A special day for a special lady

From the desk where I am writing this column, I can see eight or 10 shiny balloons, plus tinsel and streamers, hovering above another desk less than 100 feet away.

This day, Friday, March 9, is a happy day for my fellow Daily Inter Lake employee Gay Obray, for at 6 p.m. she embarks on a new life. After nearly 36 years of working in the composing room of the Daily Inter Lake, Obray is retiring.

It’s a happy day for Gay, but for the rest of us it’s a kind of traumatic shock. Not just because she is the longest serving employee at the Inter Lake and thus a familiar face, but because we’ve come to know her as a dear friend, a dedicated co-worker and a person of the highest integrity.

Indeed, you will never hear a negative word spoken about Gay — not here at the Inter Lake, and I trust not anywhere else either. If she doesn’t always have a smile on her face, she also never has a scowl — and in this business a scowl is as common as ink.

In the 28 years I’ve worked alongside her, I’ve never known her to lose her temper, speak an ill word of anyone, or do anything less than give 100 percent in everything she was asked to do. Moreover, she has always been available to help anyone who needed a hand and to volunteer to help in any way she could.

In short, it has been a pleasure to work in the same plant with her for so long a time.

The fact is, there have been so many good people I’ve worked with at the Inter Lake in nearly three decades that I could fill this column for week after week with tributes. Just in Gay’s department alone, where the ads are produced and the newspaper put together from raw images into plates that go on the printing press, there have been a number of remarkable, kind, helpful co-workers that have made working at the Inter Lake such a special privilege.

Gay will recognize the names of Lee Weigum, Wayne Herman and Marcia Shortell, all of whom enjoyed similarly long careers in the composing room and are now retired. In the newsroom, I’ve been honored to work for 20 years with Assistant Managing Editor Scott Crandell and Sports Editor David Lesnick, and for nearly that long with Features Editor Lynnette Hintze. Publisher Rick Weaver was here when I got here in 1984, but left a few years later to pursue his career until he got to return to his dream job at the Inter Lake in 2010. Numerous other employees have also been associated with the newspaper for many years, but I won’t try to name them all in case I forget one.

But the point is that this is a great place to work, a home away from home, and saying good-bye to Gay this week has been a reminder of just how good it has been here for a lot of us. Apparently, I’m the longest-tenured employee at the Inter Lake now that Gay has retired, and the words that she used in her own farewell letter could easily speak for me:

“I have thoroughly enjoyed my working career at the Daily Inter Lake. I feel it was the perfect employer/employee fit for me... for which I am grateful.”

Maybe her happiness here was foreordained. In fact, just 10 days after she started work at the Inter Lake, she was featured along with the rest of the composing room in a full-page spread on Oct. 14, 1976.

There, in a six-inch story, we were told that Obray had moved here from Utah after driving through the valley on an excursion and being struck by the beauty of the area.

Even then she was effusive in her praise of her new employer, speaking of the “highly sophisticated equipment the Inter Lake has.” But the reporter noted that it wasn’t just the machines that she liked. “I love the working conditions, the people are nice and we have comfortable surroundings,” she said.

Thanks, Gay, but I find it easy to say that in a business full of stress, uncertainty and big egos, there has never been anyone nicer to work with than you.

Enjoy your retirement, but always know, you will be missed.