50 years of passion and dedication

Excuse us, but we're going to get a little self-indulgent today, and we think it's justified.

Today, Bob Frisk celebrates his 50th anniversary as a full-time employee with the newspaper and we can't let that milestone pass without notice.

Frisk, our assistant managing editor for sports, is the dean of high school sports throughout the suburbs and a man of rare warmth, dedication and enthusiasm.

He's a legend in Illinois and we feel blessed to share the same space with him. Actually, he first joined the newspaper as a part-timer in high school 58 years ago, but his full-time days date back to June 26, 1958.

Half a century.

That's hard to imagine. It's a major chunk out of a person's life and we're happy to feel Frisk's devotion all those years to the Herald, but really, it is a devotion primarily to high school sports.

Frisk loves high school sports, genuinely loves it. He loves the character-building of it and its genuineness. And he loves the people in it, the athletes and the coaches and the athletic directors and his colleagues along press row.

And he loves the positive nature of it. For years, he has taught his sportswriters that the young people playing the games are still kids, for the most part, and that we need to focus on the touchdowns rather than the fumbles, the heroes rather than the goats.

Certainly, Frisk has taught that when you look for heroes, you'll find plenty of them -- a lesson about life all of us would do well to remember.

A lot changes in half a century, both good and bad.

A half century ago, Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House; the Cold War raged; television was primarily black-and-white, came over the air and watched its language; O'Hare International Airport was called O'Hare Field and was a distant second fiddle to Midway Airport; Woodfield Shopping Center was prairie land and farms; and the Daily Herald wasn't anywhere near daily and far from big picture, too.

Nobody owned a computer or an iPod or text messaged. The Internet didn't exist.

Newspaper stories were typed, not keyboarded, with a couple of sheets of carbon paper sandwiched between the pages to make sure there were enough copies of the story for the editor, reporter and files. Pictures were taken in film and then printed black-and-white in darkrooms that left developer scent on the photographers when they went home at night.

A lot changes in half a century, both good and bad.

But Bob Frisk's enthusiasm for high school sports hasn't changed over that time.

And his positive underlying message to search out the heroes has remained the same, too.

To us, and to countless prep fans and readers, he's one of them.