Attention to detail defined Ted V.A.

“It was just a little piece,” he said in 2014. “But I always liked to find out as much as I could, and we had some very detailed maps. I knew exactly where it was.”

That curiosity and attention to detail defined the reporting career of Van Arsdol, who died on Monday after several months in hospice care. He was 95.

Our 2014 story marked quite a switch in Van Arsdol’s place on a page of The Columbian. For 25 years, he was the story’s writer, not its subject.

A few days ago, Carole Van Arsdol recalled hearing how former managing editor Erwin Rieger hired her husband.

“He told him, ‘Ted, there are a lot of stories here: Go out and get them,’ ” she said.

Newsroom staffers who worked with Van Arsdol are remembering him as a thorough professional, of course, but it’s also more personal. Former reporter and editor Gregg Herrington grew up reading The Columbian and was a student when he first noted Van Arsdol’s byline. It was on a series about the history of prunes in Clark County. It wasn’t that Herrington particularly cared about prunes.

“But as a budding journalist,” Herrington said, “it was interesting that the paper devoted so much space to it, and this one reporter knew so much about it and covered it so thoroughly and in such depth.”

He read it all, Herrington said, and was surprised to learn how big a role prunes played in county history.

A couple of other newsroom contemporaries described Van Arsdol as a role model for young reporters.

“I used to listen to Ted interview sources on the phone, analyze the kinds of questions he asked and the way he asked them,” said Don Chandler, who started at The Columbian in 1963. “He had an interesting style. He would ask a question, then repeat the answer so the source was certain of what he had said, and so the source knew Ted had understood correctly.

“The guy was totally unflappable, never got excited, even if a source yelled and screamed,” Chandler said. “I once asked him how he stayed so cool, always so even keeled. He replied: ‘I follow the Taoist way and just go with the flow.’ ”

Later in his career, Van Arsdol did a lot writing for the entertainment section, recalled copy editor and page designer Dan Tolva. It always seemed to be a clash of cultures when Tolva heard this straight-arrow former Army sergeant doing a phone interview with a musician from a rock ‘n’ band such as .38 Special.

“But he kept plugging,” Tolva said.

Ted V.A., as he was dubbed, worked two stints in our newsroom — from 1963 to 1984, and 1991 to 1994. That certainly didn’t define his writing career, however. He wrote several books about Northwest history and authored the history of his WWII unit. That’s how he met his wife.

“He needed a typist,” Carole Van Arsdol said. “It went from there.”

They were married on Oct. 4, 1971. Her husband continued to write until he was 90 or so, she said.

Even late in his life, when Alzheimer’s disease had taken its toll, Van Arsdol still demonstrated a reporter’s instincts. When he went into a care home, the longtime reporter must have realized that the woman who ran the place had some interesting stories to tell, Carole Van Arsdol said.

“She told me that Ted was wanting to interview her,” she said.