Before I talk about the beginning of The Capital City Hues and that this is actually the 504^th issue, I feel the need to backtrack for a minute.

Back when I became the editor of The Madison Times, it was before the digitization of the newspaper industry. The Madison Times was a weekly newspaper that came out every Thursday. Well back in those days, we would print out the pages of the paper and place them on boards, large pieces of sturdy cardboard. For color pages, which are printed in CMYK — Cyan, Magenta. Yellow and Black —  we would have to print a separate page for each color.

On Wednesday night, Heidi Pascual and I would take the boards to Capital Newspaper and hand them over to Diane O’Dair. They would take photos of each board and burn the image onto a plate that would be attached to the printing press. For 26 years, I have worked with Diane to first get The Madison Times published and then The Capital City Hues beginning in March 2006.

Well, it’s been a melancholy week for me as this will be the last time that I publish a paper with Diane’s expertise. She is retiring and her last day — she said it was appropriate — is on Halloween, October 31^st. Putting out a paper is hard, especially the past 15 years when I have been basically the only one putting the paper together and getting it printed. Outside of her expertise along with Erik and the folks working the press, Diane had a great sense of humor and was flexible and worked with me to get the paper printed. I owe a lot to her and I wanted her to see it in writing. I hope she has an incredible retirement. She will be missed.