The long list includes Cary's Walter Hines Page, Scotland County's Gerald Johnson, Zebulon's Clifton Daniel, Wilmington's David Brinkley, Raleigh's Vermont Royster, Charlotte's Charles Kuralt, Hamlet's Tom Wicker and Goldsboro's Gene Roberts, to name a few.

Yoder was back in North Carolina this month plugging his memoirs -- titled, with characteristic wit, "Telling Others What to Think: Reflections of a Pundit."

Of course, even Pulitzer Prize-winning columnists such as Yoder don't tell people what to think. But he raises a few points that should get his readers' little gray cells working.

In an age of quarrelsome talking TV heads, "you're-a-big-fat-liar" books and partisan propaganda disguised as documentaries, Yoder is a throwback -- a measured voice of reason.

"I frankly fear that the American public ... is skimming impressions from TV and talk radio rather than digging hard for facts and truth," Yoder writes in his book, which he plugged at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Cary the other day.

Nor does Yoder let the news media off easy.

Journalism's pursuit of the salacious is not new. He notes that President Grover Cleveland was shocked by news hounds spying on his honeymoon. But he argues that today's "tabloidization" is far worse.

"Human nature and the follies that go with it are timeless; but the disposition to thrust them to center stage, often at the expense of more important public matters, is something new," Yoder writes.

Yoder, who at age 70 is still slim with white hair curling over his ears, once described himself as "an Adlai Stevenson conservative and a Sam Ervin liberal."

Writing a syndicated column for 75 newspapers, he could dissect the fine points of constitutional law or write gracefully about his daughter's wedding.

"She looked up at me laughing, this young woman whom I first saw, red and wrinkled, through a maternity ward window in August 1959," Yoder started one column. " 'Daddy,' she said, 'this is the silliest wedding I've ever been to.' "

The son of an intellectually curious Alamance County school superintendent, Yoder entered journalism after being educated in Chapel Hill and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Yoder's journalism career took him to Charlotte, Greensboro and Washington. Since giving up his column, Yoder has been initiating undergraduates at Washington and Lee University in Virginia to the joys of James Joyce.

His annual postcards from family vacations at Wrightsville Beach were a particular favorite among his readers.

"There is no cure for what the yearly photographs reveal about aging bodies, although we are not taking creeping mortality lying down," Yoder once wrote.

"One of us ... was into pill-augmented tanning, and another was swimming laps every afternoon. There was heavy teasing about these stopgap measures. We know they are small fingers in the dike, that on its other side waits the great relentless tide of time that, as the hymn tells us, bears all its sons away."