Three decades of enjoying my dream career

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2010 (5957 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I’ve had a Beatles song rattling around in my brain this week.

“It was 20 years ago today/Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.”

What I’ve been tunelessly singing is “It was 30 years ago today.” Like so many of my generation, song lyrics tend to morph into what we think they should be. Either that or they disappear entirely, much like our car keys or reading glasses.

But it has been almost 30 years today. Thirty years since I started journalism school, convinced I was the next Pete Hamill. I was a kid, a fresh-faced Prairie girl with no fear. We took the train to Ottawa so I could start classes at Carleton. The day we arrived, the Winnipeg Tribune and the Ottawa Journal folded.

I was too optimistic to consider that a possible sign.

I worked and studied and partied and fell in love with the craft. All of us thought we could change the world. Some of us, CBC’s Keith Boag among them, actually did. We wrote on typewriters and couldn’t have imagined the Internet. There was a black-and-white romance to hammering out stories late at night, the clack of the keys echoing through the room. We all smoked fiercely, drank our coffee black and learned to curse without blushing.

I’m nostalgic for our energy and the innocence. I sometimes look at the interns we work nearly to death each summer, all of them anxious for what we take for granted. They make me smile. They make me remember.

My first story for this paper was written when I was 18. I probably bought 20 copies of the paper, all of them vanished after countless moves. The paper paid me $25.

I framed the cheque. It’s still in a box of miscellanea. I’m not sentimental and have pared my past to a couple of boxes. I couldn’t let that cheque go.

We get into this business for a variety of reasons. It’s exciting. You meet new people every day. You might get lucky and make a difference, move a reader or change a policy. You can be barely housebroken and still be, if not welcomed, allowed into most places.

This, from Pete Hamill’s memoir A Drinking Life:

“The room (of the New York Post‘s editorial department) was more exciting to me than any movie: an organized chaos of editors shouting from desks, copyboys dashing through doors into the composing room, men and women typing, telephones ringing, the wire service clattering, everyone smoking and putting butts out on the floor.”

It was like that 30 years ago. My first full-time job was at an upstart paper that only published three times a week. I’d come in early and find beer bottles strewn across my desk. The night crew had a few when they put the paper to bed.

Once, in a moment that lives on in several people’s memory, a reporter named Bart Jackson hurled a typewriter at an editor. He didn’t do any damage, at least not the editor, because those things were heavy and hard to toss. It still was a magnificent moment.

I knew then I was ruined for polite company.

If we had time to socialize it was only with each other. No one else understood our hours, our recklessness, our casual disdain for authority. We ran hard and fast. We thought we were all that.

We weren’t. We were just a bunch of moderately talented individuals who were living their dreams. The smart ones never forgot that, not in the years when there was a budget for everything and not when it seemed the cost-cutting would never stop. The really smart ones went into PR.

We kept doing it because, for most of us, there was no possible alternative, nothing that would ever match the excitement and the novelty and the freedom. We did it because we were blessed to have the chance.

It was 30 years today, give or take a few days. Like all the good love affairs it has only become richer, more nuanced and challenging. We make it fresh every day, sometimes with gritted teeth but usually with something approaching gratitude.

Thanks for sharing the journey. I couldn’t do it without you.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca