Hail and farewell
The year 2000 has arrived and so I have decided to fold up The Fringe and bid you all a fond farewell.
The editors of The Western Producer have been most tolerant of my random vaporings but the time has come to leave the stage to the highly competent present generation.
This column started as “The Other Column” Feb. 2, 1978, when Bob Phillips was the editor and still writing a column.
It became “The Fringe” Aug. 23, 1984, after Bob had ceased to columnize and there wasn’t any other column for it to be the other column to.
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Since 1978 there have been almost exactly 1100 columns published on subjects ranging all the way from this to that and even a few beyond that.
The reasons it became The Fringe had to do with location (the fringe of the page) and the content (on the edge of matters of consequence and sometimes from the lunatic fringe.)
I have appreciated the responses from readers, both the favorable and the furious.
Any disturbance caused was purely intentional.
When it came time to name a new editor of The Producer, back in 1986 the powers-that-were wondered about the sense of choosing a fellow whose only public image was a weird little column. This was when Bob Phillips asked me to sign the editorials I was also writing and so the way was cleared for me to become editor in spite of the unseemly prattle of The Fringe.
There are no serious health problems but the years are passing and rather than reaching a point where I embarrass the kindly editors and myself, I bid readers adieu.
It’s been a wonderful perch from which to do my cock-a-doodle dooing.
