“I still miss being in newspapers,” said Dee Bauer. “Once you get that ink under your fingernails, it never comes out.”

Bauer, 76, had many jobs over the years, including a couple of stints at The News Courier and its predecessors, Alabama Courier/Limestone Democrat, and a couple of stints in the public relations office at Athens College.

He said working college PR is not as hectic, but newspaper work still calls to him.

Bauer, who today spends a lot of time golfing and traveling in his motor home with his wife of 52 years, Robbie, didn’t start out to work in news, but a knack for photography landed him there.

A Limestone County native and Ardmore High School graduate, Bauer enlisted in the Air Force and served in Korea as an aerial photographer, spotting targets for the next day’s bombing runs, as well as doing ground photography, including the Panmunjun Peace Talks.

Once back in North Alabama, Bauer married his sweetheart, Robbie Ferguson of Lincoln County, Tenn., and went to work as a civil service employee for the Army shooting research and development photography. From there, he went to NASA as a motion picture director, but a heart condition forced his retirement and he went to work for Barrett Shelton Sr. at The Decatur Daily as chief photographer in 1966.

But a chance to try his hand at yet another job drew him to Ardmore in early 1968 where he helped put WSLV-Radio on the air as general manager. Later that year he came to the Alabama Courier/Limestone Democrat.

“There wasn’t any action there, so when Bobby Ray Hicks at Athens College called me the second time I took the job of director of P.R. and was there for four years,” said Bauer.

Bauer was to stay a Athens College for four years before coming to the Athens News Courier, a paper owned by Robert Bryan Sr., who had bought the Alabama Courier/Limestone Democrat, renaming the publication. Bauer was to serve as editor for the next four years.

But the call of regular hours and the lack of deadline pressure once more drew Bauer back to Athens College, where he served as P.R. director again for two years.

“I stayed there until I went up to Elkmont Rural Village as the administrator,” said Bauer. “I retired in 1985.”

That was also when Bauer’s son, Steve and wife, Kathy, had their son and Bauer’s first grandchild, Kirk, and he wanted to play grandpa all he could.

But Bauer still couldn’t wash that pesky newspaper ink from under his fingernails, so in about 1990 he came back to The News Courier as a part-time news writer.” But the news game had changed over the years and the lure of travel and golf took precedence, so Bauer decided to at last take his well-earned retirement.

Two incidents especially stand out Bauer’s memory from his days as a newsman.

“I was the only reporter who got into Browns Ferry during the (1975) fire,” he said. “The fire trucks hadn’t been there two minutes. Chief A.E. Bumpus, who was my cousin, got the word that they were running everybody out. I had a camera around my neck and Wilson Craig said, ‘here, put this helmet on,’ and I was just putting on a coat so I could look like a firefighter when a guard was on each side of me and escorted me to the gate. I had to go a quarter-mile down the road and by that time the TV stations were there.”

He said “the night of the killer tornados,” on April 3, 1974, was another night he won’t forget.

“Police Chief Richard Faulk called my house at the time that one tornado had already hit Tanner,” he said. “We only had a couple of ambulances back then and Faulk says, ‘You know the county as well as anybody and we got this ambulance coming down out of Tennessee and you’ve got to show them the roads.”

Bauer said he was helping carry a victim on a gurney when he fell waist-deep into a drainage ditch. He said later that night, he was headed out Nick Davis Road with the Tennessee crew when they were radioed to take cover because another twister was coming across a field toward them.

“We stopped the ambulance and got out and got in the ditch and it went over the top of us and it sounded like a train, ‘wup, wup, wup,’ and seemed like the ground was bumping up and down, it had a rumble to it.When we got out to Harvest, people were in trees.”

Life is quieter now. A golfer since 1951, Bauer recently had his second hole-in-one on the 17th hole at Canebrake.

But while that moment was a thrill, life’s joys were blighted for both Bauer and his wife, Robbie, when two years ago their grandson, Hunter, 14-year-old son of Jack and JoAnn Bauer, died of the bacterial infection MRSA.

“He and I were real close,” said Bauer. “He’d call me and want to play golf or travel with me. That was the hardest thing I ever went through in my life.”

The second annual Hunter Bauer Memorial Blood Drive is Dec. 17 from noon to 5 p.m. in the First United Methodist Church Beasley Center.