It was 20 years ago today.

Twenty years ago, I was one of only two people where I worked who wanted Ronnie to win. Not that I planned to vote for him. This was during my anarcho-syndicalist phase: Workers vote with their feet by walking off the job to go on strike. But, as I told any of my co-workers who would listen, the Reagan revolution, by putting fascists in the White House, would hasten the real one.

Not that I was a worker, mind you. As an assistant city editor in The Miami Herald's Fort Lauderdale bureau, I was one rung up the corporate ladder from the reporting ranks from which I sprang, my own nonvoting feet clasping that low but perilous perch the way an acrophobic monkey clutches a limb. Scarlet rhetoric aside, I liked being a boss and wanted to see just how high I could climb. (My lefty-loosey hectoring hadn't moved the masses anyway, especially those masses who worked for me. One prole, possibly referring to my supervisory skills, described me as "a good communist but never a staunch abolitionist." Another suggested my slogan should be: Power to the people. My people. Me.)

Needless to say, the revolution never came, and by the time Reagan went, I was the editor and soon would be the publisher of this magazine, started by another, admittedly more capitalist-minded journalist to celebrate business in one of the nation's most pro-business states. Before another decade passed, I would own it.

The last two decades have brought lots of changes, most far more interesting and much more important than my own metamorphosis from class-conflicted middle manager to smug-but-still-appreciative-of-the-little-people-and-all-they-do proprietor. Many of the...