Attic Salt for Nov. 16, 2008

• By ED CULLEN
• Advocate staff writer
• Published: Nov 16, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:00 a.m.

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There have been days. Heck, there have been years that I regretted not moving on.

In the newspaper business I grew up in, people who didn’t change jobs every 18 months were freaks.

There was never a place that seemed THAT much better to me. I stayed in Baton Rouge because I liked the neighborhood where we bought our house, the only house we’ve ever owned.

For years, my drive to work was 12 minutes. If I caught red lights on Nicholson Drive, 15 minutes.

I was close enough to work  — and the route relatively safe — to ride my bicycle to the newspaper on pretty days when the paper was downtown.

A few times, I went to assignments on my bicycle and, then, rode home in late afternoon traffic. I got home in about the same time it would have taken by car.

I’d hear from friends at the “name” newspapers in the business. Their jobs sounded a lot like mine, the same pluses and minuses.
The difference was that my friends spent hours in traffic commuting to work and assignments.

Our children went to public schools at a time when it wasn’t that hard to support public education. For many parents, that’s changed though there are still some good public schools in Baton Rouge.

All this was going through my mind the other night at a dinner speech I was covering. I’d already interviewed the speaker so my mind was free to wander, something my mind likes to do.

I started by counting the people I knew. They were busy wielding cutlery and didn’t notice. Then, I counted people I’d known at least 10 years. Then, 20. Then, people I’d met within the first five years of my moving to Baton Rouge.

By the time we’d started  dessert and the speaker was building to an exuberant conclusion he’d reached over  other dinners in other cities, I felt at home.

Walking to my car in the parking lot after the talk, I idly wondered how many talks I’d covered, talks that bored me to the point of fidgeting and talks that had lifted me out of the day’s routine.

Some of my friends at the big papers have taken buyouts or been laid off (never to be hired again). That’s not to say this newspaper is immune to the decline in readership.