Confession up front: Spike Speigner was gone from The Sun newsroom several years before 1984. Probably no later than 1981. Maybe even late 1980.

But Spike Speigner popped into my head the other day, and I believe he warrants mention in my series on people I worked with. Even if he’s a little out of sequence.

If only for this reason:

Spike Speigner is the only person I fired in 23 years as sports editor. Out of maybe 100, 150 people I supervised over that time? And I still feel badly about it.

It was a competence issue, pure and simple. Spike had been hired by the sports editor who preceded me. I’m guessing Spike came into the newsroom just before I got the SE job, in June of 1980.

He had some connection to the local air base, Norton AFB. I’m guessing he wasn’t full-time military because how/why would he have time to work for us?

Spike wasn’t his real name, of course. I’m not sure I ever knew. The name “Fred” suddenly pops into my head. Well, yes, I must have known his real name, once upon a time, while handling the paperwork for letting him go. But he was always just “Spike” to us — and to himself. He presented himself that way.

Spike was an agate clerk. A 30-hour guy who took calls from prep coaches, handled boxes. That sort of thing.

And he wasn’t very good. Not at all. At. All. He had trouble with grammar and spelling, and that’s fatal in that job.

About the only positive thing I remember is … he used to be willing to make “food runs” — back in the day when we were politically incorrect enough to send a part-timer (usually, though sometimes junior full-timers were forced to go) to a nearby fast food outlet to pick up dinner for several of us. So we wouldn’t lose time taking lunch. We didn’t do that, back then. Take real lunches. We just powered right through the shift.

Anyway, Spike made a food run to Der Weinerschnitzel (one of the few upsides to being the food-runner was you often were allowed to choose the venue) … and I ordered a mushroom-teriyaki burger that made me seriously ill. I remember that.

I didn’t hold the burger against him. It was just that he wasn’t competent. Somebody had to clean up literally everything he did. We couldn’t take it. It was dragging us down, making us late, making us incorrect and incomplete.

So I looked into firing him … and then went about doing it.

When I finally had the ducks in a row, I took him into the library, for some privacy, and told him it wasn’t working out. (He had been there no more than 3-4 months.)

He seemed to take it fairly well. And that was the last we heard of him.

I just did a google search for Spike Speigner and the one hit that looks like it may be him comes from 2006, from the spring edition of something entitled the “Air Lift Tanker Quarterly.”

It is a story about Air Force personnel getting some sort of “Air Lift Hub” established in a place called Spangdahlem, Germany.

This is the passage involving a Spike Speigner:

As the transition took place, a contingency response group — whose job is to set up aerial port operations — arrived at the base, set up and started moving transports in and out of the base. At the same time, an advanced team from the squadron arrived from Rhein-Main and began setting up shop. Their mission was to get squadron programs established, support agreements hammered out and starting the unit’s bed down process.

“We were doing all the administrative stuff needed to run an organization,” said Master Sgt. Spike Speigner, superintendent of aircraft services.

He arrived in June with the advanced team. That’s when the team started to help the 52nd Fighter Wing prepare for the base’s new mission and the incoming heavy jets.

“The main thing was to make people aware across the base — give folks a better picture of what we were bringing to Spangdahlem,” said Sergeant Speigner, of Rock Ledge, Fla. “There was no mobility experience here. So we stood it up.”

I’m thinking that could be our guy. Even though it’s 25 years or so after I fired him. He had a military bearing, and he was somehow involved in the Air Force, way back when.

I hope it’s him. If he’s a Master Sergeant, he’s had a real military career and things worked out. He must be a crackerjack Air Force guy. Great, because he wasn’t quite a journalist.