This was supposed to be an entry about Charlton Heston, the late actor who came to symbolize the very essence of the BIG, I tell ya, big epic movie.

Back in 1979, when I was the film critic for the Ministry of Truth, Heston, then 55, came to here to participate in a Canadian Club Pro-Celeb Tennis Classic event at the Bayfront Center. As a mega-star of his stature with “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben-Hur” and “Planet of the Apes” under his belt, the actor certainly didn’t have to make time for a scribbler of my humble journalistic bloodlines.

But he did and the result was a fairly wide-ranging interview in which Heston discussed his approach to roles, the art of move-making at the time and his own calculation of his worth to a fim, noting he never demanded the multimillion dollar salaries his peers insisted upon, preferring instead to take a percentage of the film’s gross.

“I think if the picture’s not a hit, then, I don’t deserve a million dollars,” Heston smiled. “Nobody is.”

Despite whether you agreed with Heston’s later image as an advocate for the NRA, the actor was classic, old-school Hollywood - courtly, gracious and unpretentious. Indeed, not long after my piece ran, Heston sent a handwritten letter, thanking me for MY time to talk to him. It was a very classy gesture.

In preparing to write this, I had to pull the actual newspaper clipping of the story from our archives.

Since about 1990, everything you have read in The Tampa Tribune has been electronically preserved. But prior to that year, the history of this newspaper has been kept in a series of massive vaults - on the original paper it was first printed upon.

As you might imagine, given Charlton Heston’s career, his clip file was thick with entries, including one yellowed story from 1953.

But it was first clip that fell out of Heston’s file, which brought back a flood of memories.

It was dated, Dec. 19, 1978, a wire story written by Jane Gregory for the Chicago Sun-Times Wire Service about Charlton Heston and a book he had authored, “The Actor’s Life.”

By-lines are fairly innocuous things in this business. Most people pay very little attention to them, unless, of course, what they just read had royally peeved them off and they want to know who to blame.

I had probably even read Jane Gregory’s piece on Heston at the time and forgotten about it. Many years later though, as fate would it, I would work with Jane Gregory, work with her up until the day she died in the newsroom.

Jane was one of those people you run across in this racket from time to time, a true jack of all trades. She had covered breaking news and crime, entertainment and fashion, a little bit of everything.

But she was hardly the stereotypical hard-boiled Chicago reporter. This was a gracious, elegant, soft-spoken woman of great wit and literacy.

In 1984, I joined the staff of the Chicago Sun-Times and a year later became the paper’s television critic, where I had to pleasure to get know Jane back in the features department.

In the late 1980s the do-gooders at the Sun-Times successfully lobbied to have smokers like Jane and me banished from the newsroom and exiled to a small, windowless room complete with some ashtrays and a couple of computers.

The decor was lousy. The camaraderie was golden.

One afternoon, the smokers were taking out their invective on Henry Kisor, the book editor and truly lovely man, who in the opinion of the smoking room had writtten a somewhat too chummy, too flattering profile of Scott Turow.

As the barbs about Henry’s piece flowed back and forth, Jane gently acknowledged that she too, had found the piece boring and feigned falling asleep with her head in her hands.

Several minutes passed as everyone continued to gab about Henry’s story when someone noticed Jane was still pretending to be asleep.

Jane, though, was dead. Dead without a sound. Dead without calling the slightest attention to herself. Dead, as only Jane could be dead - understated literally to the very end.

Several hours later, after the body had been removed. One reporter ventured into the smoking area and after proceeding to sit down for a cigarette, realized about half-way into settling into chair, this had been where Jane was sitting when her heart simply - stopped. The reporter quickly straightened and found somewhere else to perch.

Jane died doing what she loved doing most, working in this often silly, insane, threatened business of newspapers.

No one was ever quite sure what caused Jane’s eerie demise, but after a while, we all agreed to blame her death on Henry Kisor.

Death by boredom. Jane would have liked the simplicity of that. But we never told Henry.