I recently caught up with Dennis Rogers, the legendary (and I don’t use that word lightly) columnist who spent nearly four decades chronicling life in eastern Carolina. I’m happy to report that aside from a bout of pneumonia earlier this year, Dennis is hale, hearty and curmudgeonly as ever: “The older I get, the more I can’t tolerate heat, humidity and buttheads,” he said.

I’m with you, brother. Except I don’t mind heat and humidity.

Dennis retired from the newspaper business two years ago this month. His first order of business was to buy a recreational vehicle, dubbed the Wiggly Pig, and set off across America with wife HollyAnn. Their travels were detailed in a series of dispatches from the road, the first of which you can read here. After nine months or so of near-endless movement, Dennis and HollyAnn parked the RV in Oxford, where they now live. Dennis and I traded a series of let’s-have-lunch email messages over the past year, and finally got together yesterday.

It was an August afternoon in North Carolina, and Dennis had me for company. He suffered all three intolerables mentioned above at once.

Talking with him for an hour reminded me of what the N&O lost when he left the business. Dennis is funny as ever, and still a first-class raconteur. The newspaper business won’t see the likes of him again, and that’s a loss for readers. But we miss him more than he misses the business, I think. In many ways, it’s a refuge for oddballs and misfits, and while we both happily acknowledge belonging to both categories it can make for a bizarre professional life — one whose dysfunction is apparent only after you’re gone from it.

That’s a long way of saying, Dennis looks doggone happy these days. He’s helping a buddy with a book, and leading a remarkably disciplined life for a retiree: No television or alcohol before 5 pm. That last part is crazy, but what do you expect? You can put a man in a bouncy RV and send him all over the country, but you can’t shake all the Baptist out of him.

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