Nineteen years ago during my previous career in journalism, an applicant for a reporter’s job at the Watertown Daily Times was in my office, outlining his background.

    He was the son of a former U.S. diplomat. He grew up in Japan and once wrote – in Japanese – a magazine article on Japanese architecture.  Over the previous year he kayaked from the St. Lawrence River through the Great Lakes, down the Illinois & Michigan Canal and Mississippi River to New Orleans because, well, he lived in Vermont at the time and it was something he thought would be interesting.

    He had been a reporter at other newspapers. So I had to ask: Of all the gin joints and newspapers in the world, why Watertown?

     “Because my dad worked here as a reporter for a short time after he got out of college,” he explained. “He once told me about this story he did that caused a lot of commotion. He was on a train from Albany to Watertown and there was a huge delay because of a snow storm. And the mayor of Watertown was on the train as well and started berating the crew because he had to get back to something important in Watertown. He didn’t know my dad was there and so the next day there was a story in the paper about the mayor yelling at everyone on the train.”

    When my interview was over, I took the applicant into the office of the late and great John Johnson, who had been the editor and publisher of the newspaper since 1949. I wanted to see if he would remember the applicant’s father, even though he had only briefly worked at the Watertown Daily Times more than 40 years earlier.

    Johnson eyed the applicant for a few moments and said, “You look like your father.”

    He then started to chuckle and added, “I remember this story he wrote about being on a train in a snowstorm with the mayor of Watertown…”

    Old journalists are like that. They remember the good stories, even the ones they didn’t write.

    For instance:

    In 2007 Alec Johnson was a college-aged intern at the Watertown Daily Times assigned to writing feature stories.  One afternoon I heard a call over the police scanner about a man and his dog missing in Lake Ontario at Wehle State Park. We were short-staffed in the newsroom that day so I sent Alec.

    What would he end up writing about? Who knows? All I ever told reporters was “If you don’t go you won’t know.”

    Johnson arrived on the scene soon after to find a lot of confusion. The woman who called for help was on a cliff looking down, but could not see any evidence of her boyfriend and his dog. The waters were becoming increasingly choppy. Had the man and his dog been crushed on the rocks, pulled under or dragged by the current to another place on shore? Law officers couldn’t tell either.

    An hour later, Johnson called me and said there no evidence of a body. Since it looked like a shear wall of rock down to the water, searchers along the cliff were about to leave the area to go see if the body was someplace else along the shore.

    I told Alec he could head home. He had already worked a full day as a features intern. Since I had a night reporter coming in soon, I told Alec I would have that person follow up with police as the evening wore on.

    “I think I’ll hang out here a little longer,” replied Alec.  “Something might happen.”

    Good call. Within the next hour a rescue boat saw the man and his dog in an indentation in the wall of rock, directly below where his girlfriend was looking. And Alec was there to watch the rescue unfold. The newspaper the next day printed Alec’s pictures of the man and his dog pulled to safety and our story included Alec’s on-the-scene quotes from the very lucky survivor and those who rescued him.

    After completing his undergraduate degree at Dickinson College and then getting a master’s degree at Columbia University, Alec spent eight years as a reporter and editor at the Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American. Now, he has returned to the Watertown Daily Times as managing editor.

    (The Johnson family avoids hiring its own blood right out of college. They prefer the pups make their early career mistakes on someone else’s dime.)

    While the Johnsons made no hiring exception for Alec when he finished college, maybe they should have as he quickly became an award-winning journalist in Connecticut. He once tracked the police records of a drunk driver who had killed another driver. It was the reprobate’s seventh DWI but because his previous crimes occurred just across the borders of New York and Massachusetts – and nobody was sharing police records — he was still driving and killing another driver instead of being in jail.

    For those of us dependent on a free press to tell us about our local businesses, hospitals, schools, nonprofits, etc., we must be willing to acknowledge some cold truths. Johnson works in a world where our President refers to journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a term preferred by totalitarians who are about to round up the opposition for execution. Combine that with a growing population that thinks their Facebook “news feed” is actual journalism and you end up with the sorry mess of news coverage we find ourselves in today.

    Similar to the view he had on the cliff at Wehle State Park many years ago, Alec Johnson now navigates these choppy waters of news gathering. Fortunately, the new managing editor – who now stands on the bridge were his family has stood for more than 100 years — has the patience, fortitude and competence to guide the Times’ newsroom in service to our community.