By JERRY KLEIN Journal Star Posted Jan 17, 2009 @ 06:03 PM

I arrived at the newspaper in 1953 as a greenhorn, with no journalistic experience or background. My studies were in music. I graduated with a bachelor of music degree (piano major) from Bradley in 1950 and did postgraduate work at the University of Illinois. Nothing about journalism there.

One evening, as chance would have it, I was drinking beer at Si Maroon’s Hitching Post and I joined Max Bosler, who at the time was managing editor of the Journal Star. I told him I was looking for a job and he suggested I see Gomer Bath, who was opinion page editor at the Star and writer of a daily column, “Straws in the Wind.”

Gomer asked about my background and suggested I go home and write some editorials and bring them to him the following Monday. I did and I was hired on the spot. No inkblot test, no background check, no personality profile. That was it. It was September 1953, and I wrote my first piece about the wasteful extravagance of some of the recipients of foreign aid.

For the next five years, I labored under the shadow of Gomer Bath. After his death I was, in effect, editorial page editor of the Star. Then came the Newspaper Guild strike in the winter of 1958, and after it was settled in the spring I was assigned to the copy desk, second shift. It was not an ideal situation, but I still had a job and a growing family.

When Evabeth Miller, the reigning critic at the Star, retired, I began to cover symphony concerts, and then plays and then movies and art shows and opera and ballet and chorale concerts. I did restaurant reviews and critiqued various programs at Bradley and Illinois Central College, Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan, Knox and Eureka colleges, to name a few. Publisher Henry Slane sent me to Europe with the Bradley Chorale in 1968, and in 1989 I joined the Peoria Symphony for its triumphal appearance at the Bodensee Festival in Friedrichshaffen.

And for most of this time I had been writing a column in the Sunday Journal Star - nature pieces, social criticisms, essays and the like. When I retired in 1992, this column continued, most recently on an every-other-week basis.

Back in the early days, the newsroom was like a setting from the movie “The Front Page.” Heavy Royal typewriters chattered like machine-gun fire in the Argonne. A pall of cigarette smoke hung overhead. Telephones jangled and there seemed to be endless shouting and rushing about. Considering all the mechanical business involved, my reviews invariably appeared in the following day’s paper. Now everything is electronic and the newsroom, with its little cubicles and the staring eyes of computer screens, resembles nothing so much as an insurance office.

I may feel like a dinosaur in this environment. But the words remain. Written words in particular can be indelible, invincible, irresistible. Like faith, they can move mountains.

I have moved no mountains - not even a small hill - with my millions of words on these pages. Still, I will miss sharing them with you readers. For these 55 years, I am grateful. Thank you.