I’m going to deviate in this space where I typically offer thoughts about someone or something, today offering some purely personal thoughts related to my retirement from this newspaper after 36-plus years.

My association with The Daily Iberian and this community has been wonderful, at least from my perspective. I look forward to do nothing for a while, though am sure before too long I’ll be looking for something with which to get involved. Wife Gladys and I plan to stay in the community. This is home. We’ve lived here more than half our lives. We’ve put down roots here, raised our family here and made lots of strong friendships here.

I’m confident this newspaper will continue, will do just fine under the leadership of Christina Pierce its new publisher. She’s got a strong resume of experience at other newspapers, has worked in Louisiana for many years so has a good taste for our state’s culture. She seems excited at the prospect of getting involved in this great community in coming weeks and months.

This newspaper has a great staff which I’m confident will continue to work hard to try to offer our readers and advertisers a good value for their money.

I’ve shared the story many times of how I was hired to be this newspaper’s advertising manager and thought I’d be here for a couple of years getting experience and building my resume with the idea I’d have to move on to get a publisher position. Luckily for me that opportunity came at The Daily Iberian, where I have had the honor of being its manager for right at 30 years. It’s not very common that a guy gets to spend so many years with the same company, getting to do a job he always wanted, much less in a great community like the one I’ve been fortunate to work in these past many years.

I don’t have any hard statistics, but I’ve been writing two Sweet Talk columns a week and two editorials on the Opinion page for a long time. I skipped some when I was on vacation or out of town on business, but I’d estimate I’ve written more than 5,000 columns and editorials. We watch the word lengths of these things so they’re not too short one time, too long the next. I estimate those 5,000 pieces would have included more than 2.5 million words.

Hopefully most included some thoughts worth considering. I’ve been pleased innumerable times by people who’d call or write or stop me while shopping at a local store to offer some comment on something I’d written.

I’m aware of plenty of times where we’ve had mistakes in something we wrote because we were careless or sometimes just goofy. But I also think this newspaper has published a heck of a lot of news, photos and opinions that contributed positively to the community. Hopefully the good stuff far outnumbered the times we came up short. I can promise our intentions were always to do good.

I’ve enjoyed the heck out of my time with The Daily Iberian. I’m excited to see what the future brings for this newspaper, and for me.

WILL CHAPMAN is the retiring publisher of The Daily Iberian.