I just found out from a card with a picture of a laughing old man in sunglasses that we lost my high school journalism teacher, Mr. Pease, to prostate cancer.

Bob Pease was a Missourian who wrote novels and plays, coached JV football, and relished assigning banned books to his English class. When he taught our class at Buena High School in suburban SoCal, he was in his 60s, sort of a cantankerous but wise Western Wilford Brimley character.

Back then we would print stories from a 286 PC, lay them out with hot wax rollers, then drive the stacked pages down the Santa Paula Freeway, past the orange groves and crumpled mountains of Ventura County, to a citrus farm town with its own newspaper and printing press, something you needed before the Internet to get word out. The press shut down years ago.

One day after beating a deadline to put an issue to bed, we came to class to find that Mr. Pease had left us with a congratulatory letter he had typed up, praising us for prevailing against the odds. The last line quoted from the headline over my longhaired drummer friend Matt’s review of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: “‘A Bloody Success,’ indeed.”

When you are 17 and have fresh memories of middle school P.E., with its mandatory jock strap inspections and other human rights abuses, it is hard to express what it means for someone like Mr. Pease to honor you. His class was the anti-P.E., where you were a trusted professional who could slip out for important editorial duties, though Mr. Pease may not have signed off on the time the three of us, during 6th Period, drove a car out of the school parking lot to pick up the new Porno For Pyros CD, for the music page, feeling like actual Spin critics. But the journey was undertaken in the spirit of loyalty to Mr. Pease and what he stood for, which was the freedom and dignity of the written truth.

Coverage in The Buena Vista slanted towards spring dances and water polo scores, but there was space for more. And with no Web, it was heady to be in the one class where a few had been vested with the power to disseminate unauthorized ideas.

As editors-in-chief, we took ourselves so seriously that I imagined that I was John Lennon to my co-editor Daniel’s Paul McCartney. As the 4.0 Most Likely To Succeed, Daniel could be Paul, the sunny counterpart. He could devote column inches to interviewing the student body president and promulgating teetotaler values (“People think drinking is cool. But what’s so cool about stumbling around like an idiot?”). And I, as John, could write columns accusing student government of being a Vichy sham. Mostly I just wanted a girlfriend. With patience and grace, Mr. Pease put up with all this.

The last time I saw him, in 1994, Mr. Pease was stooping over a stack of English papers, probably about Brave New World, as I walked in after my first semester of college. “Met any girls, John?” was the first thing he said.

The last time I talked to him it was about ten years later and you could still write articles in the craft Mr. Pease taught us, for money. I was sitting in a hotel lobby in Washington, D.C., waiting to meet a guy who was going to give me a stack of FOIA’d documents about nuclear submarines for a magazine article, when the urge came to phone Mr. Pease and tell him what I was up to. Suddenly there was a familiar drawl on the other end of my cell phone, as if the Pease hotline would always be there. I remember he made a crack about U.N. Ambassador John Bolton. And he told me he was still messing around with penning a Western novel, which made me happy.

This year I drove to my hometown, coming in with the sun going down on the orange groves and crumpled mountains. It made me think of a moment at the brink of summer. It was 1992 and two high school nerds in a black Camry were on the road to the printing press, with the wax layout sheets in back. The death of print news makes that feel like it was a thousand years ago. Mr. Pease initiated us into an ancient order, and whatever that means in this weird new century, I will always be grateful.

P.S. I have archived Legacy.com’s guestbook of tributes to Bob Pease here.