[huck von finn]

He is. I know him from my St Louie newspapering days, though he works for what was my competition. But he's sharp, agressive and is, or was, in my opinion, one of the good guys.

So you worked for the Globe back when St. Louis was still a two-newspaper town? Interesting! (The Weatherbird used to creep me out in the sixties when I was a kid. Do you remember that?)

I have no knowledge of Harris, but it seems as if he is doing a brave and magnanimous job in this situation.

St. Louis used to take journalism very seriously.

[meenie]

I think one improvement would be to let the Iraqis pick up the trash and paint the schools. I know of no country that has learned to respect the US military because they are such good garbage men.

[bitt]

Just dashed off an e-mail to this Ron Harris and asked him to keep up the coverage and tell our military that we are no longer unaware of what they are going through.

Here's the journalists's e-mail address - I bet he could convey our interests and prrayers to those soldiers and marines...

rharris@post-dispatch.com

[archy]

So you worked for the Globe back when St. Louis was still a two-newspaper town? Interesting! (The Weatherbird used to creep me out in the sixties when I was a kid. Do you remember that?)

Nope, though St Louie was a short-lived two-rag town in the early 1990s for almost a year, with the advent and sundown of the short-lived St Louis Sun, for which I was a downstate Illinois stringer.

I have no knowledge of Harris, but it seems as if he is doing a brave and magnanimous job in this situation.

He has the advantage of having been there during the initial move into Baghdad, so will at least be taken more seriously by those Marines than a fresh-faced rookie with more preconceived notions than experience. And really old hands from the Desert Shield/Storm/Sabre days of 1991 have it even easier, especially if they have a little language facility.

St. Louis used to take journalism very seriously.

They still have the St Louis Journalism Review, I believe, and the state's university prides itself on a prestigious journalism department. And Joe Pulitzer's name is forever linked with St Louis, though the first newspaper he owned and operated was inIndiana...and I worked for that one for some four years, though long after he'd left for the greener pastures of St Louis. After all, the Griesedieck brothers had begun their Budweser brewing operations around that time too, and it was an important transportation hub for both railroad and river traffic.