Fresh out of high school this writer got a newspaper job the old-fashioned way: His parents knew somebody -- Neil Ellis, a real-estate developer with an interest in public life and politics. That job wasn't so great -- smelting lead in a furnace and moulding it into bars for linotype machines -- but it was just downstairs from the writing part of the business, where the heat of public life was preferable to the heat of the smelter.

As he sold the Journal Inquirer the other day, 56 years after creating it by merging two little weeklies into a daily, Ellis said, "I'm not a newspaperman." Maybe he's not one now, though he is still going strong in his 90s. But in one respect he long resembled Orson Welles' caricature of press baron-to-be William Randolph Hearst -- Charles Foster Kane, who declared, "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper."

With the crucial help of his wife, Elizabeth, who as publisher kept volatile egos in check and became a saint to the JI's staff, Neil pretty much did run the paper, providing its critical inspiration and investment.

Neil was why, in the JI's early days, when a restaurant sued the paper for libel, falsely charging that a review had accused it of selling frozen pizza, the paper rejected the timid advice of its lawyers to retract. For in fact the review had said only that the restaurant's fare was "reminiscent" of frozen pizza. Eventually the restaurant gave up on trying to intimidate the paper and dropped its lawsuit.

This was a good lesson for an apprentice journalist: Lawyers were often just bullies, and bullies could be faced down.

Neil was why the JI used antitrust law to defeat the efforts of the big Hartford daily papers, the Courant and the Times, to kill the upstart by preventing it from obtaining syndicated features.

Neil was why the JI outlasted both the Times and the Manchester Evening Herald, papers with long head starts.

Neil was why, when the JI exposed a South Windsor zoning commissioner in a conflict of interest and she sued for libel, the newspaper also refused to settle and instead won a unanimous decision from the state Supreme Court.

Neil was why, when zillionaire U.S. Senate candidate Linda McMahon threatened to sue the JI for this columnist's assertion that her wrestling business involved pornography, the threat could be laughed off, and indeed was laughed at throughout the state.

And Neil was why, when Gov. John G. Rowland's chief of staff, at the governor's direction, telephoned the JI's managing editor to threaten "consequences" for its coverage of the administration's corruption, one could be confident that the governor indeed had become as corrupt as the paper's reporting had suggested and that he would be forced out of office.

Yes, it can be fun to run a newspaper -- if sometimes more exciting and expensive than might be desired.

Some might say, as Franklin Roosevelt said about Winston Churchill, that Neil had a hundred ideas a day and four of them were good. But all were necessary to keep the paper hopping and providing a growing number of towns with what was becoming a rarity -- local news.

One of those good ideas was essentially a reiteration of the maxim of the great journalist Elmer Davis: "The first and great commandment is: Don't let them scare you."

That is, Neil was why, despite frequent controversy and volatile business conditions, when he owned it the JI was never scared, and why many of its alumni were well prepared for the positions they came to hold at news organizations of national renown.

Recalling his switching foreign correspondent jobs in Europe in the 1930s, the journalist turned historian William L. Shirer joked that he had gone "from bad to Hearst." While the Hearst chain is the JI's new owner, it has actually improved some of the other eight Connecticut dailies it has acquired and kept going.

May such improvement continue, and may it always remain fun to run a newspaper.

Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years.