With Joe Strauss, the glass was always half empty, if that.
Woodward and Bernstein had nothing on him, as far as conspiracy theories. If it was 80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky, Joe would want to know why it wasn’t raining, contrary to the forecast. Had God changed his mind?
But that hard-bitten, take-nothing-at-face-value attitude was what made Joe Strauss a top-notch baseball scribe and, for three years after he got off the beat, a first-rate sports columnist at the Post-Dispatch.
And he probably worked even harder at his column job than he did covering the Cardinals, which he did for a decade after taking over for me.