News flash: We have a grand total in the Give The Editor The Bird food drive, and, well, it’s really grand!

I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath (or baited breath if you like anchovies) for the results of my Give The Editor The Bird holiday food drive for Redwood Empire Food Bank.

The deal was if we raised $10,000, I’d kick in a grand from the money I swipe from the newsroom swear jar.

I figured it would take six or eight weeks, and it would give me plenty to write about without having to do actual, you know, research.

But you guys really stepped up to the plate and put one right through the uprights. You blew past $10,000 before most of us could even find our Sunday papers in the bushes.

So, I upped the ante, figuring $25,000 would be safe. And not wanting to ask you all to do something I wouldn’t do myself, I kicked in an extra $1,000 because, well, it’s a really big swear jar. (Little-known fact: Most of our journalists are at least bilingual — we speak English and profanity.)

Anyway, I even got my boss, Eric Johnston, the Queso Grande of Sonoma Media Investments, to kick in a grand of his own dough, which I thought was pretty cool, given that the folks upstairs are all too nice to even have a swear jar.

Turns out we blew past that goal, too.

Last I looked we were at a little over $45,000, which coupled with my donation and Eric’s comes out to $48,000. The cool thing about it is that with Redwood Empire Food Bank’s economies of scale, that money will have triple the food-buying power of anything we could do as individuals.

So, that’s like $144,000 that will put food on the table over the holidays for people whose kids might otherwise go hungry.

(You can still donate here or at refb.org/givethebird.)

I have to confess something, though. This isn’t my first food drive. In a former life I was a humble suburban editor and columnist in a far-off state (can’t spell crazy without AZ) and ran a similar holiday turkey campaign, though with admittedly less impressive results.

Most of the time my column consisted of me trying to sneak fart jokes past the copy desk, and one day, with deadline looming, I was desperate for a tidbit to wrap up that day’s effort. A reader happened to have emailed me a picture of a broom lying in the middle of a busy Phoenix freeway, asking how then-Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer got to work that day.

It was clearly a sign from the news gods. The sender, whom I’d never met, was a guy named Dave Trotter, a proud, disabled veteran who had founded a very successful company. Dave was thrilled with the item, which he cut out and kept on his refrigerator for years. And thus grew our friendship.

Dave had a huge heart and couldn’t stand the thought of kids going to bed hungry. We both did a lot of volunteer work at a school for homeless children in our community, and whenever anybody at the school needed anything, Dave was always first to whip out his checkbook.

His generosity didn’t end there. Every Thanksgiving, as I’d inch toward my food drive goal, Dave would call me up at the last minute and ask how many I needed to put me over the top. Whatever the number, he’d donate that plus one.

Dave was never in the best health, and a few weeks ago I received a call from his wife telling me the bad news. It was about the time I wrote my first Give The Editor The Bird column.

I’d sort of been counting on Dave to put me over the top this year, but it turns out he didn’t need to. The 400 of you who donated this year (including some guy named Anonymous who donated 47 times!) did that and then some, and I can’t thank you all enough.

It’s truly humbling to see your responses online and on my Redwood Empire Food Bank page. And on behalf of the hundreds or maybe even thousands of people you’ve helped, I thank you from the bottom of my heart (which most reporters describe as cold and hard for some reason).

Anyway, I’ll be dropping my check off to the food bank next week, and, assuming my bosses let me do this again next year, I plan to rename the food drive in my friend’s honor. “Give Dave Trotter The Bird” has a nice ring to it, I think.

Somehow, I know he’d approve.

John D’Anna is interim executive editor of The Press Democrat. Reach him a john.danna@pressdemocrat.com and follow him on X or Twitter or whatever it’s called at @azgreenday.