Phill Casaus: The memories made it fun

Aug. 10—In The New Mexican's small conference room, there's a big, black-and-white photo of people who worked here once upon a time. From the details in the background, maybe it was the 1950s. Rotary-dial telephones. Wire-rimmed eyeglasses. Typewriters. Glaciers of strewn paper. Wooden desks. Dour expressions.

Scenes from a newspaper.

Just images in a frame — here once, now gone.

I joined that ghostly line Friday, my last day as editor here. So in a lot of ways, I suppose this is goodbye. To you, and to a big chunk of my life.

I'll try not to be maudlin about it. Maybe I just felt as if there were one final set of words I needed to write. It's what I do, or at least, what I did.

I can't tell you I haven't thought twice about the decision to step down; I've thought 200 times about it. Two thousand. But it's time, and I hope the next person is far better and brighter. Our readers and my colleagues deserve that.

Tomorrow, I begin thinking about a new job and a new life. But today, I want to remember, if only because it's memories, far more than DNA, that make us.

I want to remember writing my first stories on a huge, green manual typewriter my mother got from her office's scrap heap so she could indulge a seventh grader's passion for sports and telling stories. Once the awful hunting and pecking was complete, she'd drive me in her '76 Oldsmobile Cutlass station wagon to deliver the pages, unsolicited at first, into the mail slot at the front door of my small town's newspaper. Magically, the words appeared in print. I was hooked.

I want to remember the endless nights in locker rooms and press boxes as a young sports writer — Toby Roybal Gymnasium in Santa Fe; Hobbs' Tasker Arena; Artesia's fabled Bulldog Bowl; Leon Williams Stadium in Clovis (the team moms make a mean ham-and-mayo sandwich for visitors); Wilson Stadium in Albuquerque; Billy Henson Field in lonely, far-off Animas.

If I can say I really ever learned the craft, it was in those kinds of places: defining a work ethic; refining an interviewing style; learning from many mistakes that appeared in print; understanding (the hard way) a writer's ego sometimes had to take a back seat to simply delivering information — on point, on deadline.

I want to remember the days of covering hard news, or helping others do so: the Oklahoma City bombing; the frantic morning and night of 9/11; even the crazy October afternoon when a young reporter called me to utter words to this effect: "That shooting on the movie set? They think it's Alec Baldwin!"

I want to remember the friends I've made in newsrooms along the way — tender hearts and knuckleheads; truth-tellers and poets; beer drinkers and badasses; people who'd spit in your eye but give you the shirt off their backs, maybe on the same day. They have names like Maestas and Latta; Johnson and Wright; Kutz and Holm; Maese and Limón; Archuleta and Brewer; Temple and Brown; Barker and Miller.

If there is heartbreak, it's about saying farewell to them.

There were hellos, too, many worth a story or two at the bar. I once met Jennifer Lopez as she filmed a movie in my office, flanked by the two largest humans I have ever witnessed (and I've covered the NFL). J. Lo did not impress — but then, neither did I.

I've seen the pages of my reporter's notebook warped by my own tears as I covered the funerals of children; I've felt my Adam's apple tighten as a man who fought along the volcanic ridges of Iwo Jima quietly described a Japanese bullet snapping his forearm in two. This is so random, but laugh as I think about then-Gov. Gary Johnson, alone at his new desk, plowing into a Schlotzsky's sandwich as big as a spare tire. The man ran marathons; turkey on wheat was an hors d'oeuvre on a toothpick.

Along this journey, the best friend I've ever had has somehow stayed with me, almost certainly to her own detriment. She's the one who planned and executed the kids' birthday parties as I flew home from covering an NCAA Tournament game or tried for hours to rehabilitate a hopeless lead paragraph. She ate thousands of meals without me because I was still at the office, no doubt devising a Pulitzer winner about a three-car pileup on I-25. She endured the mood swings and frustrations and moves and terror that come with managing a modern newspaper. She never complained. Not once.

What I ever offered the beautiful Kathy Casaus in return is a bright mystery, but I do know this: There are simply no words to convey how grateful I am for her love.

I think I just heard the warning alert for maudlin. So I'll stop here, at 24.4 inches, and 39 years of newspapering. I walk out the door and into that black-and-white photo buoyed by where I've been, the people I've met, the craft I've tried to hone. No matter where I go from here, in my mind, I'll always be sitting in front of that green manual typewriter.

I have you to thank for that. And I won't forget.