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Several days ago, a story ran in the Norfolk newspaper, The Virginian-Pilot,  about the retirement of Dennis Hartig, the paper's editorial page editor. I might not be in journalism if not for Dennis. And I wouldn't have met my wife, who was teaching school in the town where I first went to work for Dennis. Dennis eventually stood beside me as the best man at my wedding nearly 30 years ago.

He hired me in 1975 to work for a small daily paper in Southwest Virginia, the Martinsville Bulletin. I was 21. He was 26, maybe 27. The paper was small, less than 20,000 in circulation, but it had a reputation for being very aggressive, and that was largely due to Dennis, a Norfolk native. He was the editor, but he was not a sit-behind-the-desk kind of guy. He led most of our investigative stories, and I teamed up with him on several during my five years in Martinsville. 

With Dennis, we found that the sheriff's department, the community college president, and other local officials were engaged in all manner of financially questionable dealings.  The sheriff was indicted, the community college president and the county administrator resigned.  It wasn't that we were brilliant journalists; we just questioned things that hadn't been questioned before. Sometimes that's all it takes.

Dennis' main accomplishment with me was taking a kid and teaching him how to be a reporter. He also taught me how to take my responsibilities seriously. Things like getting to the office at the 8 a.m. start time, and not 8:10. Things like asking the tough question.  If I let some official off the hook because I didn't ask the tough question, Dennis would send me back to ask the question. When city councils or county supervisors tried to meet in secret, he would blow the whistle on them, loud, and they would cut it out. 

I don't think I have ever worked as hard as a reporter as I did with Dennis. We would literally sleep at the office when we were on a particularly big story.

In 1979, Dennis was hired as an editor by The Virginian-Pilot, and he recruited me out of Martinsville less than a year later. Dennis was the boss in the newspaper's Virginia Beach office, which was an important job, because this was during the Navy buildup of the 1980s, and Virginia Beach was one of the fastest growing towns in the country.  It was also a place that the newspaper -- very Norfolk-centric -- didn't have much of a clue how to cover.

Dennis rapidly built up the zoned tab that the Virginian-Pilot operated in Virginia Beach, called the Beacon, and turned it into one of the best community editions in the country. He turned Virginia Beach into an impregnable fortress for the Virginian-Pilot.  Any outside media company that might have been tempted to launch a product in Virginia Beach would be discouraged by the Beacon.

Eventually, Dennis' outstanding work led him to bigger jobs downtown at the paper's headquarters. He has been the editorial page editor for the last six years, and his deep knowledge of the issues -- developed over nearly three decades as a journalist on the south side of the Hampton Roads -- has made him an authoritative voice for the paper. 

Dennis could have gone anywere and become a big-time editor at one of the nation's largest newspapers, but he stayed in Norfolk, not just because he loved his hometown, but because he felt strongly about the role of The Virginian-Pilot in his hometown.