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Wendy Zomparelli was the best editor I ever had, and the only one who ever hugged me -- after I won a journalism award.

But her rapid rise through The Roanoke Times' ranks kept many people from learning how kind and funny she can be.

And her lofty jobs sometimes required tough decisions that did not please everybody.

Anyone privileged to work closely with Zomparelli would agree, I think, that she is one of the brightest, best-organized and most creative employees that the Times-World Corp. has ever seen.

In 22 years she held seven positions of increasing responsibility. She spent six years as features editor and a little more than six years as president and publisher, her two longest stints.

She accelerated through her other jobs as if on a bullet bike.

Even she was surprised.

"I thought I'd be here for a year," she said. "I've never been very astute about what was in the works for me."

Now the jet-propelled publisher is leaving for a most understandable reason: She is getting married in March and moving to Charlottesville. She is retiring Friday.

Zomparelli, 56, loves family life more than anything.

In that respect, she is just like the rest of us.

An inner strength

Many news employees weren't here when Wendy Zomparelli was an outstanding editor and an inspiring leader who wanted most of all for her people to succeed.

They don't know the woman who, as assistant to publisher Walter Rugaber, took time to visit reporter Cody Lowe in the hospital after he had a heart attack -- and gave him a mix tape of songs with lyrics that included the word "heart."

"I think she's very warm personally," Lowe said.

But, he noted, "The higher you rise in an organization, the more difficult it is to let that show."

Her strength and belief in the paper were tested time and again -- for example, in the aftermath of the paper's four-part "Living Gay" series, which examined homosexual life in Roanoke and resulted in more than 600 subscription cancellations. Most were renewed later.

"When the firestorm started, she stood up for what we did," said Rich Martin, a former managing editor at the Times who is an associate professor of journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"When you do something like that, you really want your publisher on your side, and I felt like she was."

They don't know about her decision to publish the story of Javier Cruz, a convicted killer and drug dealer with ties to a Colombian drug kingpin who wound up working in Roanoke as an informant for federal authorities -- to the surprise and chagrin of the victim's family.

The Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Attorney tried to talk Zomparelli out of running the piece, but never demonstrated a compelling reason to withhold it, she said. She is proud to have published it.

Then there are the in-house controversies.

She managed to reinforce a much-derided participatory management style introduced by the parent Landmark Communications Inc. in the early 1990s. It led to protest-free reorganizations of news department work teams, once on her watch and once on the watch of her successor as editor, Mike Riley.

Zomparelli also stood her ground when, as publisher, she edited a story about problems with the Heidelberg press the paper introduced in October 2003. It was the centerpiece of a $32 million project.

"I felt like there were things that were taken out of the story that really needed to be in it" because they added background and depth, Martin said.

Wendy Zomparelli

The Roanoke Times

• President and publisher (2000- 07)
• Vice president and general manager (1998-2000) Editor (1995- 98)
• Assistant to the president and publisher (1992- 95)
• Features editor (1986- 92)
• Assistant features editor (1985- 86)
• Staff writer (1984- 85)

Education and academic honors

• Bachelor of Arts in English, Cornell University, Phi Beta Kappa
• Advanced Executive Program, Kellogg School of Management and Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, March-May 2005
• Babson College Program on Corporate Entrepreneurship, 1999
• "The Effective Executive," Johnson Graduate School of Managing, Cornell University, 1993

Community Service (most recent)

• Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Batten Leadership Program, Hollins University
• Roanoke Higher Education Authority: Board of directors and executive committee
• The Business Council, vice chair, board of directors
• Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership: Advisory Council

He and Riley found themselves in "a big disagreement" with the publisher, Martin recalled.

"We lost that fight," Martin admitted, but he didn't take it personally.

"She was coming at it from certainly the company's viewpoint," he said. "I understand that."

Zomparelli stands unwaveringly behind her editing.

"The points I asked to have removed from the story were, in my judgment, inadequately sourced and therefore unfair," she said. "And as events played out, they turned out not to be true. But it hurt deeply at the time to know that some people in news thought I had acted inappropriately. Those were the worst weeks of my career."

