It was February 1979, and an editor for the Baltimore News-American had an idea from Florida. He suggested a police blotter, and Richard Irwin, who covered cops and had worked at the paper from 1955 to 1958 and then again starting in 1965, was assigned the task with two other reporters. They split the city; Dick's job was to hit the precincts in Baltimore County.

Dick drove to a few of the station houses, not quick trips in the sprawling county that surrounds the city, and had managed to get to just a few when he was called away to a fire at Sparrows Point. It was the last time Dick drove; from then on, the Police Blotter was done by phone.

For years thereafter, Dick manned the overnight desk of the News-American, and then, when that closed in 1986, the Evening Sun, and when that closed, he came to the Baltimore Sun. He carried the blotter with him like a tattered suitcase.

Its format and type of crime changed, but Dick never did, and his compact style remains to this day -- as popular on the Internet as it is in its shortened form in the print edition. We've changed over the years -- Dick's early blotters are full of rich detail and names. It was Roger Crawford, 22, of Arbutus, who had a gun shoved in his back as he walked out of a bathroom of a BP gas station, the very first item in the very first of Dick's thousands of blotters.

A city police officer who shot a dog that was biting a child got named too -- Thomas Stein -- as did the 2-year-old child, Wallace Cordell. Today, names of victims are typically left out because people are scared of being identified as witnesses and victims.

Cops are more circumspect now -- most calls from reporters are handled by public affairs officers, or spokesmen, even for the most routine information. Irwin has usually been exempt from such rules -- I remember once in the 1990s when the department issued a blanket rule that homicide detectives could no longer talk to the news media. One detective said a hand shot up in the room, "What about the blotter?" and of course the command staff didn't mean that.

That doesn't mean there were never problems. Paul Scardina talked to Dick hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times over the seven years he spent on a desk at the Southeastern Police District. The now retired sergeant, who spent 32 years on the force, said he cringed when he picked up the paper and discovered a long list of break-ins, thefts and burglaries under the Southeast heading and only a handful scattered among the other, more violent districts. "Commanders and shift commanders didn't want us to give too much out," Scardina told me. "I'd be told to give out one robbery when we had twenty."

Dick developed a relationship with the cops on the often quiet overnight shifts. "Not only does the blotter provide a list of serious incidents of crime, but also funny ones," Dick says, just after learning someone had broken into a house in Parkville this week and taken a hot tub. "It's amazing what people steal. They get into a house and they feel they have to steal something no matter what it is."

Dick still takes notes on a torn notebook paper and keeps them by hand. Even though he works a night shift, getting off around midnight, he still makes his blotter calls in the early hours of the morning, to the cops he's been dealing with for years. They all know the drill.

Few newspapers have blotters anymore -- the New York Post still does -- and even fewer send reporters out to station houses to compile crime. Such lists typically come from headquarters, and are usually sanitized and contain only the most serious incidents, the incidents that command cares about and thinks everyone else cares about as well.

Community and neighborhood newspapers publish blotters. The one in the Baltimore Guide is very popular among residents, and I thought it was great timing when this week the New York Times wrote a brief sketch of a reporter for the Brooklyn Paper who still walks to the 94th Precinct in Greenpoint to compile a weekly blotter. The headline: "The Dying Art of the Crime Blotter."

What is surprising to me is that while newspapers shed features once thought sacrosanct, such as stock tables, the blotter remains one of the most popular items in both print and web formats. People complain when it's not in the paper, and the words "police blotter" are among the most searched for terms on our Internet site.

A sampling of crime in the blotter pales in comparison to the comprehensive lists available on the Internet -- the Baltimore Sun  offers a complete weekly tabulation of every crime in Anne Arundel County, complete with maps, derived from data sent directly to us from the county's 911 center. A similar map of Baltimore County crime is coming soon, and we already map homicides. It's all useful information and helps people figure out what is going on near their homes. But the blotter offers just a touch more narrative.

For example, the computer list will note a burglary between Jan. 4 and Jan. 23 at 4400 Old Court Road in Baltimore County. Dick's blotter will tell you that someone stole clothes worth $220 and then "poured ketchup, hand lotion and paint onto carpets, walls and floors."

Dick's favorite blotter item, and mine, made the Jay Leno show a few years ago: "Someone entered the rear yard of a house in the 5900 block of Johnson St. on Saturday morning and removed a tomato from a tomato plant. The tomato was valued at $3, police said."

If a blotter can be poetry, this is it. These are little stories, fun and useful to read in their own right, but taken collectively over time, it's a body of work that tells us something about ourselves and our community. We scan the list to see if anything happened to our neighbors or in our neighborhood, we learn intimate details of the people living down the street, we know about a string of burglaries in the next block and make sure our doors are locked, we read the blotter and feel we're connected.

There are many web sites that compile blotters from various newspapers around the country, and I remember a book that told the story of a small town in Maine by using only items from the local newspaper blotter. The Los Angeles Times wrote about a police blotter in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where the blotter "documents what happens when thousands of fishermen" come to port.

In a small town, the blotter, like the neighborhood gossip, tells all. In a big city, the blotter makes us feel like a small town. Yes, in the big city we have murder and blood and guts headlines splashed across the front pages, but the blotter reminds us that we also have sheds that are broken into, purses that are snatched and tomatoes stolen from tomato plants. Somehow, it makes us feel like even the small things matter. Highlights of blotters past: