Thirty years ago this week, I walked out on my first newspaper job, and the editor turned in his resignation with me.

It was easy for me to quit. I was 23 and making $175 a week at the Danville (Va.) Register. If the newspaper wasn't going to back me when I had the goods on a crooked politician, I could go back home to Mom and Dad.

But for Hal Tarleton, the editor who quit with me, it was different. He was 30. "The sole breadwinner in a paycheck-to-paycheck family," he recalled recently. The youngest of his three children was an infant. Yet he didn't hesitate.

Recently, through the magic of e-mail and my first hesitant steps onto Facebook, I reconnected with Hal, who has somehow turned 60 while looking pretty much the same. He just became director of the Red Cross in Wilson, N.C., the city in which he landed after we both put Danville, Va., in our rear-view mirror in 1979.

"It amazes me that I wasn't the least bit anxious about what we were going to live on that evening 30 years ago," Hal's beautiful wife, Ginny, (who also doesn't age) said in a return message to me. "I was just proud and excited."

It all began mundanely: I was assigned the story on the Danville Circuit Court Clerk's race. The incumbent had been in office for 27 years, and I wondered what the challenger could possibly say. That he could alphabetize court records better?

But the challenger tipped me that the incumbent had been running a microfilming business out of the clerk's office. I checked and found ample evidence of that in the city's billing records. His company was selling goods and services to the city. I also began hearing from female employees who said the clerk had sexually harassed them -- and not just with loose talk.

The victimized women ultimately decided not to share their stories in public, but the knowledge incensed me. The evidence of the microfilming business was solid. The paper's lawyer said so, and added, "Politically, it's dynamite." We were ready to go, and then the owner of this family-run newspaper decided to sit on it.

The owner was like Margaret Hamilton in "The Wizard of Oz," only meaner. She didn't like the challenger's father-in-law. So the paper was going to hold the story until after the election, when it would do the voters no good.

This played out over the course of a couple of weeks, but seeing the end coming, I'd told Hal early on that if the story didn't run, I'd quit. He told me if he couldn't get it in the paper, he'd quit, too.

And so we resigned the same dramatic night. I gave my story to the Gretna Gazette, a gutsy country weekly up the road, and it printed my account on the front page. I gave my notes to a local TV and radio reporter, a woman who'd heard the same stories about this guy's neanderthal treatment of women, and she ran with it.

I wrote my microfilming story so carefully that my mother later declared it the most boring story she'd ever read. But in Danville, the big story was that a powerful politician had connived with the newspaper owner to censor the news, and the clerk lost the election after 27 years in office.

So we were all out of jobs, which I thought was fair.

Before I left Danville, Ginny Witherington Tarleton gave me a small piece of needlepoint she'd made: "Ye Shall Know the Truth, and The Truth Shall Set Ye Free -- Nov. 2, 1979."

Hal soon landed a job as editor of the Wilson (N.C.) Daily Times (where he remained until he was laid off last year). When somebody for the Roanoke (Va.) Times & World-News mentioned they were looking for a reporter to cover Blacksburg, Va., Hal recommended me. I got that job and stayed with that paper nine years before moving to Pittsburgh in 1988.

I e-mailed the Tarletons to remind them the 30th anniversary of our being set free from Danville was coming up, and I saw that Ginny's Facebook picture had her carrying a little boy on her back -- her grandson and the son of Adam, who was just five months old the day his daddy up and quit.

"Our vindication was not subsequent success, though we both had some," Hal told me. "Truth is its own vindication and integrity is its own reward."

I only worked for Hal Tarleton for 15 months, but he still has my back. He just bought my book and I caught him on Facebook telling people how to order one. But I appreciate even more the first gift his young family gave me: risking everything to share a little truth.