Fortune's Allan Sloan, one of the country's most-respected business journalists, recently eulogized another luminary of the profession, James "Jim" Walker Michaels, the long-time editor of Forbes who passed away on October 2, 2007 at the age of 86.

"Michaels forced us to find things that competitors such as BusinessWeek and Fortune and the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal hadn't found, and forced us to write business articles that were like the man himself; short, feisty and opinionated. And smart," Sloan wrote.

Sloan worked for Michaels at Forbes from 1979 to 1981 and then again from 1984-1989.  It was while at Forbes that Sloan emerged as a world-class business journalist.

"In our final lunch, last year, [Michaels] was physically frail but mentally robust, urging me to write how some 401 (k) investors are getting ripped off because of investment choices foisted on them by employers," Sloan recalls.  "I should have done it."