AT 8.25am when all but the final front pages were finished for the next edition of the Goulburn Evening Post, the stairs to the editorial office thundered with his footsteps.
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He came in with a rush, dealing out like cards from his coat pockets, newspaper clippings and scraps of paper as ideas for stories. He hung up his coat, rolled up his sleeves and came to my desk, squatting down to my seated level, face to face.
“Have you been for your run this morning Thissy? Have you done your 50 squats?’’ said the former champion wicket-keeper, rising to his tip toes and falling effortlessly onto his raised heels, as he did for years, so he could be the best possible cricketer.
“What’s on the back page?” he would ask. Then he was gone, the legendary Ray Leeson we all revered, to the next reporter and the next, and the next, to cheer and challenge them, question them, and more than anything else, to teach them.
He corrected our copy. “Two beers Thissy,’’ he would say, pointing to a spelling mistake and the wrong tense in a sentence. The copy would disappear down a chute to production, a chute that took a piece of finger from the wicket keeper’s battered hands that rarely dropped a catch or missed a comma.
Wool prices, eisteddfod results, Lieder play reviews, marriage reports, convicted drink-drivers, Mulwaree Shire Council minutes and obituaries filled the back of the paper. People’s names and achievements were cut out and placed inside envelopes and filed away.
This was 1980 when Goulburn had three hospitals - the Base, St John of God and Kenmore - a brush factory at Bradfordville, a teachers college, two private boarding colleges, a chenille factory, railway workshops, big departments stores, wool sales, two first grade football teams, State Government regional headquarters and much more.
Ray Leeson fought for them all with fire in his eyes, and all of his energy which sent him bounding up those stairs each morning. The paper changed hands, the troops thinned, the wire machine fell silent and technology changed our industry.
Mr Leeson still came up those stairs, rising up and down in front of us as a tireless wicket keeper once did, and as a regional daily editor for 36 years, before leaving generations of journalists with a love of their craft, and of their leader.
