He’ll buy the last newspaper at Sawyer’s

<p><QC></p><p><MC>Racks and shelves are going bare at Sawyer's News. The beloved, 65-year-old downtown Santa Rosa newsstand and card shop will ring up its final sale on Friday afternoon.</p><p>John Sawyer, whose family business was done in largely by declining readership of periodicals, has been thinking a lot about that last transaction. He's decided the final item to be sold shouldn't be a Mother's Day card or Better Homes and Gardens magazine or candy bar, but a Press Democrat.</p><p>“I think it's fitting that the last item across that counter be a newspaper,” Sawyer said. It is a newsstand, after all.</p><p>Sawyer and his partner, Dan Potts, have invited lifelong customer and patron-of-downtown Tom Reier to come by just before quitting time on Friday and buy that concluding PD.</p><p>Reier was born in March 1945, a mere two months before Sawyer's grandfather and great-grandfather opened the stand just down Fourth Street from where it is today.</p><p>As a kid in Santa Rosa, Reier was forever downtown. He ducked frequently into Sawyer's News to peruse hot-rod magazines or catch up on the news of the world.</p><p>“Sawyer's was like the Internet of its day,” he said. “Back in the Fifties, if you wanted some information you went to the newsstand.”</p><p>A Sawyer's regular all these years, he'll buy that last newspaper just before 6 p.m. Friday and then, along with the rest of us, mourn the loss of a great old piece of Santa Rosa as Sawyer and Potts latch the door.</p><p><EL4><IP0><HRCUTOFF,72,0.3,0,0><EL-4><IP9><QC></p><p>[BOLD_TEXTRR]BYE MIKE MCCOY: <MC><HY0>Longtime PD reporter Mike McCoy deserves to have his name in the paper at least one more time.</p><p>Mike joined the PD in 1973 and for all these years has been a tough, fair and driven newsman. He's earned great respect for the way he covered Santa Rosa City Hall the past 17 years, and the Rohnert Park-Cotati area for years before that.</p><p>He decided it was time to retire and over the weekend cleaned off his desk and phoned sources to sign off. He left us colleagues a cake with something of a self-portrait on it — a picture of a dinosaur.</p><p><EL4><IP0><HRCUTOFF,72,0.3,0,0><EL-4><IP9><QC></p><p>[BOLD_TEXTRR]GROUCHO'S STOGEY: <MC><HY0>There won't be a lot of speech-making at Wednesday's celebration of the life of Everett Shapiro, the loving and very funny former Santa Rosa attorney, wool buyer and Tootsie Roll Man who died Saturday at 82.</p><p>But a memory that begs to be shared recalls how he came by his most prized paperweight.</p><p>Everett, you may know, adored the Marx Brothers. One night long ago he and Phyllis were at a casino showroom and spied Groucho at a table with his nurse and companion, Erin Fleming.</p><p>When they left, Phyllis Shapiro noticed Groucho had placed an unlighted cigar in his table's ash tray. She urged Everett to go get it.</p><p>Everett ambled over and casually palmed his favorite star's cigar. He could have smoked it but it made for a better story to have it bronzed.</p><p><EL4><IP0><HRCUTOFF,72,0.3,0,0><EL-4><IP9><QC></p><p>[BOLD_TEXTRR]EARLY ARRIVAL: <MC><HY0>Veterinarian and Ursuline High alum Dana Thistlewaite saw no harm in her husband, Bennett Grassano, flying to London three weeks ago for a conference on social entrepreneurship.</p><p>Their first child wasn't due until May 5. When labor started early and she phoned Bennett to say he'd better get home.</p><p>He tried, so hard. But airborne grit from the volcano Eyjafjallajokull had closed England's airports.</p><p>When Bennett finally arrived home after taking a train from London to Portsmouth, boarding a ferry to St. Malo in France, driving to Madrid and flying to Mexico City and then San Francisco, his daughter was eight days.</p><p>Bennett suggested working the name of the Icelandic volcano into hers. Dana was quite satisfied with Opal Flora Lydia Grassano.</p>