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More than 100,000 articles (long and short), about 33,000 photographs (large and small), tucked into nearly 2,300 editions (hefty and not-so hefty). All the product of one newsman.
Those numbers offer a professional tally, but they don't really tell the personal story of Hal Edwards, longtime editor of south-central Utah's Richfield Reaper, who died Wednesday at home in his beloved Richfield of causes incident to age. He was 86.
They don't tell the story, for instance, of a small-town journalist who packed big-time clout, whose editorials (more than a thousand of them) could prompt city councils and county commissions to swiftly shift their positions.
They don't tell the story of a hard-news reporter who would show up in his old Cadillac — notebook, pen and camera at the ready — at a fire or accident not long after emergency responders had arrived at the scene.
They don't tell the story of a man so attuned to his community that he often would catch factual errors in obituaries supplied by family members and then correct the notices before they ever saw print.
Edwards could do that because he knew the people in his city of 7,500. He sang with them in choirs, performed with them in plays, worshipped with them in church.
Born in Gunnison, about 35 miles north of Richfield, Edwards launched his lifelong love affair with journalism at age 16 when he wrote a front-page editorial scolding residents for not flying Old Glory on Flag Day.
After schooling at Snow College and Brigham Young University followed by radio stints in Richfield and Salt Lake City, he took over as editor of the weekly Richfield Reaper in 1957, a position he held for more than four decades until his retirement in 1998.
What Edwards craved was "spot news." Perhaps his most memorable story was a deadly midair collision of a private plane and an Air Force fighter on the evening of Veterans Day 1974.
Years later, just days before his 1998 retirement, Edwards recalled the rush of adrenalin he felt when he drove into a darkened Kingston, 50 miles south of Richfield. One of the downed planes had knocked out power lines in the Piute County town. His eyes brightened as he mapped out on a scrap of paper, using his trademark blue felt-tip pen, where the burning aircraft landed.
While Edwards loved breaking news, he loathed government meetings. City officials remember seeing Edwards put down his pen and roll his eyes whenever council members spent more time making speeches than casting votes.
"Those meetings are a lot like church meetings," Edwards once said. "They could do it in 15 minutes, but they take three hours."
Oddly, the veteran newsman didn't mind spending three hours watching crews build or repair roads. He reveled in highway stories — the stench of tar, the rumble of steamrollers, the starkness of fresh stripes on new pavement.
"The construction of Interstate 70 was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me," Edwards said of the freeway that now skirts Richfield and was completed in 1989.
His published stories were clean and crisp, but his verbal yarns could take more detours than a cross-country truck driver.
Reaper Publisher Chuck Hawley remembers how Edwards would playfully rib deer hunters when all those pickups driven by orange-clad outdoors-types would show up in town.
"Hal never got into hunting," Hawley said Friday. "He would say it would be a lot cheaper if they just bought the meat."
But Edwards loved his family more than he hated hunting. So, Hawley explained, he would take his youngest son, David, an avid hunter, out to go for a deer, while Hal waited behind.
The Reaper editor's uncanny ability to recall when certain stories or photos ran — even if they appeared years or decades ago — always amazed Reaper office manager Cherry Niemeyer.
"He could do it within about a week or two," she said, of the actual publication date.
Niemeyer noted that Magleby Mortuary will pay tribute to Edwards after his funeral Saturday, taking him to his final resting place in the Richfield City Cemetery in a hearse that the newsman dreamed of driving.
"Hal always wanted to go out in the old hearse," she said.
Edwards is survived by his wife of 63 years, Janet Blomquist (the couple lived in the cozy house where she grew up) along with four children, 18 grandchildren and 24 great-grandchildren.
The Reaper continued to print Edwards' personal "Off the Cuff" column for years after he stepped down. But he may have gotten out of newspapering just in time — before the digital age took root.
"Technology really kind of freaked him out," Hawley said. "We literally had to take his typewriter away from him."