For once, I didn’t need a scarf or gloves
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- April 13, 2024
- 443
From fall 1987 until the last day of 1999, I had the great good fortune to work at a place that very quickly felt like home.
Having established myself, in a modest way, as a sports guy who could run a department with just enough skill and sleight of hand to maintain a modicum of journalistic integrity, I was ready to move on. A long-term romantic relationship had finally foundered on the shores of my recklessness, setting the stage for the next act.
That’s the thing about newspaper lifers.
We’re a nomadic breed, always looking for a new challenge, something that brings out aspects of our vocational calling we never knew existed, at least until you put yourself to the task.
In my case, that opportunity presented itself in the form of taking the job as the entertainment editor, an odd sort of slide step from the sandbox of athletics into something a bit more, well, polished.
Instead of ballgames and other contests, I began covering concerts and plays. Gone were the nights of press boxes and locker rooms, replaced with primo center-section seats as symphonies and rock bands performed and actors made stages their own and best-selling authors listened attentively to my tentatively posed questions.
It didn’t take long for me to draw distinct parallels between interviewing coaches and talking with country music stars.
Both wanted a fair shake, to be quoted accurately and to have the chance to change an answer or two if they felt the need to clarify something before I hung up the phone or drove off into the night.
I remain kind of proud that no one ever accused me of misquoting them, at least to my face, and that ability, without the use of a tape recorder or, gulp, a smartphone is something of a badge of honor.
A journalist’s only defense against accusations of malfeasance is his or her reputation for accuracy, so we guard that with the intensity of a goal-line stand or a difficult Shakespearean soliloquy.
From arts and entertainment, I ventured rather blindly into the realm of hard news, taking a position as senior night editor for a newspaper fully 700 miles away from home, a place where I knew no one and no one knew me. Again, journalists are true nomads.
We go where the work is and where another challenge awaits, not unlike radio disc jockeys or television personalities. Reality soon becomes what you see in the mirror as you get older and wiser.
My primary responsibilities revolved around the front page of the daily paper, what stories went where, how to balance the local with the national and international dispatches, which photos to feature and, most essentially, the way the news staff’s copy was presented.
Like any other collection of creative people, newsroom writers and photographers have a pronounced (and sometimes inflated) sense of themselves and their work, which often leads to a clash of egos.
But guess what?
The typical subscriber doesn’t give a whit about any of that drama. They want their paper delivered on time, every day without fail, and rely on what’s printed to be a reliable source of information.
As I look back on a career that began the month after I graduated from college and continues to this day, some 47 years down the road, I’m grateful for having worked with (and for) some incredible people, most of whom I’ll probably never see again.
Unless, however, I do, and that’s what I want to write about now.
Faithful readers may recall that about three months ago, I returned to my hometown after spending 23-plus years in coastal Carolina, a span of time my wife calls “our endless summer vacation.”
The hows and whys don’t matter; in fact, all that counts is we decided we had one more move left in us and it was now go-time.
Did we think through all the ramifications? Did we consider the ripple effect a decision like that would have? Did we fully understand the utter folly of moving to Ohio in early January?
Some questions are better left unanswered, I think you’d agree.
There have been surprises aplenty since our rocky reentry, but without a doubt, the most pleasant one involved an invitation I received last week, specifically to join a group of former co-workers at their bimonthly get-together the next county over.
It felt like the first real day of spring, a welcome relief after days and weeks of freezing temperatures, tornado sirens, snow, sleet, icy sidewalks and a random hailstorm that jolted me to my core.
There were flowering dogwoods and the scent of freshly mown grass, a fine southerly breeze, and plenty of parking at the restaurant where folks I hadn’t seen in many moons were waiting.
I couldn’t have felt more welcome had they handed me the key to the city, and I had to fight back the tears as I got sincere hugs and hearty handshakes, all accented with “I’m so happy you’re back” sentiments. Most of the time, I couldn’t even form coherent sentences, something my former bosses doubtless noted.
As I’ve said, newspaper people are nomadic by nature, and it’s a big world out there. Only the luckiest of us get to come home again.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where he’s looking for volunteers to help him unpack.