Today is the last day for the majority of 54 Advertiser employees laid off several weeks ago, the victims of severe downsizing in our industry.

The past few weeks have been extremely difficult as we have started to say goodbye and our colleagues have sorted through a range of emotions before wondering what to do next.

The four we have lost in the newsroom include an experienced assistant city editor, a talented photographer and a young photo desk technician who learned quickly to shoot photos and video. But the most recognizable loss is longtime cartoonist Dick Adair, who joined us in January 1981 and by my conservative count has produced about 8,000 cartoons for The Advertiser.

Adair was hired by legendary Advertiser Editor George Chaplin, who was familiar with his work through Adair's tenure at the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. An editor at Stars and Stripes, Dick Larsh, went on to work on The Advertiser's editorial pages and became an advocate for Adair. But the truth was that Dick Adair's colorful work history and travels around the world made him more than qualified for the job.

Adair was born in Chicago in 1935 and attended high school in Los Angeles. As a teenager, he received his first rejection slip as a cartoonist when he tried to freelance for a girlie magazine. The editors told him his sketches weren't sexy enough. "It was understandable considering this was the early 1950s and I had to study anatomy from the back seat of a 1941 Hudson in a drive-in movie," he wrote in a bio submitted to The Advertiser when applying for his job.

As a Navy journalist serving aboard the USS Yorktown in 1956, Adair edited the ship's newspaper and drew a comic strip called "Dork," named after the masters-at-arms. It won him a fleet-wide award for cartoonist of the month. Aboard the Yorktown, he made his first visit to Hawai'i and regrets not having bought property in Hawai'i Kai at the time. He also visited Japan and Southeast Asia for the first time.

After an honorable discharge from the Navy, he attended Los Angeles City College under the G.I. Bill and worked as a cartoon muralist for hot dog and pastrami stands. An eclectic fellow even at a young age, Adair also danced for the Spanish-American Ballet based in San Fernando Valley, while also designing the sets. He attended art classes at the city college in Mexico City and was invited to be guest choreographer for the Ballet Nacional de México. When the ballet headed to Cuba, Adair, a U.S. citizen, was left behind and hitchhiked back to the border, earning money and meals by selling caricatures of townsfolk.

His drawing skills again came in handy in San Francisco when he illustrated the seaman's manual for the Seaman's Union of the Pacific. In exchange, he was given union membership and sailed as a deckhand around the Caribbean and South America. After getting his fill of the sea, he worked as a set designer and choreographer at summer stock in Cooperstown at the request of Dorothy Shay. At the time, he took night classes under famous illustrator John Groth. They remained close friends until Groth's death in 1988.

In 1964, Adair felt the allure of Japan and visited just before the Olympics. There he taught English and dancing while meeting Larsh at Stars and Stripes. He did freelance illustrations for the publication until they couldn't pay him anymore. Adair took his seaman's papers to Yokohama and got a job aboard the President Cleveland, headed back to New York. Adair desperately wanted to stay and work in Saigon but he ended up in Singapore.

Through a connection made via legendary Stars and Stripes entertainment writer Al Ricketts, Adair formed a company designing, building and furnishing military officers' clubs. He also convinced Stars and Stripes to send him to Vietnam, where he spent five years chronicling Saigon during the war. His book, "Dick Adair's Saigon: Sketches and Words from the Artist's Journal" was published in 1971, with a foreword by famed Vietnam war correspondent Peter Arnett.

After a year back in Los Angeles at the Art Center School of Design, Adair was back in Tokyo working for a large design firm but soon went back to freelance work, illustrating travel articles and children's books and traveling to movie sets in Asia and South America as a sketch artist. Tokyo was getting too expensive, so he relocated to Manila, continuing to write and draw for Hong Kong and Japanese magazines. He wrote a screenplay called "Postcards from China," which Adair said "was a comedy I wrote in English which was translated into Tagalog and turned out to be a tragedy." He wrote and co-directed a documentary for the Ali-Frazier "Thrilla in Manila" fight of 1975 and a documentary on electricity projects in rural Philippines.

There he found his future wife, Margot, whom he called "a bright and beautiful school marm who had all the charms of Asia together for a character who could express his experience and philosophy of life in funny pictures." He and his wife have two sons, 24 and 19.

Chaplin took a chance on Adair, hiring him in January 1981. For the first 15 years on the job, Dick was required to submit three or four rough drafts of cartoons to be selected. Over the next three decades, Adair has continued to draw six cartoons a week, delighting and infuriating readers. His office contains dozens of awards and just last month he won yet another from the Society of Professional Journalists, Hawaii chapter.

Reflecting on Adair's history, I couldn't help but think that what he accomplished would have been enough to satisfy anyone's dreams of a life well lived and a career well spent.

Mark Platte is senior vice president/editor of The Advertiser. Reach him at mplatte@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8080.