Tom Vogt

My 48 years of newspaper reporting - most of it at The Columbian here in Vancouver - were split into a pair of career tracks: 23 years in sports and 25 years on the metro team before I retired in July of 2018.

I covered the Portland Trail Blazers when they lost the 1992 NBA finals to Chicago, and the Bulls' Michael Jordan is still making news with the "Last Dance" documentary.

But some of the Vancouver folks I wrote about as a metro reporter were more interesting than most of the sports stars. They included two local astronauts, a Holocaust survivor, 9/11 witnesses and World War II veterans. And some of them are still making news too. A volcano scientist was part of the New York Times' recent Mount St. Helens story and an archaeologist was featured in two different Washington Post stories in the same week.