Some 50 or so people gathered Friday night at Bee reporter Ed Fletcher's East Sac home to say farewell to a couple dozen of the reporters, graphic designers, photographers and editors who were let go during The Bee's most recent staff cuts, this time through layoffs. For most, Friday was their last day.

So you will not see the names of many wonderful reporters and photographers in the paper from here on out, and there will be little notice in The Bee's pages themselves. Melissa Nix, Chris Bowman, Florence Low, Brian Baer, Robert Faturechi, Walt Yost, Marty McNeal, Jennifer Morita, Bob Walter, Quwan Spears, Scottt Howard-Cooper, Sandy Louey, Ramon Coronado, Charles Waltmire, Brian Ching, Rachel Leibrock and Rachael Bogert...all gone.

But there are names you never, or rarely, saw in the paper, of people who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to make sure that stories read well or business ran smoothly: Yvonne McKinney, DeWitt Russell, Kim Rutledge, Chad Jones, Randy Allen, Scott Lorenzo, Shahryar Ahmad, Brian Daly, Terry Dvorak, Debbie Meredith and George Costenbader.

And then there was Marco.

Marco Smolich was - I don't even know what his title was, but he was indispensible. Marco knew stuff. Lots of different stuff. If your computer was malfunctioning, he knew what to do, or who to call. If you needed help with your HOME computer, he knew what to do. If some editor was driving you crazy, he could explain why. But more than that, the guy was - is, he is not dead, after all - funny as hell. And his wit came in part from the fact that he knew more about what was going on in the newsroom - and saw it for the bittersweet human comedy it was - than most or any of the reporters he was tasked with assisting.

As someone pointed out Friday evening, Marco was the guy who gave newcomers the tour of the building and explained how things REALLY worked. He had a great sense of humor, knew who you could trust and who you couldn't, and was the best source for news inside Sacramento's "most-trusted" news source.

It's hard to imagine him not there. Imagining The Bee without Marco Smolich is...well, it's like not having The Bee itself. But then, that's the big story, isn't it? 

More than that, Marco, like George Costenbader, Bob Walter, Walt Yost, Debbie Meredith and many others, was at The Bee most of his career, or at least seemed to be. They literally spent their lives at the paper, and when the paper couldn't pay them anymore, that was that. And that is one of the subtext's of the events of the last few years at the paper: long careers with established employers are going the way of the newpaper itself. That's painful to many, this cultural sea change, and it was a subject of much conversation Friday night.

Marco wasn't at Ed's party, which was a shame. It was a great party, of course - the esprit de corps of Bee reporters is legendary - but it was also a sad occasion, as people spoke about their work at The Bee, and what the future might hold. And they worried quietly about each other.

Those conversations were, of course, off the record, and will remain so. But I could not let the occasion pass without one more mention of the passion for journalism of the people who until Friday helped create it in this town. That passion will survive, whether or not they find another newspaper job. Whether The Bee will survive their loss is an open question. They're cutting into muscle now. But let the record show that the people who made the paper cared about it right up until the end.

As I was leaving the party well after midnight, a night shift partying on into the early morning hours, huddled against the cold but unwilling to part ways, I saw a pile of front page mock-ups honoring a number of the editorial employees who had worked their last shift Friday afternoon. I shot the above photos of those mock-ups and now post them (with apologies to whoever made them, please comment for credit) with the idea that these people, like the hundreds who preceded them out the door, deserve more honor than was given them at The Bee.

We will miss them, even those of us who never knew them. Good luck to each and every one.