I punched in the number of my Texas publisher/friend and started talking before he could reply to my ring. He interrupted my jabbering with words I have never heard before.
“John, I’m at the slaughterhouse and having trouble getting this buffalo inside. It’s not going well. Got to call you back.”
Was Dan speaking in code? Was it a metaphor for the newspaper industry, which over the last few years has spilled lots of blood, and many more tears, yet the old buffalo still refuses to go quietly into that dark night, aka “slaughterhouse.”
Nah, it’s Dan and he’s not a code-talker. He’s direct. He WAS actually at the slaughterhouse, and he WAS struggling with a buffalo.
“They hear the noises, they smell the blood and they just don’t want to go inside,” he said the next day. Well, I would guess not.
I’ve stayed at Dan and Susan’s ranch many times, having the honor of occupying The Man House, his guest house that sits hard up against the fence-line, with Longhorns to this side, horses and donkeys the other direction. We’ve drained a bottle of whiskey or two, talking about the industry on more than one quiet ranch evening, seen lots of things, talked about even more.
But I’d never seen a buffalo there.
“Well, it was my buddy’s buffalo,” he told me the next day. “Now that I’m a retired publisher once again, I can just get up and go and do stuff like this again.”
And that’s the whole point of this column.
Dan Savage, interim publisher of the Waco Tribune-Herald for the last eight months, is interim publisher no more. Call him “former.” For the second time.
Dan retired in 2005 as publisher of The Trib, but came back last summer when new local owners Clifton and Gordon Robinson bought the paper from Cox Enterprises. Dan’s last column explains it all. How he and the Robinsons formed a tight friendship. How the paper prospered while others floundered.
An editorial the same day as his last column thanked Dan for all he has done for the community and the paper, during his two terms of duty.
And I thank him, too. He brought me on board to help build a new Web site and transition off the old Cox infrastructure. It was a pleasure and honor to work with Dan and his management team, to get to know the Robinsons and to be there as a paper bucked all the trends in today’s industry – making money, hiring reporters, growing circulation.
The Trib remains a closely held story. They don’t write press releases about how great they are. They just get it done.
There’s a phrase in Texas about braggarts and politicians who talk and don’t produce: “all hat and no cattle.”
Dan’s got the hat and the cattle. And the boots, too.
What does he do now? “Do what I do best,” he says. “Be a rancher and fix motorcycles.”