I was working the late shift at The Providence Journal until 1:30 a.m. I had been with the paper two years, so this goes back a few decades. Don’t ask how many.

The night managing editor was Joel Rawson. He ranked pretty high for his age, 35. I was living in Newport and he in Jamestown, and after work we’d planned for me to drop him off on my way home.

We were heading down Route 1 through North Kingstown. I was tired and couldn’t wait to get back to my apartment. It was now 2 a.m.

That’s when he made a suggestion.

“Want to fly airplanes?”

Joel had been a reconnaissance pilot in Vietnam and was now in a flying club that had a plane at Quonset Point.

I did not want to fly airplanes. Had he been anyone else, I’d have kept driving. But he wasn’t anyone else. He was the boss.

“Sure,” I said. Twenty minutes later, we were pushing a two-seater Cessna 150 out of a hangar, and were soon up over Narragansett Bay. After cruising for a few minutes, he asked if I wanted to have fun.

I had no interest in having fun. But again, I said, “Sure.”

A moment later, we were completing a barrel roll. I was upside down staring at the top of one of the spires of the Newport Bridge. I do not have a strong stomach, and I could only hope that dripping sweat in my boss’s airplane would not hold back my career.

Joel is now 64, and a few days ago, he retired from The Providence Journal. He spent 34 years here, and was executive editor for the last 12. He played a significant role on a paper that has an historic place in this country. The Providence Journal is the oldest continuously published daily in America, covering everyone from President Andrew Jackson in 1829 to Buddy Cianci today. It has long been known as a crusader against corruption and a pioneer in local journalism, printing separate daily editions for each part of a small state.

Joel helped make it into something else notable. Although a good hard news editor, Joel is a writer at heart, and helped develop The Journal into a writer’s paper. It became standard here to have magazine-length features based on crafted storytelling. He held regular sessions to talk about literary techniques, which often felt like writing salons. Joel would toss off seemingly simple observations, such as, “Dialogue is action,” which would sink in over time and bring new aspects to your work.

Joel was my overseer when I spent a month in Africa in 1984 writing daily about a famine across that continent. Dozens of U.S. reporters were there, most focused on hard news. Joel told me to keep filing crafted features. He was more interested in the atmosphere of the famine camps than the latest visits to Ethiopia by U.S. politicians — even one from Rhode Island — and he was right.

It’s one reason I made a career of The Providence Journal — because Joel kept it a place where you could keep striving as a writer as well as reporter. Not long ago, I set out to do a column on a little boy who lost two legs to bacterial meningitis but went on to play ice hockey. I got so drawn in, I spent over a year turning it into a book-length series, taking months off my regular column to finish it. Not many papers would have allowed that. Joel encouraged it.

If you’re picturing him as a warm, professorial type, that’s not who he is. He spent four years flying in the Army, and always had a brooding military air about him. He also had an interesting personal style. At meetings where people thought he was paying close attention, he was sometimes caught doodling pictures of airplanes. In the heat of a dramatic breaking story, he was known to climb onto a desk and shout orders. He was known to kick a few trash cans. He yelled at me twice. I deserved it. He has since mellowed.

Actually, a part of him mellowed awhile ago when he realized reporters aren’t soldiers and you have to find different ways to bring out their best.

A few years back, I was talking to him when he mentioned he had finished a novel, partly about Vietnam. It was excellent — I read it — but he couldn’t find a publisher. He moved on to a second novel, and has now finished four fine manuscripts. One of the hardest things to do is to publish a novel, even when you’re a noted newspaper editor, and Joel hasn’t made it yet. But he plans to begin a fifth one soon, which confirms what I learned about him decades ago: he’s a writer at heart.

Just as The Journal is a writer’s paper at heart.

To a large extent, that’s because of Joel Rawson.

It’s a good legacy.

mpatinkin@projo.com