When I joined The Sun 21 years ago, there was still at least one person in the newsroom who had worked here when H.L. Mencken did. He used to use his pencils down to the stub, she told me.
"Wow," I remember thinking, not so much about his thriftiness with office supplies - although we did receive a memo about that yesterday - but just the fact that I actually knew someone who knew Mencken.
Maybe it's the same in other workplaces - surely there are people in town who knew someone who knew someone who knew the actual Alex. Brown, or the original Johns Hopkins - but The Sun is the first newspaper I ever worked at where I felt a part of such a storied lineage, that had such an illustrious history both within its own walls but also within its city.
It's not something reporters tend to think about on a daily basis, and in fact, we cover the city and its other institutions as outside observers - would you want your only source of City Council information to be the City Council spokesman? - so we see ourselves as in the city if not entirely of it.
But lately, I've been thinking about the role The Sun plays in Baltimore for two reasons, the two big stories that have consumed many of us lately.
First is the City Hall scandal over whether Mayor Sheila Dixon, in her previous role as City Council president, took gifts from a developer in town and voted on contracts and tax breaks that ultimately benefited him.
The fact that the state prosecutor is even investigating Dixon, and that a grand jury has been meeting to consider possible charges, is the result of a series of stories that The Sun first began running two years ago and continues to cover to this day.
The second story may seem like a big deal only for those of us who work at The Sun, but has implications beyond 501 N. Calvert: The elimination of about 100 jobs at the paper, about 55 or 60 from the newsroom.
Like others in the industry, The Sun has been hit hard by falling revenues - many of the ads that people used to pay to place in newspapers have drifted to the Internet, or, as a result of the faltering economy, simply gone away. Couple that with our increasing costs - paper, ink, fuel for delivery - and we find ourselves at this point.
Which is, waiting for the "packet."
The packet is the envelope with the information about what the company is offering me if I'll voluntarily leave - a buyout. I've lost count how many buyouts I've been through here at The Sun, but they've always been more limited, offered to a certain number of people in certain job classifications.
