I miss a lot about working in the Reader offices: bantering with my colleagues, learning about their current projects, even watching music editor Philip Montoro assemble his complicated and presumably delicious lunches. I especially liked combing through the paper’s print archives, which reach back to its first issue on October 1, 1971, and whose heavy blue bound volumes filled shelf after shelf in our front hallway. I was always looking for something particular when I started—such as a 1984 piece on Wesley Willis, believed to be the first story anywhere on the cultishly beloved Chicago artist and musician—and I always got derailed by the ads.
