I WISH THIS CURSE on you. I wish that someday you'll have a boss you love so much that 36 years after you met him and 18 years after you called him boss, which you never did because everyone called him Gene, I wish you the joy of seeing your Gene after all those years. This is my Gene. Everyone calls him the frog because, well, look at him. I'm the toothy one.

I love this picture from last night. I handed Dale Mezzacapa my camera and asked her to get a pal shot of me and Gene. And don't we look great. Hey, hey. If we appear to be preternaturally younger than our ages it's because, yes.

Amazing Gene. How sweet the sound. I won't say he saved a wretch like me but he made me a believer. And this was back in the day when believing in something mattered in journalsim. It was a great time to be a newspaper man and woman. The values of everything were challenged daily, in the paper and in the newsroom.

This was in 1972 when Gene Roberts replaced John McMullen as executive editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, where I had been hired the month before. Roberts replacing McMullen was like John XXIII succeeding Pius XII. The windows of the Vatican were open and the dust was swirling, even sort of darting side to side, kind of zigging and, you know, oozing. Gene Roberts communicated like a Buddah . Not only did we get it, we couldn't even explain it to each other without quoting him . I have never heard anyone explain the philosophy of journalsim that we all embraced without a little red book quote from Chairman Gene.

"News doesn't always break," Gene said. "Sometimes it oozes." Kind of like the Iraq war. I can't imagine how differently a Gene Roberts Inquirer would be covering the war. We'll never know. But unlike most editors today, Gene Roberts had actually covered the long stupid war the United States was involved with at the time. Gene rode in helicopters in Vietnam covering the war for the New York Times. Four years later he was the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Nice.

I apologize to readers who have no idea what the heck I'm talking about but are oddly facisnated to have read this far. I'm coming back from a Philadelphia Inquirer Reunion at Mermaid Lake in Whitpain Township Montgomery County for those of us who worked for Gene Roberts at the Inquirer during his golden era, 1972-1990. Everybody showed up. There were three, maybe four hundred people. All the usual supects and a surprisng number of just regular folks who were proud to have been part of something as important and cool as the Inky back in the day.

And it was our day. And we were all there. And it was great.