One began a short story, "An Imperfect Conflagration," written in the 1880s by Ambrose Bierce: "Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father - an act which made a deep impression on me at the time."

The other, by Hunter S. Thompson, appeared in 1971: "We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like 'I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive.' And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas."

In December 1913, Bierce rode a horse into Mexico, which was then suffering from a civil war. He had earlier written to a friend, "If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a Gringo in Mexico - ah, that is euthanasia!"

And then he vanished, although his last adventures inspired a fine novel, "Gringo Viejo" by Carols Fuentes, and a decent movie, "The Old Gringo," based on the novel.

Thompson killed himself over the weekend. I have no idea why, and the one time I ever talked to him - he called me in the wee hours once to talk about the Lisl Auman case - I was rather tongue-tied and star-struck, for he might have been the most influential journalist of the late 20th century.

Thompson's famous gonzo style didn't just hatch one morning. If you read the best collection of his work, "The Great Shark Hunt," which came out in 1979, you'll find a lot of great more-or-less traditional journalism, much of it written from South America for mainstream publications, as with this from 1963:

"When the cold Andean dusk comes down on Cuzco, the waiters hurry to shut the venetian blinds in the lounge of the big hotel in the middle of town. They do it because the Indians come up on the stone porch and stare at the people inside. It tends to make tourists uncomfortable, so the blinds are pulled. The tall, oak-paneled room immediately seems more cheerful."

Then came his 1966 book "Hell's Angels." He didn't just interview people and quote police authorities; he got into the story, so deeply that he ended up getting stomped. A friend in college was highly impressed by the book and urged me to read it, so I did, and when we encountered that memorable 1971 opening Barstow paragraph in Rolling Stone magazine, we checked to see if it was the same Hunter Thompson who had written the Hell's Angels book.

It was, and Thompson was at his prime then, writing not only what he saw but speculating about what might be happening, making himself a character who might be half-crazy, but that made him a lot saner than the full-bore lunatics who ran our country.

Thompson had some good effects on American journalism. He loosened it up with a vicious style that captured the situation in just a few words. In the 1972 Democratic primaries, Hubert Humphrey "campaigned like a rat in heat," and Edward Muskie sounded "like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop."

He had some bad effects on American journalists of my generation, many of whom seemed to think that creativity required trunkloads of uncontrollable substances, and that bragging about your consumption somehow improved your writing.

I yearned to be able to write like Thompson or Bierce. Bierce fought the good fight against the railroad barons that dominated California politics. Thompson was more of an idealist than the cynical Bierce, as evidenced in 1973: "What a fantastic monument to the better instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon."

The greedy little hustlers are still running this country, 32 years later. Good writing only goes so far, no matter how compelling the opening paragraph.

-- Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.