There was the time when John Ed Pearce and I were among a select group of writers and photographers who were invited to dinner at the home of Robert P. Clark, the straight-laced executive editor of The Courier-Journal & Louisville Times. Clark was about as Presbyterian as a man can get, which often interfered with his judgments as an editor. He was so concerned with offending somebody that he all but squeezed the humor out of the papers.

Unsurprisingly, Mr. and Mrs. Clark’s views about alcohol consumption were diametrically opposed to those held by most of their guests, writers and photographers being a bit more unrestrained in those days than they are now. Still, we were offered a cocktail upon arrival, for which John Ed and I were grateful. But when it got time for a follow-up and we both were clinking the ice cubes in our empty glasses, Mrs. Clark looked at us and said, “Would anyone like another half-drink?”

John Ed and I looked at each other in astonishment. A half-drink? He rolled his blue eyes and smiled that bemused smile of his, the one he always used when confronted by another example of life’s delicious surprises. It’s a wonder that he didn’t tell Mrs. Clark that, yes, he would love to have two half-drinks.

When I heard that John Ed had died Monday on his 89th birthday, my sadness was tempered by the knowledge that seldom, if ever, have I known somebody who enjoyed life — and got as much from it — as he did. From humble beginnings in Virginia and eastern Kentucky, he rose to become the most influential Kentucky journalist of his time.

From the end of World War II until 1990, his prose graced the editorial and magazine pages of The Courier-Journal and had much to do with the paper’s national reputation for excellence. He became almost a son to Barry Bingham Sr., the paper’s editor and publisher, and emulated him in many ways. He admired Mr. Bingham’s grace, charm, sophistication, wit, intellect, and style. He loved being the center of attention at the dinners and parties the Binghams gave in honor of some visiting diva or ambassador or author.

The main difference in Mr. Bingham and John Ed was money. Mr. Bingham had scads of it and John Ed didn’t. Understand, he didn’t begrudge Mr. Bingham his wealth. He just considered it a cruel twist of fate that he, too, wasn’t born rich. He deserved it, for heaven’s sake. But John Ed did the next best thing. He hung out with the rich and powerful, and he used his way with words to unlock a lot of doors and hearts.

As a kid growing up in Kentucky during the era when the Courier had home circulation in all 120 Kentucky counties and was consistently ranked by Time as one of the 10 best newspapers in the nation, I yearned to someday follow in the footsteps of sports editor Earl Ruby or general columnist Joe Creason or iconic sports writer Larry Boeck.

I didn’t know anything much about John Ed Pearce — editorials then, as now, were unsigned — until I became friends with David Hawpe in the mid-1960s. Just as I was a sports junkie, Hawpe was a political junkie. And he told me that the best writer at Sixth and Broadway, hands down, was John Ed Pearce. Hawpe loved John Ed’s rich imagery, his powerful editorial stands, and his commitment to coal miners and the environment.

In the 1950s and ’60s, John Ed’s editorials were so popular and widely read that a couple of Kentucky governors, Bert T. Combs and Ned Breathitt, enlisted him to write speeches for them. This meant that John Ed could write an editoral favoring a certain position, write a speech for the governor that supported his editorial, and then write another editoral praising the governor for his speech.

This worked well for both sides until A.B. “Happy” Chandler, who disliked both Pearce and The Courier-Journal, got wind of it and exposed it. Although Barry Sr. may have privately condoned the practice, he was forced to publicly deplore it and order Pearce to get out of the speech-writing business.

The way Barry Sr. had it planned, he would be replaced at the newspapers by his son, Worth. This would have suited John Ed just fine, because he and Worth were much alike in their lust for life and action. But when Worth was killed in a 1965 automobile accident, he was replaced as heir apparent by Barry Jr., who was a stickler for ethics. Upon becoming editor and publisher in 1971, Barry Jr., concerned that Pearce didn’t share his views about conflicts of interest, moved John Ed off the editorial board and into the Sunday magazine department.

If John Ed was angry at the time, he had to eventually realize that the move was one of the best things that could have happened to him. Since his editorials were unsigned, he never got the pride of authorship, nor the widespread recognition, that went to Courier columnists such as Creason, Ruby, and humorist Alan M. Trout. But the magazine ran his columns and essays with his byline and photograph. Suddenly, late in his career, John Ed became a celebrity outside the halls of the C-J and the corridors of power in Frankfort.

When Creason died suddenly in 1974, Carol Sutton, the C-J’s managing editor and the first woman in American history to hold that job at a major paper, picked yours truly to be his successor. I was given a tiny office on the fifth floor, right by the elevator bank and near the Sunday magazine department, where John Ed had his office.

