Dick Wallace retiring from Freedom Communications

I didn't blog last night because I was at the surprise retirement party for Dick Wallace, who is sort of retiring after almost 47 years at Freedom. He married into the Hoiles family and has devoted most of his life to working for the company -- at everything from learning at low-level jobs to being general manager of the Register to some sort of executive vice president at corporate.

I got to know Dick reasonably well when he was at the Register, and liked him instantly. He is genuinely devoted to libertarian ideas -- he has donated a huge library of libertarian books to Chapman University and has been the prime mover behind Freedom School, where publishers and editors and editorial writers go to spend several days "thinking about big ideas," as Jonathan Rauch, one of the speakers at the most recent one, put it. Jonathan told me he knows of no other company that does anything remotely similar.

Dick and Pat have three sons, two of whom are very active with the company and the moving force behind the desire to keep the company in the family and keeping it devoted to libertarian principles.

Anyway, it was a great party, at the Balboa Bay Club, and it was a genuine surprise. Tom Palmer sent a video and David Nott of Reason Foundation came. And Scott Flanders, Terry Horne, Dave Threshie, Tibor Machan, Tom Grochow and about 75 others came. It was a well-deserved tribute and sendoff to one of the really good guys.

Dick won't be completely gone. He told me one of the reasons he's "retiring" is so the company can have his salary for other purposes, but he plans to remain active, especially in organizing the Freedom Schools.

Freedom's Dick Wallace retiring

This may seem a bit like inside baseball, but Dick Wallace, part of the family that owns the Register and Freedom Communications, its parent company, us such a good guy that he's worthy of a bit of celebration. He'll turn 70 in January and he's announced his retirement. It may be, however, that he is taking one for the team, freeing up his salary for other expenses. He'll continue to be involved in Freedom School with Tibor Machan, and is likely to be around the corporate office quite a bit as well. What has endeared him to me, however, is his consistent, persistent and sincere support of freedom principles and his influence in making sure the family continues to make supporting liberty a big part of the corporate mission. That and the fact that along with being a hard-headed manager he has a great sense of humor and a great sense of fun.

As is hardly a secret, the newspaper business is still in serious trouble. Terry Horne, the new publisher at the Register, has pretty solid plans for dealing with the situation, but a whole lot -- death of department stores, Craigslist and Monster.com taking away classified advertising, other Internet news sites, young people not buying newspapers -- is beyond our control. We're working on Web-first reporting and commentary. The strategy of zoned editions, to attract local businesses not interested in the full run of the paper, is starting to show results, but we're a long way from being out of the woods.