David Montero, reporter

I hadn't been here more than a two weeks and was wondering when I would get to write an actual story. There was the learning of a new computer system, learning the names of colleagues - why were there so many Sarahs and Kevins in one place?

On Friday, it was about time to leave for the day when news broke about a man who had welded himself into a bulldozer that was made to look like a tank and decided to try and single-handedly level the town of Granby. The editors were anxious to get people on the story and I was one of those dispatched.

They handed me a laptop, gave me my instructions. I had no idea where Granby was. I didn't know where anything was. But I was a reporter and I would figure it out. OK, no problem. I'd covered wildfires before. I'd been in Kosovo during the war. I could do this.

And then the news came that the man had a gun and was firing at propane tanks. I was a little nervous. Then, Tonia Twichell and Deb Goeken suggested I grab a flak jacket on my way out the door. Apparently, they had one left over from reporters who covered Iraq. A flak jacket. This had never happened in California.

I dutifully put it in the trunk of the car. I called my wife to tell her I'd be gone for the weekend. I was covering a guy who had decided to bulldoze a town.

She cried.

As I walked out the door, I'll never forget hearing Jim Trotter in his southern drawl call after me, "Welcome to Colorado."

It's been a great ride.

Deborah Goeken, managing editor

I was a new reporter in the business section, fresh from Peoria. It was an early afternoon, and the phone on our business desk rang. Mike Rounds, a veteran reporter who had seen a lot in his time at the Rocky, picked it up. The caller said he was holed up in his house with lots of guns and he wanted to talk to the cops. I think he had hostages.

Mike asked him why he'd called the business department. Turns out, we were the first number in the phone book under Rocky Mountain News.

Mike, as cool as could be, kept the very angry and very heavily armed man on the phone and talking. On another line, we called the police department.

Before we knew it, a SWAT team complete with guns and cool uniforms had arrived in the Rocky's business department.

A SWAT officer sat down at the desk next to mine, and he began to negotiate with the man. For hours. And I would be lying if I didn't mention that fellow business reporter Kimberly Mayer and I thought he was the most handsome officer we had ever seen.

Steve Oelrich, presentation editor:

My first real job at the Rocky was as the makeup editor, sort of a liaison between editorial and the "shop" one floor below, where the compositors actually put the type on the pages.

The pressure of deadlines often produced a highly charged atmosphere down there. One night, as the time to lock up the first edition bore down on us, an editor wandered down from on high and started throwing his weight around, pointing out to the shop foreman that "the clock on the wall shows we're two minutes late."

The foreman - steam almost literally pouring from his ears - walked over to the wall, pulled a chair over, stepped up, tore the clock off the wall and smashed it to the floor. "Now what does the clock on the wall say?" he asked.

Mike Littwin, columnist

Photographer Todd Heisler and I were on the road, somewhere in southern Colorado, and my wife, always prepared, warned us on the phone that we should get a hotel room that night before it got too late. But we stopped for dinner, and we interviewed some folks, and we kept driving to this small town, where we figured we'd get a room, on the way to San Luis.

Except that, as my wife had warned, every room was full. I mean, every room. There was a wildfire nearby, and the firefighters had every room for miles. And miles. And miles. We called Alamosa, the biggest town nearby. Sold out. We called every other nearby town. Sold out. We called towns we'd already passed. Sold out. We called New Mexico, for God's sake. Sold out. We were going to sleep in the car, except every place we stopped looked like a scene out of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and we kept driviing.

We were desperate. Finally, we called one hotel, where the guy behind the desk heard there was a bed and breakfast that might have a room. We called. The guy said he had a room. One room. The honeymoon suite. Yes, it was. And so we drove somewhere out of town, somewhere in the deep, dark night, sometime after midnight, where the innkeeper said he would wait up for us.

When we came to the road leading to the inn, there were two signs. The place was called something like the Apple Lodge, but the road went in two directions, each with a sign saying Apple Something. We went left, and we came to a place that looked like it couldn't be a lodge, but it was nearly 1 a.m. and we had no choice. We pulled up, and a dog came roaring at us. A man came out, also roaring. I don't know if he had a gun. But when we asked where the Apple Lodge was, we didn't wait to hear the answer.

Instead, we went right, very quickly, and pulled in to a much friendlier looking place, with its one available room, the honeymoon suite. Where there was, of course, one bed. Fortunately, because I know you like a happy ending, it was a very large bed.

