15 years ago today: The best *&%$-canning in recorded history.

October 19 is an auspicious day in our city’s long history, for it was on this day 15 years ago that Eddie Laduke was finally sacked from his post as editor of the Tribune.

Sacked, axed, fired, given his pink slip, made redundant … supply your own glorious word.

In these parts, 1994 was the murky pre-dawning of electronic media, meaning that if I wanted to provide historical documents from the time, I’d have to dig deeply into the banker’s boxes for yellowed newsprint. The articles are there, but the story remains somewhat consistent in our collective memory, so for those of you who were not around then ...

Laduke was a former baseball star (Indiana University and the minor leagues) who returned home to become a sportswriter, a job to which he was well suited by scholastic aptitude, personal interest and temperament. The sports department was where he belonged. However, years passed by, the newspaper changed hands from local to regional to national chain ownership, and eventually someone decided to verify the veracity of the Peter Principle by promoting Laduke to a position of journalistic “leadership” and decision-making outside the narrow confines of wins, losses and ties.

The Peter Principle? It's this: "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence."

And so we embarked on a period of perfect journalistic storm, with the newspaper steadily declining as it was bled dry by outside interests and dumbed down in search of the perfectly advertising gullible 2nd grade reading level, and all hope was abandoned internally, with Laduke gazing at the scene with dull, uncomprehending eyes and an antebellum socio-political viewpoint, and writing crazily laughable editorials that were utterly beyond parody because they already were parody.

It was an absolute reign of error, and it came to an end 15 years ago, but in an odd turn of events, the upper management of the newspaper’s corporate overlords idiotically botched what should have been the easiest of all terminations by suggesting that the lopping off of Laduke’s editorial head had to do with age, not rank incompetence, enabling him to file a discrimination suit and win a comfortable settlement.

At the time, I remarked that since the settlement came from a bank account far, far away, and happily, the interests of New Albany had been fulfilled with someone else’s money, it was the ultimate in win-win situations.

It may have been our very last win-win, though that’s grist for another outburst. The newspaper is far better now, and Laduke is no longer part of it.

Be thankful for small favors.