The Donald Has Left the Building   

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Donald C. Drake leaves after 35 years.

AFTER NEARLY HALF a century in the newspaper business, "I'm a little sad that now when I meet people for the first time I can't say that I'm a reporter," says Donald C. Drake, a pioneering science and medical writer who took a buyout after 35 years with the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Colleagues recall the reporter, editor and mentor tirelessly pushing his long narrative style. Reporter Stephen Seplow, who worked with Drake on a 1998 series about the Pennsylvania Ballet and has been at the Inquirer almost 30 years, remembers that during meetings discussing the paper's direction, "Drake always took the single most extreme view, saying something like: 'Let's only do long stories.' "

Drake is "one of the early and best practitioners of narrative journalism," says Gene Foreman, a journalism professor at Pennsylvania State University who spent 25 years managing daily newsroom operations at the Inquirer under various titles.

Drake started his career as a copyboy at the New York Herald Tribune in 1953. He began reporting on science and medicine in 1957, when, with Sputnik orbiting overhead, he persuaded his editors at Long Island's Newsday to launch a medicine and science beat.

In the early 1980s, the Inquirer was one of the first major newspapers to give attention to AIDS. "I'm really proud of the paper for that," Drake says. One example appeared on October 22, 1987: "AIDS: A Day with a Global Killer," which consumed more than six full pages. Drake and Loretta Tofani shared the byline, incorporating the work of 23 reporters who followed the sun around the world as it illuminated the daily lives of AIDS sufferers.

"Can you imagine," Drake asks, "sending someone to Bangkok for 3 inches?"

He fondly remembers the freedom he had. "I would disappear for weeks, months at a time and people would assume I was working on something," he says.

But with the buyout offer (which he says is worth about $100,000 more than if he'd taken regular retirement after one more year), Drake is one of about 50 Inquirer reporters so far to decide his time had come. "I have a lot of disagreement with the trend in American journalism today" toward shorter stories, based on the assumption that people do not have time to read longer pieces, Drake says. "I just insist that people will read a well-written narrative story."

Since his last day on July 20, Drake has thrown himself into writing a new play, a comedy about an Alzheimer's patient. At least two of his previous plays have been produced. "It is a luscious feeling," he says, "to get up and write until 1 or 2 and then have the rest of the day to do things that normal people do."