December 19, 2007
 

Oh No!
What If I Have To Do This Alone?

Oh sure, it’s wonderful for family Orbanek.  But what about me?  While the Sentinel’s editor and publisher of the past few decades is eagerly anticipating retirement’s myriad joys, I’m faced with adjusting to a new editor.  And whoever draws the short straw in the Sentinel newsroom, will the unlucky devil be up to the challenge? 

Non-writers can’t comprehend the joy or sadness an editor brings to an author’s emotional makeup.  But for this scribe, Herr Orbanek, has worked copy magic on the weekly Milieu.  George had some real train wrecks sent his direction but with a word change here and a paragraph elimination there, voila!  Come Wednesday morning the front of the local section brings a surprised smile as I read the improvements on what was e-mailed to the paper on Monday. 

Mr. Orbanek, his very successful Sentinel career comes to a conclusion next week, has been editing the Milieu since the early eighties.  Between the literary efforts of way back when and those after the turn of the century, there was a twenty-five year hiatus.  Long ago, when I wore a younger man’s clothes, many an early morning was spent jogging valley roads with Jim Kennedy, then the Sentinel’s imperial potentate.  With my inability to remain silent, Kennedy interrupted one just after dawn monologue by remarking, “Maynard, anyone that full of BS should write a column.” And that’s how George, at the time the Sentinel editorial page ramrod, was given the responsibility of making sense of weekly offerings from an untrained author continually guilty of run-on, one sentence paragraphs and whose idea of proper grammatical structure involved reading words aloud and putting in a comma whenever forced to take a breath. 

Around 1984 the Milieu went on sabbatical.  We Maynard’s opened a country radio station and were trolling for advertising dollars in the same pond fished by the Sentinel sales department, and you know how sales types love promoting a competitor.  

Around the same time, Mr. Kennedy headed south to lead the Cox empire and George moved into the editor/publisher chair. My own involvement with small city media, albeit electronic, gave me an appreciation for George’s style. True I competed for the same advertising dollar but was still a Sentinel fan.  And that’s not the faint praise of “oh, it’s a pretty good paper for a town this size” but an admiration for the way the Sentinel folks covered Grand Junction and Western Colorado.  

Once removed from the radio business, the Milieu resumed in ‘03.  And while George had more than enough to do keeping a couple hundred Grand Junction Sentinel employees reasonably content while simultaneously trying to maintain a smile on the faces of the Atlanta suits, he agreed to again edit the column. 

Readers comment, “They edit your column?”  Of course.  It’s their newspaper.  But, except for language occasionally determined to fall below the standards of a family newspaper and grammatical faux pas, no Milieu has ever been rejected.  

Now the Sentinel’s Orbanek era is ending as George heads out door to do whatever we retiree’s do, meaning he leaves behind 8 to 5 for a life devoted to the fun stuff.  And indeed, except for emptying the dishwasher and taking down the Christmas lights, it’s pretty much all fun stuff. 

To save George the embarrassment of editing a piece where he’s the subject, today’s effort was sent Denny Herzog’s direction.  But, I did want to offer the pride of Cathedral Prep in Erie and Penn State a very public “Thank you.”