Hector Gutierrez, reporter

On Oct. 19, 2005, I woke with a terrible toothache. I went to the dentist, who said my root canal was infected and gave me Vicodin, told me to go home and rest. Instead, I came to work.

A story broke that night about a couple who had killed a man who had invaded their home. Turns out, as my reporting discovered, that the man and the couple had been represented by the same attorney. It was a nice little scoop.

But while I worked on the story I was passing out at my desk. I would pass out every couple of minutes at my keyboard, wake up, write a couple of sentences and pass out again. My editor, Curt Anderson, nervously wondered if I would ever finish my story. Somehow, I did manage to get it done.

Jay Dedrick, assistant features editor

I had only been working at the Rocky a few months when I was given the opportunity to pinch hit and write a theater review. Turned out it was to be an overnight review of The Lion King, which was launching its first national tour in Denver.

As if the accompanying hoopla didn't have me nervous enough, when I sat down at my seat in the theater, I noticed Rocky Editor John Temple and his family seated a couple of rows in front of me. I guess I did OK, because my career at the Rocky lasted another seven years.

This is the first paper I ever read in my family's home while growing up in the suburbs, the paper I read while earning my journalism degree at Colorado State University. I will miss my friends and colleagues, I will miss doing the work and I will miss reading the Rocky Mountain News.

Gargi Chakrabarty, business reporter

In the summer of 2007, I worked on a five-part series about ethanol. It took me to Yuma, a sleepy rural town in northeast Colorado close to the border with Nebraska. One day, I found myself interviewing a corn farmer next to a stinking pond. A noisy generator activated a pump with floating rollers in the pond, churning the fetid gunk and stirring up pig poop from the bottom. The solution would be used as compost.

I held my nose as I took notes. I've never thrown up on the job, but that day I came close to it.

This Tuesday, Laura Frank, a colleague, and I were on a reporting stint in Garfield County. We traveled to a "man camp" for oil and gas workers, perched 8,600 feet high on top of the majestic Roan Plateau. We didn't realize the gravel road, carved out of the face of the mountain, would be so dangerous. Very soon, we were slipping and sliding on the muddy road. Not to mention the oncoming semis. We climbed 3,000 feet in four miles and in 30 minutes, at times tunneling through the mountain.

I wondered who'd die first: The Rocky or me. For the record, I outlasted the Rocky. But our story didn't make it to the last edition.

Jim Trotter, senior editor for projects

I'd been in Moscow for the last days of the Soviet Union, sweating bullets trying to get through airport security with dollars in my socks. Rode on the back of a firetruck when half of Malibu was burning down. Dodged bullets when the Atlanta cops took exception to a bank robbery that had gone wrong. I thought I knew about covering the news.

Then I came to the Rocky in 2000, joined the insane newspaper war and quickly learned that the news is never covered. You're always just working on it, sometimes 20 hours a day. One of our former reporters, I thought, described it best when he said most big newspapers are like battleships. They steam into position, swing their gun turrets around, and eventually open fire. "The Rocky," he said, with some amazement, "is like a canoe with bazookas." Amen to that.

In the meantime, I edited Gene Amole's columns on dying and learned much about grace and courage and dignity. At the Rocky, I worked with some of the best journalists on some of the best stories of my long career. I will treasure those experiences. And each and every Rocky journalist has my profound gratitude. Thanks for showing me how it is done.

John Boogert, Internet news editor

Listing all my memories would literally take forever.

Such as designer Bronco Dean Lindoer fer leaving the building through the garage door about a month after we moved to 101 W. Colfax. Literally, THROUGH the garage door. The door was in shambles for what seemed like months, while the replacement door - rumored to cost as much as $80,000 - was shipped by boat from Germany.

Or another one, also involving Dean, when he learned the hard way that whitehouse.com was a porn site. I lured him into that trap, right in front of managing editor Deb Goeken. At about the same time, we pulled the old "I'm downloading porn" audible alert. Every time Dean called up an e-mail, a voice said loudly, "I'm downloading porn."

Lesley Kennedy, deputy features editor

I was madly filing a New York Fashion Week report in my Midtown hotel room on Sept. 11, 2001, when I learned of the terrorist attacks. I vividly recall finally getting through to the newsroom and being ordered by John Temple to get out there and file for the Extra edition we'd be putting out. (He did ask if I was OK first!) I had to beg a shop owner on Sixth Avenue to let me use his landline to file my quotes, as no cell service was working.

