You'll forgive me, I hope, if I indulge myself this morning and say one final good-bye to the good people at Cox Newspapers, which officially doesn't exist anymore. Cox has combined its few remaining newspapers with its television and radio stations to become Cox Media Group.

I hardly know anyone there anymore, but through the years I have met many first-class journalists and learned from each of them. It has always been funny to me how people categorize journalists, or that horrible "mainstream media" as one big group, all thinking and acting in the same way.

The people I knew were individuals, most of them much more intelligent and talented than I will ever be. I've always felt like a shrub in a forest of Sequoias.

I suspect I always will.

I worked for that company 30 years. Came as a reporter and was a publisher when Cox sold, so I guess you could say it was a good run.

About the only person who was working for Cox in those days and is still a practicing journalist is Andrew Alexander, who is now the ombudsman for the Washington Post.

Alexander is a both a great journalist and a good friend.

We worked together closely \— he in Washington, me in Lufkin \— on a story that helped prevent a local young man from getting unfairly kicked out of the Air Force Academy.

That young man went on to serve his country with distinction in the Pentagon.

Arnold Rosenfeld, who died some years back was a mentor of a special kind. An extremely soft-spoken individual who was tough as he could be inside.

I've never quite met another man like him.

He had a personal library of several thousand books in his Atlanta home and he told me one day his brother-in-law, who had never before seemed interested in reading, took a particular interest in his books.

It was enough to get Arnold excited that maybe the brother-in-law had turned a corner.

Before the day was over the brother-in-law asked if he could borrow some of Arnold's books.

"Sure," he replied excitedly. "Which ones?"

"The blue ones," the brother-in-law said. "We're doing some redecorating."

There was Caroline John, vice president of the company, who cared deeply for her employees. She never failed to ask about my family and try to help me, especially in my role as a young parent.

Her own children are something special, too. Her daughter first taught for years in inner-city Washington, D.C., then started her own school to help the same kind of young kids. Her son, at last report, was president of the Humane Society in, I believe, Nashville.

Jay Smith, the president of Cox Newspapers, was the consummate journalist. Nobody who knew Jay ever tried to slip one by on him. He could get to the heart of the matter more quickly than anyone I have ever known. A genuinely good guy who has taken a well-deserved retirement along with Ms. John.

Glenn McCutchen came from Atlanta to East Texas close to 20 years ago now. He was first my boss at the Lufkin Daily News, then when he became publisher of the Longview News-Journal.

Glenn and I would often disagree, which I always dreaded, because he was almost always right in such cases. Glenn was one of the most courageous journalists I have ever known.

Shortly after he got his job at the Atlanta newspaper, the Ku Klux Klan \— back in the 1960s when it was a big, powerful organization \— picketed the Atlanta Journal-Constitution building. Glenn had to go to work and walk through the picket line.

He might have thought himself just an anonymous employee of the newspaper \— at least until he heard someone say, "Hey, Glenn" from the robed crowd.

I'm absolutely sure that did not slow him down at all in reporting the truth.

But some of the Cox alumni come with us in this change, including Gary Borders, who is publisher of the Longview News-Journal.

I'm told you should always strive to hire the person who can replace you. I went one better, I hired the person who would later become my boss.

I recognized that possibility at the moment I did it, though. Gary's personal circumstances led him to come back to "pine curtain" \— I believe he coined that phrase \— from West Texas.

I had the chance to hire him and I did so in an instant.

Gary's written two books and I believe he is working on a third. He is tireless and he always wants to do what is right for the community, no matter how much heat he might receive.

Recently I read a blog in which someone called him "a Texas journalism legend."

Works for me.

When I first came to work for Cox at the Lufkin Daily News my boss was Joe Murray, who would later become my mentor and teach me most of what I know about journalism.

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Meritorious Service, Joe was part of a team (the reporter was Ken Herman, who still works for the Austin American-Statesman) that uncovered shoddy recruiting practices by the Marines that led to the death of a mentally challenged man in pugil stick exercises.

Good people, one and all, but we are moving to a company of good people, too. I'm looking forward to the adventure.