Feelings remain among some employees that the press story should have been handled differently. But Zomparelli said the press's ability to print color on every page has boosted readership and revenues significantly.

Looking back, she says the press is a complex machine that probably should have been introduced with less fanfare. A marketing campaign for the occasion included a 40-page special section about the new press and billboards promising a paper that would be "Brighter. Bolder. Better."

But press issues caused the paper to be consistently late for about a month -- not an unusual occurrence for a press launch, she notes.

Martin agrees that "a softer launch" might have tempered the expectations and disappointment. Despite the turmoil, Zomparelli says working with Martin made her time as editor the most fun she has had here.

He agrees.

"I always felt I could talk to her about whatever was going on," he said. "She is a very good manager. She gives very good advice."

She's also fun to be around.

Both remember the time they arrived early for a Landmark meeting in Williamsburg. Rather than pursue the area's history, they spent the afternoon riding roller coasters at Busch Gardens.

A leader by nature

Basically unknown to many of the community's business leaders until after she became president and publisher in 2000, Zomparelli quickly showed that her skills applied to other fields as well.

Warner Dalhouse, chairman of HomeTown Bank, recalls that Zomparelli accepted an invitation to join the Roanoke Valley Business Council (now known simply as the Business Council) "and with some considerable aplomb she fit right in. She not only became a member but she became a leader."

Not just a leader, but a "strong-minded" leader who, Dalhouse said, "thinks on a high plane and is a very articulate spokesman for her own ideas. And she has a lot of good ideas."

And, he said, "She doesn't suffer fools lightly."

Dalhouse recalls when he and Bittle Porterfield, another community volunteer, "were summoned to her office."

Zomparelli informed them that their failure to have honored a woman at the annual multiple sclerosis fundraising dinner in Roanoke was unacceptable. It had gone on for 15 years.

Some women had been honored with their husbands, but none had been honored singly.

"Wendy is very focused on diversity and certainly women being treated fairly and equitably is a central concern of hers, but she's also interested in people of different ethnic backgrounds and people of color, and she gets rather passionate about it," Dalhouse said.

"Bittle and I, who are not two shrinking violets, immediately pleaded mea culpa and had to admit that, as enlightened as we tell ourselves we are, we hadn't noticed. We just hadn't paid attention."

Last November, Beth Doughty, president and chief executive of the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce, became the first woman to be honored individually with the Silver Hope Award at the 16th annual MS Dinner of Champions at the Hotel Roanoke.

Doing her best

Zomparelli's career at The Roanoke Times began when she was the mother of a young son and the wife of a Hollins College (now Hollins University) instructor on a one-year contract.

If she didn't get a job at the paper, she figured she might wait tables, as she had done before.

Zomparelli was hired as a staff writer for the features department and is perhaps best remembered for her sometimes stringent reviews of the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra and other musical groups.

She and Andre Spies are divorced. Their son, Sam Spies, is a reporter and editorial assistant at The Associated Press bureau in Raleigh, N.C.

A mere eight years after starting at the paper, she ascended to the office adjacent to publisher Walter Rugaber's on the Times' hallowed second floor, where many of the big hitters live. She became his assistant.

Three years later she became editor. That raised suspicions among gimlet-eyed news people, who knew she hadn't worked among the reporters who covered cops and courts and city hall politics, beats that constitute the nuts and bolts of daily news.

Her mandate was to "change the culture," if necessary by changing the employment status of staffers who would not embrace the company's team management philosophy.

This created fear.

But she showed fairness as well as determination, and if skeptics still existed three years later, when she was promoted to vice president and general manager, that's because skeptics always exist in newsrooms.

Zomparelli realizes that many people don't know her as anything but a bigwig, and that others assume she has changed.

When you hold a position of authority, she said, "a lot of people are afraid of you ...

"I feel like I've been the same person all along."

There was a time when she recognized that she should soften her business-first approach and develop relationships with people she managed.

But a big brain can be hard to hide.

