Ronnie Blair Of Advantage Media On The Book That Changed His Life

An Interview With Jake Frankel

You don’t need to empty your notebook. Early in my career, I felt compelled to include in articles nearly every scrap of information I gathered.

Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Ronnie Blair.

Ronnie Blair, the Lead Writer in public relations for Advantage Media and Forbes Books, is the author of the recently published memoir “Eisenhower Babies: Growing Up on Moonshots, Comic Books, and Black-and-White TV.” Prior to his current position, Blair worked for daily newspapers for more than 30 years. He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Morehead State University in Kentucky.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and how you grew up?

I was born and raised in a coal-mining community in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. My parents had grown up during the Great Depression, and neither of them had even a high school diploma. But they were determined that their children would go to college, so my sister, brother, and I were raised with that in goal in mind. Over the course of my childhood and teen years, I became interested in writing as a profession and decided to major in journalism. After college, my first job was as a reporter for the Harlan Daily Enterprise, a tiny paper in my home county. Even though the Enterprise had a small staff and meager resources, it was a great place to start a newspaper career. The fact I was inexperienced was largely irrelevant because the editor didn’t have a lot of options on who to send on major stories. I covered coal mine strikes, coal mine accidents, forest fires that were large enough to draw national attention, and a campaign appearance by Ronald Reagan, among other things. I was there just slightly more than a year, but I have many fond memories of…