Proofing a sports agate page in the composing room of the Griffin newspaper before pages were created entirely on computers.

Regrets, I’ve had a few…

…..but not a decision at 16 to become a journalist

Retirement gives you time to ask yourself, did you make the right choices? Sometimes seemingly unimportant decisions result in surprises, both good and bad.

I’ve never regretted a decision that had a big impact on my life: to become a newspaper journalist when I was in 11th grade. Despite all the downsides of newspaper work, especially as the industry started to struggle in the 1980s, I loved my work for 26 years. I was doing something important.

I was one of just three juniors in the English class that produced the student newspaper for our junior-senior high school. I had to pass a tryout exercise to get on the paper. It wasn’t an automatic option.

I already knew our teacher, Suzanne Anderson, from 10th grade. I liked her from the moment I met her. She had praised a report I did on Gandhi and the civil rights movement. I always did better with teachers who seemed to like me, and she did. Mrs. Anderson had returned to teaching after her kids had grown older. She resembled Maude on television at the time, and even wore those long cardigan sweater vests.

The class produced the newspaper, but we also had a regular curriculum learning the basics of journalism. We also had to find advertisers, and we sold the paper to…