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Jim Schlosser joined the Greensboro Record in 1967 and retired from the News & Record in 2008. This is his last Monday column. We would say that we’re going to miss him, except that we have no intention of letting him completely get away.

It may have been the pro football coach Vince Lombardi who said: “If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you’ll be fired with enthusiasm.”

And it was former TV basketball commentator Billy Packer — whatever happened to him anyway? — who said that when a player bends over, stares ahead and tugs at his shorts, he’s tired. Or was it Packer’s nemesis, Al McGuire, who said that?

A reporter’s telltale signs of weariness, and of dwindling enthusiasm, come when time spent looking out the window surges past that spent looking at the keyboard and computer screen.

For a retired reporter, who prided himself on productivity, this raises “troubling questions,” to use words that appear so often in serious news stories.

Therefore, I’m firing myself, temporarily. This will be my last regular Monday story. 

“The fossil has finally wised up,” my younger colleagues are surely whispering.

Nonsense, I’m not getting old, despite my age. But I have been writing a long time. It hasn’t gotten easier.

I’ve written 43 years for the News & Record. Before that, I penned lots of unreadable papers in college that were returned looking as if the professor bled on them.

Even in the military, I couldn’t escape writing. I did the unit’s monthly newspaper — using a manual typewriter to type a stencil.

Don’t ask what a stencil is; I don’t have the space.

After a short break following my retirement in early 2008, I began writing these Monday stories, this being number 104, I think.

I was foolish to believe it would be a breeze, after years of writing four or five stories a week, and during the 1970s while I was covering the legislature, as many as three a day.

But having a week between stories created a self-imposed obligation for more prose polishing. Never mind that the late mystery writer Robert Parker, who churned out three or four books a year, said that when he slowed down his writing, the result wasn’t any better. I also spent several hours cutting words to meet, often unsuccessfully, the allotted space.

Once a story was  turned in Wednesday or Thursday, the rest of the week was spent worrying about some overlooked mistake. Was it Packer or McGuire who made that observation? Did Lombardi say that or someone else?

After completing a story about a couple remodeling a building for a new restaurant, I agonized that a monumental mistake would cause me to throw up Monday morning. Late Sunday afternoon, it hit me what it might be. The couple’s names.

The telephone book turned up no names like those in the story. I went to the soon-to-be restaurant. By luck, the couple was there working. Their names, first and last, weren’t even close to being right in the story.

A call to the newspaper corrected the embarrassing error just before deadline.

That wasn’t the only close call. Sometimes mistakes weren’t caught. 

Besides growing fatigue and declining enthusiasm, I also felt outdated, especially after hearing a waitress talking about attending an ’80s party.

It’s time for another break.

I’m grateful to readers for ideas they telephoned and sent by e-mail.

I’ve always been able to find stories, but I also depended on others. I’m not like Greensboro’s greatest newspaper writer, O. Henry, who while seated in a New York restaurant once bragged that he could find a story anywhere. He pointed to the menu.

Later came  “Springtime a la Carte,” a splendid love story.

I’ll write occasional stories, not all of which I hope will appear on my week’s most hated day, Monday.

Be back soon, readers. I hope the prospect doesn’t raise troubling questions.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net