Longtime journalist and editor Bennett DeLoach, my own mentor, left us the other day after a 97-year-old life with a pencil, an L. C. Smith upright, an electric typewriter and a computer. A lifetime as a reporter, editor and tutor, my tutor.

He was an intense newspaperman, assigning, editing and managing those young people who thought/think newspapering to be adventuresome, fascinating and important. I did. I do still.

Early on, when I was just into this experience as a reporter at the Fort Myers News-Press, DeLoach, the chief of the Associated Press office in Tampa, called and asked me to go south to Ochopee, get a guide, turn left until I found a crashed small plane and its pilot. I did and called the police by radio. The flyer had perished. But, we got his body out. The AP had the story. I had the contact and a friend.

Several years later, when I had moved to the St. Petersburg Times, The Tampa Tribune bought the old Tampa Times, a six-day a week paper, canned most everybody and hired Bennett DeLoach to rebuild it to compete with fervor against the St. Pete Times. Bennett called me in St. Pete, offered me the sports editor job at $150 a week to hire and manage a staff of not many guys (only guys then) to beat up on the competition. We did. DeLoach was everywhere. He understood the importance of sports, and the every day column.

My first, small staff included Bill Blodgett, who went on to become the director of marketing at Gulf Western, Jan Van Duser, who became an NFL vice president, Bill Purvis, who went to a Washington legislative staff, Walker Lundy, a Florida student from Tampa who became the editor of a leading Midwestern paper, Bob Austin, who has become heavily involved in theater, and Malcolm King, who became a bigshot with General Telephone. 

We gave The Trib all they wanted and DeLoach and publisher Jim Council loved it. Tribune Managing Editor Red Newton was impressed enough to have Mr. Council okay my move to the Tribune in 1962.

I’ve never left.

And, now, look around at what we have--The Bucs, the Rays, the Lightning, Raymond James Stadium, The St. Pete Times Arena, Tropicana Field, Super Bowls (one ahead, a fourth), the Outback Bowl, Outback Golf, and more on the way. And I did not mention but have said before that the Rowdies soccer and Tampa Bay Bandits didn’t fail here, the leagues did.

And with this growth, so have grown the facilities, with more on the way, if folks hereabout think and act as progressively as did others in key roles. Even with the passing of mantles, like those from which DeLoach and his predecessors did not shrink, despite vocal opposition.

Bennett DeLoach, with neat-lady wife Vennette solidly behind him, did what his people - and I was one - recommended, if it fit into his general line of thought, like football in general, like the Florida Gators.

How the Gators going to do? He asked that a thousand times. They were foremost in his sports mind.

I am so happy, Bennett DeLoach, an unrestrained Gator, lived long enough to enjoy these seemingly unlikely grand results of recent Gator seasons, more than anything else the whipping they put on Ohio State for the National Championship not long ago. Gators like Bennett and Congressman Sam Gibbons, Lamar Sparkman, Harry Root and the recently deceased T. Payne Kelly needed to sing their song, as Red Mitchum put it, this wonderful time.

Linda and I live on the west side of Davis Islands. We could hear them. One was out of tune.  No, not my mentor, DeLoach. I once had heard him humming “We are the Boys,” after a win over Georgia.