41 years is a long time... and not

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They say it's not good juju to talk about your competition, but I don't give two shakes about that.

I've sat side by side with a curly-haired, skinny guy named Chris Faulkner for the past six years. I worked with him in 1996 for about a year before I went on to a larger paper.

Chris announced this month that he would be retiring from the Daily Democrat after 41 years of doing a job that he didn't think existed. He knew newspapers existed, but a budding accountant didn't know you could get paid for writing about high school sports.

We won't go through all the dates, you can get that from the Daily Democrat.

This guy had illusions of working for a larger paper but instead chose staying in Fort Madison covering this small town's families for more than four decades.

My time working side-by-side with Chris has been a kaleidoscope of memories, a myriad of emotions. I've seen him happy, laughing, and patrolling the front line of the student sections at volleyball, basketball, and football games. Trying to raise the roof and firing off pix of kids in makeup, maybe catching a Will Larson dance.

One of my favorite stories to tell is from a soccer substate game last year. And Chris, you can smile at me about this. There was a shooting at Ivanhoe Park during the match. I heard the actual gun fire - this was no nail gun.

I meandered around and texted a few people to confirm what I thought I'd heard. As sirens started wailing, I found my way to Ivanhoe for some initial photos and then back to the soccer game. I could get the story after the game, and they weren't going to let me into that crime scene anyway.

With about three minutes left in the soccer game, I went up to Faulkner behind the south goal and said, "Well, this will be a busy night,"

"What do you mean?" he said.

"Didn't you hear the gun fire or the sirens? There was apparently a shooting in Ivanhoe Park. I left at halftime to get some pictures."

Faulkner, who really is a consummate news guy, proceeded to throw his game clipboard about 20 feet across the grass behind the goal and I thought he was getting ready throw his camera. I quickly advised against that move. We journalists will sacrifice our body before putting a $1,500 camera in harm's way, or anyone else's for the matter.

Steaming and feeling like he had failed his beat as the weekend slot editor, I told him he had time to catch it and I didn't have a whole lot of information anyway. I did....but I didn't say I did.

I remember sitting next to him on a wrestling mat in Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines when Harlan Steffensmeier was wrestling for the state title in 2018. We were watching Harlan getting ready on the mat just minutes before Fort Dodge's Cayd Lara made his way to the mat. Harlan was air drumming and bouncing around - something I'd never seen him do in three years of covering wrestling.

"Did you see that, Chris?"

"What?"

"He was air drumming. I've never seen him that relaxed before. He's gonna win this. Get ready."

We worked the rest of that story together getting with the state champion, Coach Ryan Smith, and family members to get our stories done.

There were numerous other sports events that we covered together. HTC state volleyball, FMHS football, basketball, et.al and then breaking news - fires, features, and the rest of Fort Madison's story.

It has always been my pleasure and a bit of comfort seeing Chris walk in. It's familiarity, and it's comfort. Seeing Chris walk into games made it a Bloodhound, Crusaders, or Hawks event. There will still be those games - there's too much tradition here. But it just won't be the same.

I would imagine Chris won't be able to go cold-turkey and will be sitting in the stands to enjoy stories unraveling that he no longer has to write about.

He was the envy of a lot of us who write and photograph at the same time. Very few can track the game, keep the stats, shoot the game, tweet, post to Facebook, and then go do the traditional stuff that gets made into plates and rolled off the presses.

I'll miss our conversations on ethics waiting on coaches to come out of locker rooms, or the gossip of the latest hedge fund buyout. He knew things I did not.

I rarely knew things he did.

We all have our skill sets in this looney journalism gig, and I never said it to him, but I learned some of the business from him. One thing he hones well is everything in this microcosm of news-gathering is interconnected. The things we write today will have a lasting impact on the families of generations to come. Chris got that... gets that.

I'll miss sitting next to you my friend, and doing everything we can to not shoot the same damn picture. The community will be one short now. But it's our pleasure to applaud your efforts to chronicle the lives of so many.

Chri-iis Faulk-ner... Clap... Clap... Clap-Clap-Clap.

Speaking of clapping, there wasn't a lot of that going on this weekend as I went to the Ozarks for 437,000 holes of golf. We went with some friends I met over the past year golfing on the weekends, and we were relegated to cart-path only golf due to the five inches of rain that dumped on the area. Those that come down here regularly to play are going..."Oooof" right now.

It was a long, chilly weekend. Yes, I was the only one in the group playing in shorts, but Larry Kelch, Gordy Fedler, Dan Fullenkamp, Steve Knight and about four others cheered me on in my shorts, then laughed as I tried unsuccessfully to not fall asleep in the leather recliner watching NCAA hoops. On the very last hole of the quasi-competitive weekend, Dan, who always seemed to find a way to work my Thursday 122 (talk about Oooof) into the conversation, told me my feet were lined up wrong. I hit the next ball 250 down the middle.

Dan likes to win... But that's Beside the Point.

Chuck Vandenberg is editor and co-owner of Pen City Current and can be reached at charles.v@pencitycurrent.com.

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