The “Illyria Box Lunch” episode of “Rogers of the Gazette” is quite a package… Small-town journalism, small-town romance, mysterious thefts, a writing lecture, and a pickled peach… and all in a half hour!

Newspaper editor Will Rogers Jr has a run-in with the older gentleman who sleeps in the corner of the pressroom and prints his weekly newspaper. This time he doesn’t like Will’s editorial.

“Every so often I think you’re going to make the grade and then you turn around and write a watered down pussyfooting thing like that…”

The old printer’s name is John Reed or Reid (I’ll look that up), and he has some of the fire of another newspaperman by that name, the one who went off and wrote about the Russian Revolution.

I think I’m going to go back through episodes of “Rogers of The Gazette” and see if I can piece together more of the story of Mr. Rogers’ cantankerous friend and, it seems, mentor.