I worked for eight different newspapers in nearly 30 years in journalism.
Two of them no longer exist in the form they did when I worked there and two others might as well not exist for all that they have changed.
Just as many people remember with fondness the first time they were in love, folks also have memories of the first place they worked. My first actual job was as a busboy in a cafeteria-style steak house, but my first journalism job was in Alexandria, Virginia, at the Gazette.
When I started working there in September 1979, the paper billed itself as the oldest — or perhaps in was second-oldest — continuously published daily newspaper in the United States.
The first eight months I worked there, it was as a stringer covering high-school sports on Friday nights. I learned to keep good notes, to ask the right questions in post-game interviews and to write stories quickly. One thing I was really good at, although it took me time to realize how much it mattered, was writing on deadline.
I used to tell people I couldn’t sing or dance, but I could write a 500-word story from scratch in 15 minutes. That came in really handy when I was covering the Los Angeles Dodgers 11 years later. Games generally ended by around 10:30 p.m. and my deadline was 11.
During the next half-hour, I went down to the locker room, spent five or 10 minutes getting quotes and raced back up to write a story and send it.
I didn’t miss deadlines.
I was busy in those days, attending George Mason University, working as editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, working two nights a week as an assistant manager at a fast-food restaurant and doing my stringing for the Gazette.
In May 1980, I was offered a full-time job. I wasn’t about to let money get in the way of my first full-time newspaper job, but I definitely should have been alarmed when the managing editor asked me how much money I needed.
“Just enough to live on,” I said.
“How about almost enough to live on?” he replied.
I knew I should have gone to truck-driving school. In the expensive suburbs of Washington, D.C., I started at $180 a week.
I was part of a three-man sports staff. Dave Eubank was the sports editor, and Reid Cherner and I both had the title of assistant sports editor. Dave went on to a long career in Arizona and Reid became an assistant sports editor at USA Today.
We got along pretty well, and of all the places I worked, Alexandria was the only place where there was no one on the staff that I didn’t like. None of us were stabbing each other in the back to make ourselves look better.
Most of what we did was cover high school sports during the school year and Alexandria’s minor-league baseball team in the summer. The interesting thing there was that Tim Kurkjian covered baseball too, the beginning of a career that would eventually take him to ESPN and status as one of the two or three top baseball reporters in the world.
I probably covered more minor-league baseball during my career than anything else. Two summers in Alexandria and then two years in Gastonia (NC) and Anderson (SC) in which I was named South Atlantic League sportswriter of the year in both 1982 and 1983.
Then two years in the California League (1994-95) covering the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, with the second of those two seasons covering an entire summer home and away.
One of the great mementoes of my sportswriting career is this photo of me interviewing tennis all-timer Chris Evert in January 1981. It was a fun interview I’ve written about before, and the photo exists because Reid came along with me to take pictures for the Gazette.
As my career progressed after Alexandria, I covered things that were a lot bigger deal — March Madness including two Final Fours, the NFL including a Super Bowl and major league baseball in the most wonderful stadium there is (Dodger Stadium aka Blue Heaven).
But there was something quite wonderful about being younger and experiencing so much of journalism for the first time. I haven’t seen Dave since I left for North Carolina. at the end of 1981, and the last time I saw Reid was on a visit home in 1992.
They are two guys I will never forget, and today is Reid’s birthday.
Happy birthday, dude.