Sad Day   

A battle with cancer forces Ronald D. Clark to give up his job as editorial page editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Ronald D. Clark, editorial page editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press for the past 21 years, resigns a year-and-a-half after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. "They say that sometimes the disease dictates decisions," says Clark, 59, on leave from the paper since June. "I decided to end the uncertainty and step aside." Among the features the Pioneer Press added under his guidance are community columnists--seven or eight people each year chosen from a pool of applicants. "It's a way of getting community voices onto the editorial page and getting a little more balance or a little more diversity to the makeup of our own editorial board," Clark says. The paper also added space for more letters and stopped regularly running unsigned editorials because, Clark says, too often they were written to fill space and without enough knowledge of the facts. He earned a master's degree four years ago in nonprofit management, an arena in which Clark says he would eventually like to try his hand.