No more ‘self-serving malarkey’ – Forest Park Review
After 26 years of writing weekly columns for the Forest Park Review, I am retiring. Writing for the Review fulfilled a life-long dream. After composing more than 1,300 columns, I’m leaving with no regrets.
I’ll always be grateful for the opportunity to write for the Review. My family and I are also thankful for this community. We still socialize with the neighbors we met in 1982. Our kids are still hanging out with their childhood friends. There is no one as loyal and down-to-earth as Forest Park friends, and they’ve always been there for us.
I started writing for the Review 37 years ago. In the beginning, I wrote advertisements and covered high school sports and worked my way up to writing columns.
I wrote my first column on my wife’s birthday, Oct. 2, 1999. She has always been a good sport about my sharing our family life with all of you. Our kids also didn’t mind being occasional subjects for a column. I’m sure many of you feel like you got to know our family. Our kids connected us to the community.
Aside from sharing personal experiences, I was happy to profile others. I interviewed many humble, unassuming people who didn’t know how compelling their stories were. I was struck by how many had longstanding roots in town.
We don’t just have long-term residents; we have longstanding businesses that continue to thrive. Our cemeteries were always good for a story. I also loved introducing new businesses. I hoped to give business owners the exposure they needed to succeed.
I wrote these as human-interest stories, not advertisements. These brave entrepreneurs told me what led them to start a shop, a restaurant, or a store. When I wrote about a new plumbing business in town, a reader knocked on my door to get the phone number.
I also enjoyed promoting nonprofit businesses and the causes they supported. Sometimes I was approached by families who needed their fundraiser publicized. It was a win-win for me. They needed help and I needed a topic.
Finding topics was the hardest part of the job. Fortunately, Forest Park has been the gift that keeps giving. We have such a rich history; it’s given me material for several books. We also have 16-inch softball. We provided such great coverage of the No Gloves Tournament, the Review was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
My main goal, though, was to give all of you a break from hard news. I didn’t like writing serious columns about real problems. I wanted the column to be fun. Occasionally, I came up with humor pieces. Sometimes, readers needed a break from essays, so I wrote columns of one-liners.
I made some wonderful friends through the column. I was happy to write their life stories. I also celebrated the accomplishments of young people. Some of them even had opportunities to write for the paper.
I appreciated the feedback I got from readers. I had so many chance encounters on the street with readers who said they read my column. My standard joke was, “That makes two of us.” I was grateful for supportive comments and didn’t mind the occasional criticism — such as the quote in the headline above.
Over the years, the Review has changed along with my circumstances. We have six grandsons to keep us busy. I volunteer as an ESL tutor at Triton. My wife and I have taken some fabulous vacations. We also belong to a health club, where I work out on the track and exercise my brain by playing bridge.
Wait, I do have one regret: I only learned to type with two fingers.
But I’m waving farewell with both hands.
