36 years into this trip, it's time to say farewell
By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published August 24, 2003
Opinion in American culture is undergoing a divorce from fact. You no longer have to know a damned thing about the subject at hand to have an opinion about it. - one of my favorite columnists right before he, briefly, became an editor.
Thank God! - Me, before and since.
Tommy Green was an advertising salesman at the New Bern (N.C.) Sun Journal, the first newspaper I worked at. We would get together after work for a beer every once in a while and decide how much better the Sun Journal would be if we owned it.
"The best way to guarantee performance," Green said one day, squinting at me through smoke from the cigarette that always dangled from his mouth, "is to pay an employee just a little bit more than he thinks he's worth."
Talk about prophecy.
If this weren't my last regular column, I would never admit how right he turned out to be.
I haven't been paid an obscene amount of money, but it has been enough to keep me a little scared that some day somebody would discover that I had no idea whatsoever what I was doing.
And there is a bit of joy in coming to the point where I can say that either I successfully hid that for all of these years, or that they just kept me around because I was cute.
Having my mobile home situated 50 feet outside the city limits of New Bern, where I had planned on becoming a police officer after my discharge from the Marines in 1967, turned out to be a lucky stroke of fate. I couldn't be a cop, the city said, unless I lived in the city.
I was literally knocking on doors looking for a job when I found a newspaper as desperate for a sportswriter as I was for a job, and the take home pay, $67 per week, was only $2 less than the police job.
Despite that I was completely ignorant about any sport that I hadn't played, I became sports editor and, when it turned out that the police reporter fainted at the sight of blood and couldn't interview a beauty queen without blushing, I got those assignments, too.
I went from there to the Kankakee (Ill.) Daily Journal where I worked four years covering crime, fires and politics.
I came to the St. Petersburg Times in 1973, following a friend who had come here the year before. Howard Wolknsky, who is now a business writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, got to be the old hand showing the new guy around. It wasn't the first time. Howard's wisdom and courage, subjects for another column, had a lot to do with my politics changing from conservative to liberal, something I have never regreted. It is enough to say that he and I can credit Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the FBI for forging a seminal friendship between a Vietnam veteran and a draft resister.
During the nearly 36 years I spent in this business I have covered fires, murders, train wrecks, riots and corrupt politics, Democrat, Republican and independent. I was hospitalized once after a propane explosion and again after an ax-handle got broken over my head (I've already heard the jokes) in a riot.
I have observed the changes in how women, gays and members of racial, ethnic and religious minorities have been treated by our society and rejoice in the progress made while retaining an awareness of the remaining need.
During those years I have been divorced twice, widowed once, married three times, had cancer and been treated for depression.
A few years back, this column - once a weekly exercise while I was a beat reporter - became my full-time job and I started getting paid to have opinions. One friend said that the change made me go from being opinionated to "profoundly opinionated."
I have been praised, reviled, threatened, feted and had my last name mispronounced in every conceivable way.
I have worked with a few great journalists, hundreds of very good ones and only a few turkeys, and I have shared with them the great pleasure of being able to be nosy and, in my case, opinionated for a living.
Talk about your bully pulpits.
Outside of being born wealthy or winning the lottery, there is no other career I would choose if I had it to do over again.
This is a kind of goodbye, but I will be writing a monthly column for the foreseeable future - until I get tired of it or you or the Times get tired of me.
