Observant readers will have noticed that the motto of this newspaper is "To the Death." Fear not, through the more than 38 years Isthmus has been published, no life has been lost in its production.

When Fred Milverstedt and I sought a maxim for our enterprise back in 1976, that's what we came up with. We thought it expressed our determination to succeed. It did and Isthmus has. Fred left the company around 1980 and now does other things in another place. Soon, I will be doing that also.

Isthmus Publishing Company has not died; it has been sold to a new group of owners, the principals in Red Card Media, whose current product is a meal-card plan for students. The individuals acquiring Isthmus are Jeff Haupt, Craig Bartlett and Mark Tauscher. The first two have publication experience in this market with the Onion before it was sold to Capital Newspapers and subsequently closed.

It has been a long and eventful ride for me, and I have been helped along the way by hundreds of former and present employees. I have benefited from the counsel and advice of many professional or just plain smart folks. There are too many people whose efforts have brought me and Isthmus to this point for me to acknowledge by name. I thank them all.

I'm not dead, but I die a little bit when I think of the large part of my life that I leave behind. But my wife, associate publisher Linda Baldwin O'Hern, and I leave the newspaper together, so that's consolation. And we're not leaving Madison; it's the place that we've made our home and that we'll continue to work for in other ways.

So goodbye and thank you, dear reader. It is you as part of a community formed around Isthmus that has made it successful. Long may you continue to support it, dare I say it, to the death.