Doug Larson leaves legacy of humorous one-liners

As I write this Monday afternoon, I’m sitting at my desk on the top floor of the historic Green Bay Press-Gazette building. Looking out the big windows, the world in front of me looks gray, rainy and blah.

Former Press-Gazette columnist Doug Larson surely would have come up with a much better description for such an unexciting day, looking out from his own window seat on the east side of the Press-Gazette newsroom.

“Sometimes, you’d just see him sitting back in his chair kind of pondering, and you knew Doug was thinking about his next column. It was really cool,” former Press-Gazette editor Harry Maier recalled Monday.

Larson was the master of zany one-liners. Thousands of them appeared in columns he penned for his hometown Door County Advocate and the Press-Gazette as well as for other newspapers across the country through syndication.

Still writing and waxing poetic on all manner of topics up until just a few years ago, Larson died Saturday. Perhaps fittingly, it was April Fools’ Day, and the 91-year-old was widely known for weaving frivolity into his daily “Doug’s Dugout” columns.

“He was a real quiet person, but he had this other side,” remembered Warren Gerds, the retired Press-Gazette entertainment critic who worked with Larson for many years. “He had kind of like a switch in his mind where he could turn on this humor. His columns were a series of humorous observations, like five or six (in) each column. Just an amazing person.”

Larson, a Sturgeon Bay native, started the column when he worked for the Door County Advocate as a reporter and photographer from 1953-64.

“I think he always had an interest in writing,” said Debbie Schultz, the oldest of Doug and Phyllis Larson’s four children, “(and) he was pretty humorous.”

She noted how her father quickly shifted gears to becoming a journalist after he graduated from Carroll College with a teaching degree in English.

Larson took the column with him in 1964 when he moved to the Press-Gazette, where the audience was bigger and the applause louder.

“He would just sit at his desk and kind of look out the window, and he would just come up with these short quips,” recalled Mike Blecha, who was a cub reporter at the Press-Gazette in 1969 when Larson was a city editor.

“It was kind of a gentle column,” Blecha added. “It was not any political humor or any nasty humor. It was just some real, wry observations on life. I don’t know where all of those thoughts came from, but he did that several times a week for many, many years, and I know a lot of people in the community really followed that column.”

Though he wore many reporter and editor hats at the Press-Gazette and was nominated for journalism’s prestigious Pulitzer Prize, Larson still found time to write the column that his loyal readers came to expect of him.

In 1979, Len Wagner, the then-features editor at the Press-Gazette, promised in his own column that Larson would return to the newspaper pages after he recovered from a heart attack. Wagner described Larson’s quips as “sometimes corn-bred and small town nurtured. Other times they are subtly profound.”

As proof, Wagner dropped in a few of Larson’s many straight-to-the-point gems:

» “How can you vote for anybody who’d run for office?”

» “While the pay for being unemployed is rather low, it’s hard to beat the hours.”

» “Patience is buying a hammock and then planting two trees.”

» “It’s strange that people are having fewer babies now that more men are smoking cigars.”

In a column Gerds wrote for the Press-Gazette in 1976, Larson described the process of writing “Doug’s Dugout” in this colorful way: “Well, you just put a chisel to your head and start quarrying. I put a chisel to my head every day and quarry.”

The constant chiseling, which carried on well after Larson retired from the Press-Gazette in 1988, earned him a spot in the highly read first edition of “The Great American Bathroom Book.”

“They have a list of great quotes over time, and among all of the greats, there is Doug Larson,” said Gerds, who owns a copy of the book.

The quote: “Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk.”

Enough said.

tmcmaho2@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @ToddMcMahon23