My boss, the Gazette's national editor, was Brian Kappler, strawberry blond and in his forties, viewed with suspicion among my fellow Serious Young Reporters because he was unfashionably conservative (he liked Rush Limbaugh's radio show) and sometimes not serious (he earned good side-gig money moonlighting as the paper's celebrity gossip columnist, using the pen name Doug Camilli). But I liked Kappler fine.