Rugaber, a former New York Timesman with a formidable reputation in the news business, once suggested that she back off a bit in her dealings with others, because of her intimidating intelligence.

She told Rugaber she didn't see herself as all that smart.

"I know," he said, "that's what makes it so devastating."

She credits their late-afternoon chats with broadening her views about business and life.

"He has such an interesting mind, and he's such a deep thinker," she said.

Asked about her intelligence, she said, "Before I skipped a grade I took IQ tests in the principal's office and I started hearing the word 'genius.' "

She laughs. "I don't think I really did test as a genius."

She shudders as she recalls her fourth-grade teacher taking her to the front of the room and telling her new classmates that Wendy, "because she is so smart ... skipped the third grade."

Her natural ability and her father's encouragement propelled her toward achievement.

"He said, 'You've got brains and if you work hard you can do anything you want.' "

Her parents moved her and her sister from Chicago to California when they were young, arriving without jobs or a permanent home.

Her mother was a homemaker who sewed the family's clothes. Her father worked as a salesman at a TV and appliance store in San Diego.

Eventually he opened his own store.

"They worked very hard and became quite affluent after I got out of college."

They now live in "a beautiful and elegant home" in La Mesa, Calif.

Zomparelli was the kind of child who delighted in buying her first tablet of lined paper for the coming school year, loving its feel -- and its smell.

She was a student who turned in 20-page papers when only five pages were required, not to show off but to share all of the interesting information she had accumulated -- until teachers started marking her down for it.

Her PSAT scores in high school got her tapped for the Telluride Summer Program at Cornell University between her junior and senior years.

There, she encountered her first Eastern intellectuals and suffered a brief loss of confidence.

"I just assumed I had a lot less horsepower than the people around me," she says. "That summer, I learned that I didn't."

She returned to California to finish high school, received a full scholarship to Cornell and traveled the 2,700 miles from San Diego to Ithaca, N.Y., to start her college career.

She was 16.

Four years later she had a bachelor's degree in English and a Phi Beta Kappa key.

Her organizational skills already were in place.

"When I've been in a group of people," she said, "it hasn't taken long for somebody to say, 'Wendy should be the leader' " -- another thing she doesn't quite understand.

"I've never been ambitious in that way. I've always been concerned about doing the very best I could do."

One thing she has noticed during her rise at The Roanoke Times: People believe the myth that the person in charge has it all.

It's true that it's lonely at the top, she said.

Up there, you can't show weakness to anyone.

New life, new roles

Zomparelli had decided to leave her job and Roanoke even before she met her fiance, Richard Handler, a University of Virginia anthropology professor and associate dean.

She was a divorced female executive in a small place, and she felt isolated.

More than anything she wanted a family life. If she couldn't have that, she at least wanted to live in a city like Chicago or New York, where she could hear live jazz any night of the week.

Instead, Zomparelli will live in Charlottesville and work for Kannon Consulting of Chicago, advising media companies.

Once married, she will become a stepmother, a role she eagerly anticipates.

She and Handler heard about each other through a mutual friend. He sent Zomparelli an e-mail and they agreed to meet over lunch when she traveled through Charlottesville.

"The meal was disappointing," Handler said.

But the conversation went smoothly.

They shared an interest in music and business, and they felt some chemistry.

"She has a great mind, and she has this very gentle manner -- sort of a quiet strength," Handler said.

Zomparelli leaves a legion of admirers, some detractors and, among fortunate former feature writers, a reputation for thorough editing that I affectionately dubbed the Zomp Stomp.

Reporter Beth Macy experienced it as a newcomer at age 24.

Zomparelli would summon her to her office with a one-word e-mail: "Come."

"We'd negotiate and argue and laugh for as long as an hour," Macy said. "And then I'd stagger out the door feeling like I'd been in a battle ...

"She'll always and forever be the editor in my head."

Zomparelli retires in the best possible way -- not because of failing health, not because of poor performance, not because of some arbitrary corporate rule, but because she has found love.

She has had an impressive ride.

"Who would have thought?" she said. "I am constantly amazed."