With his departure, the paper is closing the Greenville bureau where Allegood was based.

Allegood, 58, went into newspapers while still in college in his native South Carolina. When he walked into the offices of the Florence Morning News and heard the clattering of typewriters and printing presses and smelled the ink and piles of old newsprint, Allegood knew he was in the right place. He later worked at the paper in Anderson, S.C., then accepted a job at The N&O working in Greenville, a town he had never seen.

"I didn't know what I was getting into," Allegood said Wednesday. But, he said, the Tar and Neuse rivers looked like the rivers he had played in as a child, the tobacco farms in the wide, flat countryside looked like the tobacco farms back home, and the people he met were open, generous and talked to him in a language he understood.

At first, Allegood said, he tried to cover Eastern North Carolina the way he had covered the small towns where he worked before. But it was too vast. Gradually, he found a different rhythm, reporting on trends and bigger stories: sensational murders, heartbreaking tragedies, unfathomable natural disasters. He covered troops leaving the port at Morehead City during the first Gulf War as thoroughly as he did the decline of the state's commercial fishing industry.

Allegood's years in journalism spanned huge transitions in the business. When he traveled in the early years, he put his manual typewriter in the car and dictated the stories he wrote on it by telephone. He knew every pay phone on every major highway from Greenville to the Outer Banks. And because film had to get back to Raleigh to make the next day's paper, he memorized the departure times of every bus that left Eastern North Carolina headed for the capital.

"I never considered myself a great writer, but I'm a pretty damn good reporter," he said.

For a man who hated hotel rooms and being away from his wife and three sons, Allegood spent a lot of time on the road.

Once, after Hurricane Dennis, he was stranded on Hatteras Island for nearly two weeks when the storm took out N.C. 12 connecting the island to the mainland. That time, he took the road home with him. The broken pieces of asphalt are in a storage building at his house.

John Drescher, executive editor of The N&O, said the bureau's closing was forced by financial conditions at the paper and in the industry. He said the paper would continue to cover the region, reporting some stories by phone and dispatching staff from Raleigh for others.

The paper kept the bureau in Greenville for as long as it did, Drescher said, "because there were so many great stories out there. Now we just have to find a way to do those great stories with fewer people."