For George Shaffer, the demise of The Albuquerque Tribune is like a death in the family.

He stopped in The Trib newsroom Friday morning, toting a bag filled with memories — letters, photographs, yellowing newspapers — of his late father, Edward H. Shaffer.

E.H. Shaffer was The Tribune's second editor, succeeding Carl Magee, the paper's founder.

Magee hired E.H. away from the rival Albuquerque Evening Herald in the early 1920s, not long after Shaffer moved here from Ohio where he had been a reporter for the Lima News.

"The way I heard it, Magee told someone to find out who was writing those stories for the other paper," George, 75, said. "When he found out it was my father, he hired him."

Magee got not only a good newspaperman but a good man period.

E.H. Shaffer was raised on a farm near Dodge City, Kan., and he served with valor in the U.S. Army during World War I.

He was seriously wounded more than once, so badly on one occasion that his hometown newspaper in Kansas ran his obituary when he was mistakenly reported killed in action.

"Mustard gas damaged his lungs," George said. "That's what brought him to New Mexico in the first place, his lungs."

Shaffer was only 29 when he took over as Tribune editor in 1928. He was at the helm until his death in April 1944, at age 46.

George, who was just 12 when his father died, remembers the rattling teletype machines in the old Trib newsroom at Fifth Street and Gold Avenue Southwest, where his father spent much of his time.

He remembers his dad going to work early in the morning and returning home late at night.

"I think we only took one vacation," he said. "It was to Laguna Beach in 1939. Then my father got a call that Germany had invaded Poland, and we packed up and came back."

In his prime, E.H. Shaffer was tall, straight, dark-haired, dark-eyed and sharp of pen.

His humor shined in his personal columns, but his blistering editorials could cut a pompous politico down to size in short order.

In 1933, he won an honorable mention from the Pulitzer Prize committee for a tough editorial he wrote blasting New Mexico Gov. Arthur Seligman for sending the National Guard to Gallup to confront striking coal miners.

It was also in 1933 that The Tribune and the Albuquerque Journal entered into a joint operating agreement that permitted the newspapers to share business functions in order to survive the Depression. The agreement remains in effect until this day.

"He hated this joint agreement," George Shaffer said of his father. "He didn't like that at all."

Under the agreement, The Tribune and Journal retained different ownership and independent news gathering operations.

But Shaffer was galled by the fact that many readers thought the papers were now one and the same, and he took every opportunity to point out otherwise. Tribune staffers have been doing that every since.

Among Shaffer's coups as Trib editor was the hiring in 1934 of George Baldwin, who would serve the paper well and in many capacities, for more than 60 years, and also the bringing of his pal, famed Scripps Howard columnist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle, to Albuquerque.

George remembers that his father accompanied Pyle on a tour of the Four Corners area, a trip that produced a hatful of Pyle columns.

"They brought me back rocks instead of oil leases," George joked.

George said his dad used to have regular poker games and occasional parties at the family home at 120 Girard Blvd. NE.

Pyle would attend some of those parties.

"I remember my dad and Ernie Pyle back in the bedroom drinking and my dad telling Ernie that the war (World War II) wasn't all it was cracked up to be," George said.

E.H. Shaffer has suffered so badly, had seen so many awful things during World War I, that the very idea of another world war ate away at his soul.

He turned to alcohol to deal with the increasing horrors of World War II, and his health began to decline.

When E.H. died in 1944, George Baldwin, who was serving with the U.S. Coast Guard at the time, wrote to Shaffer's widow, Stella, from Alameda, Calif. The letter is dated April 7, 1944.

"In every way, I tried to emulate him because he was my model newspaperman," Baldwin wrote. "I don't believe there was every a more square-shooting man in the business than Mr. Shaffer. The good he achieved in this life will live after him. There'll never be another Shafe."

And there'll never be another Albuquerque Tribune.

George Shaffer, who has made his living in the insurance business here, understands that.

A reader, although not a subscriber, of the paper through the years, he said it hurt to learn that it is closing.

Every time he read it, it was a reminder of his father.

After today, his memories will be confined to his heart — and to a big black bag filled with letters, photographs and yellowing news stories.