, he trudged up the steps to an old midtown loft where I hold writing groups, and he sat in and wrote “for fun.” The quotes are his. Like many reporters of his era, Walt wrote for food, for a paycheck. He didn’t generally write “for fun.” But he did now and then because someone urged him to, knowing he had great stories he’d never had published.

I published a couple of them in a small chapbook I put together annually for the people who write with me. Walt didn’t think much of his pieces, though he got a kick out of being included with (and I think this surprised him) some excellent writers. It was certainly not his pinnacle as a writer, but it reminded him that he wasn’t done as a writer, that he still had words to put on pages.

I never stopped reminding him of that, no matter how much he “pshaw”d me. And that’s how I’ll remember Mr. Wiley—as a fine writer, as a careful, responsible reporter, as a gentle man of great character and humor. May his great voice (suckin’ wind or not) live on.