IT'S well over 15 years ago that I sat, transfixed, in the newsroom of the Advertiser Series in Poole High Street listening to the old journalist's tales of guts, glamour and glitz from the 1950s.

After cutting his reporter's teeth in Brighton, Bob Hounsome had been a senior feature writer on the national daily, The Star, until its demise in 1960 when he joined Southern Television.

Later, he was news editor of the Times-Herald Series, the weekly Bournemouth and Poole titles that preceded the Advertiser, but by the late 1980s had all but retired.

Not that it stopped him popping in for his weekly fix of newsroom banter and he'd check the copy his wife Sylvia wrote for the women's page before submitting it to the grateful subs.

He'd exchange pleasantries with the general manager, have a natter with the editor, but always took time to chat with the junior staff.

Never a boastful man, he liked to hear what we were up to, listen to our nave observations, ambitions and complaints and offer advice if asked. And those stories There was the time he found himself in a classic Fleet Street scrum and ended up, literally, nose to nose with Arthur Miller, asking questions of the playwright's then-wife Marilyn Monroe which were answered on her behalf by her co-star Laurence Olivier in front of his visibly jealous partner, Vivien Leigh.

He encountered Liberace and Noel Coward aboard the Queen Mary and silent film star Buster Keaton in a speeding taxi.

He was in the crowds to cover Coronation Day and asked Diana Dors why she flew into London wearing odd stockings and no wedding ring. It was an exclusive!

He kissed Jayne Mansfield at the Dorchester Hotel; met Cliff Richard at the height of his early fame and was impressed by both John Wayne and Elizabeth Taylor.

He was in at the birth of independent regional television news and set up his own news agency and Dorset's first public relations consultancy.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Bob was a gently spoken, dignified man with a ready smile and a kind word. And still we didn't know the half of it.

Bob was 85 when he died in Poole Hospital on March 24, 2005; finally reuniting him with his beloved Sylvia, who had succumbed in December 2002 after a long battle with Alzheimer's.

This month sees the eventual publication of Bob's autobiography, The Very Nearly Man (Troubadour Publishing, £9.99) and not only does it fill in many of the gaps from this most admirable man's life, but it also reminds us just how different the newspaper world - to say nothing of the world in general - is today.

Fleet Street in its post-WW2 heyday must have felt like the hub of the world and Bob was an efficient little cog, well oiled in journalistic knowhow, that helped it turn.

He was also a proud father and husband and throughout the book, the gentle trajectory of family life runs as a parallel story to the headline-making journalistic derring-do.

Time has marched on apace since the events that shaped Bob's world. Some things are better, some things are worse and none of them will ever be the same again.

The Very Nearly Man - the title of which was surely Bob's final act of self-deprecation - tellingly evokes a time and place when values were more important than prices and the view from both sides of the reporter's notebook was bound by a set of unspoken rules that was adhered to.

It's fitting that the last words should be left to Bob, providing himself with an epitaph that would serve many an honourable man well: "So the phantom figures have come and gone around the magic shadow show; the stars and the nonentities; the virtuous and the villains, those whom one loved and those one respected.

"Meeting them has been an enduring experience. If I have taken wrong turnings at times and lacked the ultimate degree of self-belief and shunned ambition's hard edge, I have few regrets."