I recently broke one of my life rules, and it went so well I'm already rethinking all the other dumb ones I've needlessly clung to all these years.

I decided finally to pitch the never-attend-a-reunion rule because, well, in this case, unlike the scores of high school and college reunions that I've blissfully let slip by without me, a lot of people I greatly admire and respect were involved.

Most important, I share with them a relationship to a remarkable institution, certainly more important to me than any school I ever attended.

The great news is that so many others evidently feel the same way.

A reunion at Ocean Beach this month of people who have worked for The Day over the last six or seven decades, organized under the official moniker Day Party Palooza, was indeed just that.

Among the more than 100 in attendance was one of my first editors, who had already been working at The Day some 25 years, longer than I had been alive, when he started correcting my atrocious spelling and grammar.

A degree with an English major from a respectable college didn't prepare me for how much I would learn in The Day newsroom about how little I knew about writing.

Of  course, I can't speak for the many other great institutions of eastern Connecticut, and maybe some of them would also get a big turnout, with many veteran employees traveling some distance to attend, if they threw a Palooza party and invited anyone who had ever worked there.

I would suggest, though, that there is something unique about The Day that inspires such loyalty.

Looking around The Day's Palooza, I spotted a Pulitzer Prize winner, more than a few book authors, a reporter at one of the nation's most prominent daily newspapers, a managing editor for another one, community leaders, a library director, a writer specializing in climate change, college professors, environmental advocates and people who have gone on to do great work beyond journalism and newspapers.

And why not?

The Day is very much a one off, the creation of its longtime publisher, Theodore Bodenwein, the son of an immigrant Prussian shoemaker, who, when he died in 1939 at the age of 74, essentially left his beloved newspaper to the community.

And so it continues to function today, not only contributing to community nonprofits and charities, but more important, keeping an institutional focus on community journalism.

In Bodenwein's day, that meant a newspaper that would report on and inform with a robust report on everything from politics to crime. Today that is evolving, with the traditional printed newspaper augmented with a digital version.

As with other community newspapers, a painful transition from the more profitable world of newsprint and printed advertising to a leaner and less lucrative digital world is underway here.

What makes The Day so different is its community ownership, with no corporate focus on the bottom line.

Certainly, it has been Bodenwein's promise kept, that the newspaper would be "more than a business enterprise ... also be the champion and protector of the public interest and defender of the people's rights," that still so animates the institution.

He noted in his will that he had devoted his life to building a newspaper in New London that would be a recognized institution in the community, a "leading factor in the growth, development, and improvement of the city and vicinity and happiness and prosperity of its people."

He also credited employees with the success of his newspaper and decreed that future employees be liberally rewarded.

No doubt it is the winning combination of this legacy from Bodenwein that explains The Day's continuing prominent role in the community, its award-winning journalism and employees who over the years who have come to understand, as Bodenwein would have it, that they are involved in something "more than a business enterprise."

I could see that looking at the Palooza crowd, just the way I see it looking across the newsroom every day. We are prepared to cover New London's evolution into a national wind turbine staging port, for instance, the same way The Day in Bodenwein's time covered the legacy of sending whaling ships around the world and building the first nuclear submarine, dispatching it on a trip under the North Pole.

As newspapers come under increasing financial strain in the digital age, some new models have emerged, one being rich owners essentially underwriting journalism. That's interesting, but still not community ownership.

On my first day in The Day newsroom, I was assigned a desk next to reporter Ann Baldelli, who explained she couldn't show me the ropes because she was leaving on vacation, to get married. Little did I know then how well I would come to know her dedication to the community she knew so well and covered so thoroughly, all the while engaged in it, raising two sons into fine young men.

The two of us covered a lot of fires, murders, car accidents, elections, town and city council sessions and trials in all those decades. We wrote about a lot of people, sometimes doing the monumental, and often the mundane.

Little did I know that morning I met Ann Baldelli that some day she would almost single-handedly throw a party she would call The Day Party Palooza and remind us all of what a great ride it's been.

Thanks, Ann. It was great.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com