DAVIS, Calif. — After more than five decades in the pages of the Davis Enterprise newspaper, a columnist and UC Davis Aggies sportswriter says he was let go.
Bob Dunning says he still doesn’t know why the paper decided to part ways with him after he’d worked there for 55 years.
“I’ve been interviewed by people and when they put the pen down they say, ‘What really happened?’ And I say, 'I don’t know! Your guess is as good as mine!'” Dunning said.
He was surrounded by readers, friends and family at a ceremony Wednesday in downtown Davis to thank him for his years of observant, humorous writing — and to wish him well on his new endeavor — a subscription newsletter on the platform Substack, The Wary One.
“By golly, I found Substack, which I’d never heard of, and all of a sudden we’ve got a lot of subscribers and I’m back to writing my column after just missing a couple of days,” Dunning said.
Dunning said his newsletter already has thousands of subscribers from all over the world.
“He’s not going anywhere. He’ll always be an institution in this town,” said long-time reader Dorrick Minnis.
“No matter what, he was going to find a way to continue that, so we were shocked, but we weren’t worried about him,” said Dunning’s daughter, Emme.
Dunning says he was feeling the impact of what happened last week, but couldn't have imagined the success he would find.
In a Facebook post after being let go, Dunning wrote he was hurt by not being able to write a final column and how it was handled.
"There was no thank you. No goodbye. Not a penny of severance. Just stone-cold silence. No golden parachute. In fact, no parachute at all as they pushed me out the back door of what I often lovingly referred to as the Starship Enterprise," Dunning wrote.
Davis Enterprise Editor Sebastian Oñate addressed Dunning's legacy in a May 10 column where he also cited the paper's reorganization and reduction of its publishing from three to two days a week.
"I give my heartfelt thanks to Bob Dunning and everything he has done for us; for this newspaper, for this community and for me personally," Oñate wrote. "To say that we will miss him is gigantic understatement. The rest of us can only hope to live up to a fraction of his example."
ABC10 reached out to the Davis Enterprise publisher but hasn't heard back.
