Star Tribune small biz columnist to retire — again

Dick Youngblood, the small business columnist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune who was the paper’s business editor in the 1960s and 1970s, is retiring from writing his weekly column at the end of the year, after officially retiring from the paper in 1998.

Assistant business editor John Oslund writes, “Youngblood started at the Minneapolis Tribune as the newspaper’s North Dakota correspondent in 1963, and moved to the Minneapolis newsroom the next year as agribusiness reporter. By 1968, he was an assistant city editor and a year later became business editor, a position he held for 14 years.

“In 1983, he gave up his editing responsibilities to become a fulltime business columnist writing three times a week for the now-combined Star Tribune. Fifteen years later, in 1998, Dick retired for the first time. But he quickly agreed to write the once-a-week column.

“As business editor in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the never-shy Youngblood could be heard throughout the newsroom button-holing reporters and demanding: ‘What have you got for Sunday business!’’

“Their standard response became: ‘Utter contempt.’

“As a columnist, he holds the world record for use of the phrase ‘dad-blamed.'”

Read the rest of the memo here on David Brauer’s MinnPost blog.