Steve Lundeberg

On Veterans Day, a quartet of us from the newsroom took a few minutes’ break from the deadline work of editing stories and laying out pages to watch a few entries in the Albany parade: the largest Veterans Day parade west of the Mississippi, by the way.

While co-workers from other departments viewed the parade, which passes right by the paper on Lyon Street, from street level, the Newswroom Four went to our favored vantage point: the roof of the paper.

Photographer Mark Ylen happened to spot us up there and, as photographers are wont to do, squeezed off a frame. Here it is:

That’s yours truly on the left, then news editor Kim Jackson, city editor Karen Petersen and Sunday editor Mike Henneke. (What you can’t see in this relatively small reproduction is that we all had rather vacant expressions on our faces; it had been a long morning, I guess).

The photo generated a fair bit of amusement both among us and our colleagues.

Henneke suggested it could be part of a new marketing campaign: “The Albany Democrat-Herald: We’re Looking Out For You.”

Editor Hasso Hering, meanwhile, saw the pic and said we looked like a quartet of snipers.

Whatever, the DH roof hadn’t generated so much attention or amusement since the Friday night about 15 years ago when then city editor Graham Kislingbury and at least a couple other staffers managed to lock themselves up there after going up to watch a comet or the space shuttle or something like that.

Since cell phones weren’t all that common back then — meaning, no one here had one — Graham and the others were stuck on the roof until they could make enough racket to get my attention in the newsroom. That took about 20 minutes, during which time Graham had tried to exhort a passerby to call me and inform me of their problem, only to be sworn at in return.

Oh well. It was a warm night up there at least, temperature-wise anyway.

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