Colleague brought empathy, can- do spirit

TAlan Miller

he first thing Gary Kiefer wrote for The Dispatch was a letter to then-managing editor Robert B. Smith.

It was short and to the point: When you have an opening for a reporter on your staff, I'd like to work there.

Thirteen days later, Smith hired him. That was almost 40 years ago.

It was a time when The Dispatch desperately needed someone like Kiefer. It was a paper struggling to make its way out of a 1950s mindset and into the modern age. Within a short time, Kiefer became a change agent in the newsroom — a role he has played to our benefit and yours throughout his career here.

We celebrated that and the fact that Kiefer is an all-around good person — thoughtful, kind and generous — as he retired from The Dispatch last week.

The Toledo native became an assistant city editor within four years and rose through the ranks to become a managing editor in 1994, a role in which he has worked alongside four editors: Smith, Michael F. Curtin, Benjamin J. Marrison and me.

All of us benefited from his counsel, his keen sense of fairness, his calm demeanor and, perhaps above all, his eagerness to explore and implement tools and strategies to raise our journalistic standards and to adopt technologies that would allow for quicker, more compelling delivery of the news to you.

He and a few others have been the vanguard of our