I know that it’s an easy thing for memory to paint the days of yore as The Good Ol’ Days.

Well, they were, for me, at the BJ Features Department where I spent most of my 26 years at Ol’ Blue Walls till my 1996 retirement.

I know, 24 years ago, come this July 1. Time makes the tarnish disappear and the gold shine through.

But think of the Features staff! A Hall of Fame collection!

Bob Dyer, named a zillion times as Ohio Columnist of the Year!

Jane Snow, the best food writer in BJ history.

Craig Wilson, an Action Line legend who trained a legion of later BJ reporting greats.

Jewell Cardwell, another notable columnist who shared a Cinderella, West Virginia family history with me. Her uncles and aunts and my late wife, Monnie Elizabeth Turkette Olesky, who passed away in 2004 and awaits me in Northlawn Memorial Gardens in Cuyahoga Falls, once lived there. It’s a Williamson suburb in Mingo County on the Tug River that separates West Virginia from Kentucky.

Mark Dawidziak, not in this photo, was my TV critic when I was Television Editor. Mark is one of the premier pop culture critics in BJ history. He was equally at ease with Hal Holbrook, Peter Falk (the disheveled detective in the “Columbo” series), Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe as with his fellow Features Department co-workers.

Dawidziak, who switched to that newspaper up north (the PD), was sandwiched between David Bianculli, my first TV critic as we organized the birth of the Channels television guide, who went to New York City to make his mark and whose son is a TV producer these days, and Rich Heldenfels. A really fantastic trifecta, in my opinion.

Joan Rice. When I first walked into the BJ newsroom I spotted Joan and Janice Froelich as the two “hottest” babes in the building. And then working with Joan, who has since passed away, I found out she also was one of the warmest, smartest, most fashionably dressed persons in the building. Who provided an extremely generous and comfortable shoulder for me to cry on when things got tough at the BJ.

Dennis Gordon, photographer, also in those days would ride his bicycle to Columbus and back! Can you imagine the condition you have to be in to do that! He stayed off the Interstate, of course, but still, even on the back roads that would take a lot of pumping and pedaling. I work up a sweat just thinking about it.

Don Rosenberg was the superb classical music critic who later went to the PD, which didn’t have the guts to back his accurate appraisals of the Cleveland Orchestra and sided with power rather than prose.

Bill O’Connor did some magnificent feature pieces. The one-time Montana monastery candidate in retirement also threw some pretty spiffy parties at his cool Summit County residence.

Michelle LeComte, the Features chief honcho at one stretch; Craig and Jane have passed away.

But memories of them and other Features Department co-workers will never fade away.

Those were the days, my friend. I thought they would never end. But they did . . . except for the memories.

It had the feeling of singing and dancing the life we chose.

“Those Were The Days” was born as a Russian romance song, “Dorogoi Dlinnoyu” (“The Long Road) from Boris Fomin and poet Konstantin Podrevsky.

Greenwich Village folk musician Gene Raskin put the English words to it.

Tamara Tsereteli and Russian Alexander Vertinsky did the song in the 1920s.

Paul McCarthy produced Mary Hopkins’ “Those Were the Days”  single that took Great Britain by storm in 1968.

 “Those Were the Days” was not always associated with happy or nostalgic moments.

Equatorial New Guinea president Francisco Macias Nguema had it played on his National Stadium public address system while he had 150 people accused of plotting a coup against him executed . . . to gunshots mixed with the Mary Hopkins recording.