Bill Roberts knows when Durangoans are restless. It is a perception he has honed over the last 26 years as the Herald’s opinion editor.
You might think that he gauges it entirely by the number of letters to the editor that fill his inbox. But the restless also corner Bill in the grocery store and, without prompting, hold court right there in the frozen food aisle.
It’s an experience I’ve heard Bill talk about over the 20 years he and I have worked together, and it’s an experience that has helped shape his keen understanding of our community and the people who live here.
His early days as a bartender dovetailed nicely when he entered the newspaper business. So nicely, in fact, that we might do well to require bartending as previous experience to becoming an editor who oversees the only section in a newspaper guaranteed to raise the collective hackles of our town.
Bill and I worked in separate camps with a strict boundary – opinion vs. news – but from a distance I often watched him forego emotion and opt for measure and reason. He listens first and replies later. It is how he has built his voice, his quality of ideas and his ability to see when an editorial might help calm or direct the community’s energy toward reasonable conversations.
After 26 years of delivering evidence and conclusion and selecting a diversity of voices to fill the opinion pages, Bill’s institutional knowledge is vast and invaluable.
He will be missed – by staff and readers alike – but he will still have to go to grocery shop.
Amy Maestas
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Editor’s note: Herald senior editor Amy Maestas is on sabbatical while she fulfills a Knight-Wallace fellowship at the University of Michigan.
