Kirby Neumann-Rea: Starting over on a new fork in the road of life
About the writer: Kirby Neumann-Rea of McMinnville, who turns 67 in June, keeps his fingers nimble at the keyboard, his mind nimble with books and his legs nimble on the basketball court, always with an eye out for quirk.
I came to the News-Register four years ago a novice, not knowing the people or the landscape, literally and figuratively.
Six weeks ago, I stepped aside as managing editor, with Editor Ossie Bladine taking on the role of directing reporters, guiding story production and overseeing our thrice-weekly deadlines. I’ve reached the point in life where I wish to let my days flow in a different pattern.
I have formally retired after a career that began as city hall and sports reporter for the Polk County Itemizer-Observer in Dallas, known locally as the I-O. I started on April 1, 1981, and finished on March 31, 2025, things having gone full circle.
That first day in 1981, I visited Grand Ronde to cover a quilt show. That stitches things together in two ways: 1) To this day, I have a fondness for quilt shows. 2) My last months working for the N-R, with which I proudly share the N-R monogram, I was able to make a return trip to Grand Ronde.
I always felt like a novice. I cannot believe that 44 years have gone by since I began working full time in journalism.
Of course, as most of you know, I will continue for a time to write for the paper. In the meantime, I thank readers for enduring this reminiscence.
On that fateful first day at work in 1981, I also went on assignment with Editor Tom Shapley to get pictures of a new thing: helicopter logging. In our rush, Tom drove us pell-mell up a logging road in his VW bus, at one point telling me to reach into the back seat and grab his camera bag.
Lesson One: Keep the camera bag on the floor of the front seat!
My career has mostly played out at once-, twice- or thrice-weekly papers, though I did spend eight years as a reporter at the Peninsula Daily News, on the Washington coast at Port Townsend.
I’ve been enjoying something in recent weeks I had not experienced in nearly 30 years — reading the local newspaper without already knowing what was in it!
This gets to the question I have asked myself: What did it feel like to be a reporter and editor all these years?
There certainly was a sense of public trust, of serving the community. The obverse of that was a sense of continually feeling exposed. As such, the need to Get It Right was not only a matter of professional responsibility, but also of personal survival.
Those of us in the newspaper business are virtually unique in one respect: When we err, we state it openly and permanently. What is wrong in print gets acknowledged in print.
Restaurants don’t share bad reviews on their menus. Attorneys don’t frame copies of legal defeats in their waiting rooms. No one says “we goofed” like a newspaper.
Mentors, and I had many, stressed the absolute importance of impartiality and accuracy.
However, I was lucky, from the age 14, to learn from people who also conveyed the human side of the profession. Journalists who feel emotion and passion are more likely to convey such sensibilities when found in the people and topics they write about.
I started as a paperboy more than 50 years ago, for the old East Side Journal in Kirkland, Washington. My first writing experiences were as an eighth-grade stringer for the Sammamish Valley News, in Redmond, Washington, then as a journalist for the paper at South Albany High in Oregon.
My top journalism experiences have to include meeting my wife, Lorre, while on the job. She was serving as municipal court clerk and I as the new editor of the Molalla Pioneer, just starting out there in 1985 — on April 1, naturally — and making the rounds at city hall.
Perhaps the most satisfying hour I ever spent on assignment came in 2004 when I interviewed presidential candidate John Kerry on a Hood River beach.
With a crowd of 200 thronging around him, I initially despaired of getting a decent photo, let alone quotes or other material for a story. Then I realized the throng was moving up the beach toward me, so just stood where I was and let it flow around me.
If there were any Secret Service agents on hand, I took no note. Eventually, Kerry came to be standing just a few feet in front of me.
Lesson Two: Solutions sometimes come right to you.
I tore my coat on a fence while fleeing a bull, was twice bitten by dogs, and once rescued a guy from the Molalla River while covering a raft race.
In 1995, I found myself in an unusual raft race, floating on an inner tube through the sluices of the Port Townsend sewage treatment plant the day before it went on line. Headline: “Daft raft race in PT.”
Big projects for which I am profoundly proud include the annual four-part “Panorama” sections we did in Hood River and the extended coverage we provided of the catastrophic Eagle Creek Fire in 2017.
I stole an idea — an accepted practice in journalism, albeit a theft from myself in this case — in proposing the 2024 News-Register series “24 Hours.” I was able to apply my appreciation for this place in our 24 Hours series, and remain proud of the ways our staff embraced this year-long reporting experience.
I attended college here, Lorre has family here and we were married in Mac in 1987. So McMinnville remains home in retirement and likely will remain so.
Over the years, I would go on to cover everything from double homicides to T-ball, author a series on alcoholism, and produce stories on transportation funding, industrial fires, mill shutdowns, and city council recalls. I also wrote features, plenty of them, on everyone from artists to foreign visitors and sailors to priests.
Folk and blues singer Maria Muldaur, whose career took off with “Midnight at the Oasis” in 1973, nearly hung up on me for inferring her to be a one-hit wonder. But I survived to conduct person-on-the-street interviews every week for eight years, and made lifelong friends among subjects and co-workers.
As to mentors, the first and foremost was Jan “JKB” Bateman, my journalism advisor at South Albany High. She taught us to think like professionals and exposed us to professionals who underscored that point. I learned more from her in three years on Sentry staff than I did from any other one person.
I won some awards. More importantly, I made people think, laugh and get mad in appropriate ways. I comforted the afflicted and afflicted the comfortable, at least once in a while.
While I believe I generally functioned like a professional, oh, there were some times.
For me, relying on memory had a way of leading to mishaps: facts gotten wrong, the wrong word in a quote, a “late” reference to someone very much alive, last-minute changes that marred a reporter’s near-perfect story, too much detail or critical information omitted, or an article inadvertently omitted.
The errors were usually serious and regrettable, but not always. They could be humorous, like the headline that read “tresses fall” when it should have read “trusses.”
Looking back on that day in April 1981, heading up that logging road in Tom Shapley’s VW bus, I had a sense of heading into the unknown. I didn’t have a clue that day about the amazing things that were in store for me.
That air of mystery stuck with me. I never lost the sense of being a beginner, a rookie, a cub reporter.
And that is how it is again right now. In the best possible way, I am a novice at this new stage of my life.
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