David Francis, who began writing the “Economic Scene” column for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper in 1964, finally stopped writing it — the oldest continuous business column in journalism — last week due to his retirement.
John Yemma, the editor of the paper, writes, “Three of the 10 Monitor editors he has worked for, including this one, first worked for him when he ran the business news department – which probably explains his unfailingly tough questions during staff meetings.
“Like any reporter, David has his share of amusing stories. Here’s a good one: In the mid-1980s, he was attending a bankers’ conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. For entertainment at dinner one night, the Canadian hosts released live ducks in the banquet hall while actors dressed like hunters blasted away with shotguns loaded with blanks. It was local-color fun for the bankers and their spouses until the discombobulated ducks began crash-landing into soup bowls.
“Around the newsroom, David has been legendary not just for his productivity but for his filing system: huge piles of paper on and around his desk, stacks so high that the pieces on the bottom seemed only a step away from becoming compost. It takes mental acuity to manage a geological filing system. If you asked him for a particular report on, say, the difference between M1 and M2 in the money supply, he would confidently slide his hand into a pile and retrieve just the thing.”
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