To author Bob Greene, the newspaper reporters of his youth were funny, street-smart, cynical and stoic. So it is ironic that the book he wrote as an homage to these reporters, and to his first newspaper, the Columbus Citizen-Journal, is quite the opposite: It is at best sentimental and at worst, mawkish.

One wonders what these jaded newspapermen would think of this account of the heyday of American print journalism in a mid-sized American city.

But for anyone who misses the journalism of the '50s and '60s and bemoans the disintegration of today's newspapers, Greene's earnestness is not necessarily a flaw, and the book's rich detail and descriptions of the good old days can be fun to read. Greene's gushing can grow on you, and his portrayal of the colorful newsroom characters and their antics and wisecracks often reads like fiction.

His latest is a depiction of those days -- the mid-1960s, when Greene was a copy boy and cub reporter. But it is also the story of an era when most news was local and cities like Columbus had their share of hometown celebrities, many in the media. It is also the story of a "pre-technological" era, when the main source of news for most people was newspapers, and when reporters pounded out their stories on simple manual typewriters that never froze or broke down on deadline.

Local newspaper reporters were respected household names in the community, and the information in stories was rarely questioned.

Like many of Greene's other books, this is also a coming-of-age story.

He tells the story of his five years on his hometown paper, the morning Citizen-Journal, where he started as a copy boy in high school and continued as an intern during his college days at Northwestern University. Greene leaves no doubt -- repeatedly -- that he was in love with every aspect of the newspaper business during those years, and that he adored the characters who inhabited that world.

"Coming to work every day ... made you glad to be getting up in the morning," he writes early on, and, half a page later, "Yes, we felt like we were in heaven. We got to put out our paper every day."

He loved the fact that the folks in the newsroom enjoyed their jobs and appreciated the paper's status as the smaller and feistier of two newspapers in Ohio's state capital. Newspapering did not pay all that much, so the editorial staff -- stuffed into the unglamorous and cramped quarters of a building's mezzanine -- did not do their jobs solely for the money.

And the underdog status of the C-J, as it was known, was particularly appealing to Greene because it bred independence and irreverence in its staff. In fact, Greene worked briefly on the bigger and better-funded Columbus Dispatch and hated it. He worked in that paper's library, felt stifled by the boring work and staid staff and quit after a brief time to return to a summer job at one of the city's tennis courts.

But the heart of "Late Edition" lies in its characters. I worked on the Citizen-Journal in the early 1980s, about 15 years after Greene left, and a few of those characters were still around. And his very detailed descriptions -- down to the shoes they wore -- holds true.

Here, for example, is his take on two grizzled C-J veteran photographers, who were still there when I worked there:

Dick Garrett, whom I remember as a dapper, rangy man with slicked-back black hair and saddle shoes, is described as "cop-shop natty as Dick Tracy."

His sidekick, the cynical Hank Reichard, was a chronic complainer "as glum as Sad Sack."

Greene portrays the men in the newsroom -- and most of them were male -- as jaded and idiosyncratic, but ultimately kind to the young, literally green copy boy. Clearly, his recollections of the people were colored by their kindness to him.

While they kidded the shy young man, they respected his talent and enthusiasm and looked after him. (In one revealing anecdote, he tells how one old reporter forgot his name was Greene, and kept calling him "Brownie." When Greene finally built up the nerve to correct him, it made no difference. He was forever "Brownie" to that person).

Greene went on to join the Chicago Tribune as a reporter, later became a syndicated columnist and magazine writer, and covered many national stories. He must have suspected in the 1960s, though, that those were the salad days of newspaper journalism and that one day he would want to relive them.

Like many love stories, this one has a bittersweet ending. Despite a very successful career, Greene indicates that little in his life has matched the thrill of seeing his first byline in the Citizen-Journal and working with the people who put out that paper every day.