I could tell that John Ed wasn’t exactly overjoyed that I had been selected to do the general column. It wasn’t that he had wanted the job himself, because he had a great gig going with the Sunday magazine. Besides, he had reached the point in his career where he didn’t want to write that much or work that hard. Still, he made it clear that he thought I would burn out quickly. It was nothing personal, just his way of putting me in my place.

It took me a couple of years to win him over. But one day he stopped by the office and told me he was proud of me and liked what I was doing. I was flabbergasted. By that time, I had learned that what Hawpe had told me about John Ed years earlier was true. He was the best in the building, and, like cartoonist Hugh Haynie, as good as anybody in the business at what he did.

I didn’t burn out as a general columnist, but I did go back to sports writing in 1977, replacing Dave Kindred as the C-J’s sports editor. John Ed thought I was nuts. It wasn’t so much that he disliked sports. To the contrary, he kept up with what was going on in sports at the University of Kentucky, his alma mater, and he loved the Kentucky Derby, mostly for the parties and balls that it inspired. It was just that John Ed thought that most sports fans were fools, and that the people who wrote about sports were dubious journalists, at best.

In the early 1980s, the C-J and Times had another executive editor, Paul Janensch, who one day called a meeting that included John Ed, politcal writer Ed Ryan, myself, and maybe another columnist or two. He said he wanted us to be “tube-rippers.” Or, as he explained it, “When people get up in the morning, I want them to feel they can’t wait to go outside and rip their paper out of its tube.”

Once again, the mischievous smile from John Ed.

In 1986, my last year at the C-J, I was named best newspaper columnist in Louisville Magazine’s first “Best of Louisville” awards. If I was pleasantly surprised, John Ed was mortified. He said as much later in a column about Louisville. After citing the city’s virtues, he added that, unfortunately, Louisville also was the sort of city where sports writing could be taken seriously as good literature.

It was a jab at me and and a jab at Louisville, but I didn’t take it personally. Heck, he probably was right.

Throughout his career with the C-J, John Ed often complained, sometimes publicly, that he was underpaid and underappreciated. He said that’s why he had worked as a speech writer. He needed to supplement his income. Sometime after Gannett bought the C-J from the Binghams in 1986, John Ed went off the staff, but continued writing for the Sunday magazine on a contract basis.

When I left the C-J and began writing for the Lexington Herald-Leader in 1987, John Ed took note. He studied his contract with Gannett and discovered that it didn’t prohibit him from writing for a competitor. So he signed a contract to do Sunday columns for the Herald-Leader at the same time he was still writing for the C-J magazine. He said he did it for the money. But he wasn’t exactly unhappy that he also had embarrassed the paper’s new owners and infuriated his old bosses at the C-J.

We both came to have great admiration for John Carroll, the Herald-Leader’s editor at the time we left the C-J. Like the Binghams, Carroll was committed to excellence. It was fun to write for him, even though we agreed we would never have it quite as good as we did when the Binghams owned the C-J.

I doubt that any writer in Kentucky’s history has ever used the language more effectively than John Ed.

He had the talent and versatility to cajole, intimadate, flatter, amuse, entertain, manipulate, and seduce. Mostly, seduce. Women would fall in love with his writing even before they were exposed to his smile, his laughter, his cleverness. Men were seduced by his logic, his convictions, his passion about causes. He was so good that sometimes he could fake his emotions, just for effect, and nobody would be the wiser.

I became good friends with one of John Ed’s five daughters, Betsy, and we devoted many conversations to discussing her father. The girls all adored him, but they never felt they got enough of his time and attention. They knew he loved them, it wasn’t that. It was just that he wasn’t cut out to play the lead role in “Father Knows Best.” One of the most brutally honest statements John Ed ever made about himself was this: “I wasn’t much of a husband, but I was a pretty good Saturday night date.”

Me, too, sad to say.

His daughter Virginia and my daughter Amy have gotten to be friends through a mutual interest in church and children. When Amy saw Virginia on Tuesday, the day after John Ed died, she told her a story that everybody who knew John Ed would surely appreciate. It seems that on Saturday, the last day he spoke, a nurse was urging him to take nourishment through a straw.

“Mr. Pearce,” she said, “you’ve got to eat something. You can’t be just laying there.”

Ill though he was, John Ed rose barely from what was to his his death bed and whispered, “Lying.”

The nurse looked puzzled.

“Don’t take it the wrong way,” somebody said. “He was just correcting your English.”