Bob Serra, the long time editor of the Siuslaw News, is moving on to a new venture. His loss will actually affect several newspapers including the South Lincoln County News in Waldport where I work; he was executive editor. The common thread….
Bob Serra
He also worked at those papers in a variety of capacities; reporter, editor, organizer, and mentor to many writers!
His replacement at Siuslaw News, Theresa Baer, has a strong background of over 20 years in the publishing business and will certainly do an outstanding job!
I know both of them from working with them on articles, assignments and other projects, and we all are writers. It’s a fraternity of sorts, newspaper work requires a certain temperament and we all seem to have shared that. We all came from different parts of the country, had different schooling and work experience, yet given deadline days we all felt the same crush of trying to get “it” in on time!
I’m sure everyone who has ever worked in the newspaper business could share many stories with you about the time they had to change the story at the last minute, bump an article for late breaking news, panicking when the photo part of the article wasn’t matching up with the text correctly and the list goes on!
Some stories are very scary some funny like the time I was running late with computer glitches slowing me down and Mr. Serra asked where my column was and when I told him he asked “are you sure the dog didn’t eat it?”
Now our team has changed with different players in different positions but ironically Bob, Theresa and I will always be linked by one common thread. Rock and roll music!
Early on in our working relationships we discovered that we’d all shared great memories of the classic days of 60’s and 70’s rock shows! Through articles and conversations it was discovered that we had all seen the same bands as they blazed trails across America. Different places for each of us, but the same bands! In fact Bob and I saw the same show featuring Jimi Hendrix and The Soft Machine, an English progressive rock/jazz band, on an early tour.
Bob saw the show in Denver right after I had seen it in Sacramento. Theresa and I actually attended concerts by the same bands at the same venues in Southern California. In a world of deadlines and lots of applications of “Murphy’s Law” it was nice to be able to get off the beaten track once and awhile talk about music and share our individual stories that went with the shows.
Now with the changing of the guard that won’t be as easy to do, but we all have the knowledge that no matter where we are, or what we were doing, it would only take a couple of minutes to bring our collective rock and roll memories right back into the conversation.
To reach Rick email: yarick@pioneer.net