The end of a career

And the beginning of . . . 

What I have to say here is the end of an old story creating the beginning of a new one.

Today — Thursday, May 29, 2014 — is my absolute last day of a career in paid journalism (they go together, in my view) which began in late July, 1969. I am sorry now that I did not make a note of that 1969 day and date. So, making a list of things I have learned in those 45-odd years, I have a No. 1: “Make a note of important dates.”

I do have the X. It marks the office of Dick Tarpley, managing editor of The Abilene Reporter-News, to whom, through sheerest serendipity, I was introduced one hot July noontime.

First, I had to run into Jon Standefer. My wife and I were just out of the Army, passing through town to visit my family before continuing on to San Diego, California, where she grew up and where we planned to live. I don’t remember why I went to the post office, but it was the big, main Abilene, Texas, post office downtown, so it must have been more than just mailing a letter.

In the lobby, Standefer and I saw each other. We were high school classmates, he a grade ahead of me. He told me he was working as a reporter and editor at The Abilene Reporter-News. That was interesting, I said, because my intention was to go to San Diego and, even though I had never set foot in a newsroom, get a job at the newspaper there. I was an English major, after all.

Standefer looked at me in an “uh-huh” way and asked me to walk over to the newspaper with him. At the newspaper, he knocked on the door of an office. Tarpley, a big man wearing glasses, looked up from his work. “Got a minute?” Standefer said. Tarpley did, and Standefer explained my situation. I offered my only two qualifications: “I am a Stanford graduate, and I know I can write at least as well as anything I have ever read on the front page of a newspaper.”

Tarpley hired me, at $70 a week. In less than 15 minutes, I moved from a) having no direction to b) having a map with an X marked on it. Back at my house, my wife met me out front, wondering where I had been. When I told her, tears welled out of her California eyes. A few slipped down her cheeks and dropped to the sidewalk, making tiny pops of steam at our feet.

So the old story had a fast start. Today, May 29, 2014, aboard what seems to be a different planet, I am peering at the closing X, a looming thing in the middle of a cleared-out community college journalism office. I take a breath and turn my back on it, close the door behind me, and look for a new X outside. There is none. I guess a new story has to develop, before it can appear.