Photographer Ellen Jaskol and I went to California to cover the first Los Angeles Fashion Week in 2003. I will always remember finding Ellen after a crowded fashion show to tell her I had just interviewed Ozzy Osbourne. Ellen frantically asked me which way he had gone, then, cameras in tow, chased him down an alley, shouting, "Ozzy! Ozzy!" He turned around to give her a great pose - my favorite shot from the week!

Bob Findlay, copy editor

I always think of the argument between John Coit and J.P. McLaughlin. Coit had written about a group of motorcycle riders and, using the same vernacular as his subjects, referred to one of them as a "girl." J.P. figured out - by asking John, I think - that she was over 18 and changed the word to "woman."

Coit became really upset and confronted J.P., insisting that in the context of the story and the group of people he was writing about, she would be a "girl." J.P. got right back in Coit's grill and said he was not going "to deny the woman her maturity."

It almost came to blows until news editor John Davidson stepped between them and calmed things down. I can't remember now whether we printed "girl" or "woman," but I suspect the copy editor won the argument.

Amy Speer, presentation editor

There was this odor. It was strong and pungent, a nose-curling rank that left me scratching my head for nearly a week.

What was that smell? Was it my feet? It was coming from below my desk. Maybe it was my feet.

By Day 3 of the smell I found myself on my hands and knees exploring for the source. It wasn't the dingy dust bunnies, and I pretty much had concluded it wasn't my feet. Still there was that smell.

Finally, my hands-and-knee search took me to the neighboring desk of John Sopin ski, a graphic designer, away for two weeks on an Italian vacation.

I opened the drawer and about keeled over right there. I had found the source, a plastic container of salad left to rot for God knows how long. The cleaning crew had to be called up, but the chemicals they sprayed (mixed with the odor) didn't help.

Needless to say, I moved to a different computer that night. I think my nose hairs have finally grown back. Thanks, John.

Lynn DeBruin, sportswriter

I haven't felt this sad since 9/11. I'm not at all comparing the two, but I just remember being so confused, sad and feeling the need to be around people.

That awful day, with no family in the area, I drove around aimlessly until I found myself at Swedish Medical Center, where Ed McCaffrey had just had surgery to repair a serious break in his leg suffered the night before on Monday Night Football.

I ran into Broncos owner Pat Bowlen in the parking lot, who proceeded to chew me out for thinking about football on a day like this - until I told him, "Pat, I've got nowhere else to go."

He ended up giving me a short interview.

Ed recovered and we all got through that day. But life wasn't the same.

It won't be this time, either.

Aaron J. Lopez, sportswriter

I saw Dan Issel implode, Joe Sakic win gold and Carmelo Anthony come into his own. I stood next to Tiger Woods as he gauged the wind at the U.S. Open, and I wrote about playing 72 holes in a single summer's day.

Above all, one memory will always stay with me. I remember ducking into a janitor's closet at the United Center in Chicago before a Nuggets game in 2005. Amid the mops and buckets, Nuggets interim coach Michael Cooper told me he would be replaced by George Karl the next day. It goes to show that news happens behind every door and around every corner.

Usually, the reporters last longer than the coaches they cover. Four years later, Karl is still coaching the Nuggets, while I'm heading out the arena door.

It was fun while it lasted.

James Meadow, reporter

I was a long-haired, mustachioed cocky kid from New York when the Rocky Mountain News hired me for its sports staff in 1971. I was a long-haired, mustachioed not-so-cocky kid from New York when they fired me six weeks later.

But, as Woody Allen once said, "Ninety percent of life is just showing up." So I did. Just kept showing up and hanging around Denver, watching it grow and flourish. Hung around long enough that, 20 years later, the paper hired me back - as a its society writer. It even bought me a tuxedo, which is what you wear when you're seeing your first debutante, which is what I did at the age of 40.

Eventually, after two years of nonstop parties, someone wised up and I was made an offer I couldn't refuse. In my case, that meant an odyssey through features to cityside to features to cityside.

I covered everything from millionaire businessmen to homeless street people. From police funerals to local high school kids experiencing epiphanies in Ethiopia. From a crippled high school coach to a cemetery filled with silent eulogies carved into the headstones of soldiers gone way too soon. A million other assignments, too, some of them wonderful, some of them, uh, not-so-wonderful. All of them adding to my soul and - I hope - some reader's morning.

Gerry Valerio, assistant sports editor/high school sports

The Rocky Mountain News certainly was a wonderful place to work, one filled with great journalists who took immense pride in putting together the best newspaper they could every day.

But it also was much more personal for me and my family. My dad, Jerry, worked in the production end at the Rocky for nearly 30 years before retiring a couple of years ago, so it was a constant in our household as I grew up.

To me, my best memory of the Rocky and everything it entails was the day I told him I was hired to join him at the newspaper.

In the end, yes, it was only a newspaper, but it also was so much more than that.

Jeff Legwold, Broncos beat writer

I had a blue pen in my hand, a click-top model, and just before I touched it to the stack of papers in front of me I looked across the table at my wife Laura and said, "You realize, now somebody's going to offer me a job."

And oh, there were big laughs all around as I scribbled my name over and over again to buy a dream house that was several work crews away from looking that way to the rest of the world.

Three hours later my cell phone rang and a man I had never met face-to-face said, "Jeff, this is Barry Forbis of the Rocky Mountain News. What would think of coming to work in Denver?"

Of course. Who wouldn't, come hell or two mortgages?

So we sold it all, packed up our family after almost a decade in Nashville, Tenn., and found our place in the sun. A place where I was just a small part of perhaps the greatest newspaper staff ever assembled anywhere.

Tillie Fong, reporter

My favorite night came on Feb. 9, 1988, when I managed to score an exclusive interview with John "Big John" Laurienti, who was taken hostage by Phillip Hutchison. What made that interview special was not only did that put one of my stories on the front page, but I got the interview right under the nose of the folks at the Denver Post.

What was fun was that the next day, when I came in, my mailbox was stuffed with bags of M&Ms and the city desk editors gave me a standing ovation.

Laura Frank, reporter

My last day of reporting for the Rocky Mountain News shows just how much the public depends on its newspaper.

I got a phone message from a reader who wanted to contact the official I quoted in a story. I got a letter from a reader who asked me to investigate something that seemed concerning to her. I got an e-mail from someone in another state who reads my stories online and just wanted me to know how sorry he is to see it go.

But what struck me most today is what these readers will miss on Saturday. We had stories ready to go on abused children in state custody, alleged misuse of public money and the future of the energy boom in our state. These are important stories.

B.G. Brooks, sports reporter

So many memories, so many stories, so little space. How to encapsulate 31 years at the Rocky in three or four paragraphs? I'm willing to bet it can't be done - unless those three to four paragraphs are more portly than any editor I've ever worked for would allow.

A number of highlights/lowlights come to mind - among them being locked in NFL stadiums after hours and being freed by groundskeepers, being assigned to cover a bow-and-arrow carp shoot (that's a fish, FYI) in my first year at the Rocky, covering CU football during maybe the most fascinating times ever, and meeting too many genuinely good people to ever think about listing here.

Goodbye, Rocky readers. Goodbye, Rocky colleagues. It's been a privilege.

Ken Papaleo, photographer

I have been sitting at the photo assignment desk for the past six weeks with a broken arm, skiing accident, my right arm of course, making me pretty useless. With some time on my hands, I do think back in my 28 year career at the Rocky Mountain News.

In my first building, things were pretty hectic. We had a small staff and shot as many as five assignments a day.

Things got better when a man named Frank Kimmel was hired as the photo editor. He threw a lot of the bad assignments away. Actually, he would crumble them up and throw them back at the reporter. Needless to say, the number of bad assignments went down.

In building two, the photo staff became world class. We did a lot of traveling. I went to two Olympics, four Super Bowls, World Cup skiing, Mexico, California, Spring Training. Some of the best times for me happened on the road back then with great people like George Kochaniec, Dennis Schroeder, Janet Reeves, Dean Lindoerfer and many others. I wish I could talk about them, but the road stays private to those who were there.

The photo staff produced two Pulitzers during its time in that building and our reputation became known around the country. Again the staff grew and a new building was in order and again, "Things Will Be Better In The New Building" was being heard.

In building three, hard times have come. The Internet and the economy have taking their toll, and there will be no building four to make things better. In the photo staff now I look to Dennis and George as my brothers who I love very much. The rest of the staff are my children. I have enjoyed watching them move on in life and have been amazed by what they produced. I worried quietly when they had troubles and provided my shoulder to some when they needed to cry.

I have had the ride of my life at the Rocky Mountain News and will cherish it until I die.

For 28 years, when someone asked me what I did, I would say "I'm a photographer for the Rocky Mountain News." I would say it with pride. It made me feel good and important and gave me access to see some pretty amazing things. I will now have to think of a new reply, like maybe "Old Guy Hanging Out," or "Photographer Looking for Work," or maybe "A Man Satisfied With His Past and Looking Forward To The Future."

May God bless every one of you with a bright future, thanks and goodbye.

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