Retirement Day: I Begin a New Journey by Looking Backwards

I retired Oct. 1, 2024, after a 35+ year career that started badly and, despite my best efforts, ended with champagne corks.

My first job was dishwasher at the Antique Kitchen Pancake House in Portage, Mich. It was hard, dirty work, but all was forgiven when they handed me my first paycheck. To this day, the sight of a flapjack makes my stomach churn.

Taking a step up in the world, I delivered pizza for Domino’s where I added tips to my haul. The downside: I got so many speeding tickets, I lost my license and spent ten days in the Kalamazoo County Jail.

I shared a cell with four guys who had more serious offenses and longer stays. They were good chess players. We slept a lot, and I was reformed, mostly.

The summer I turned 18, I was making batches of pizza dough in a kind of metal butter churn at the Domino’s commissary in Kalamazoo. Pulling the crank that turned a blade through a sack of flour, a pitcher of water and a cup of oil, I had an epiphany. If I didn’t do something different by September, I’d be pulling this crank for the rest of my life. So, I applied to attend the local college.

Thanks to Pell grants and other programs, I escaped the life of a doughboy. I loved exploring history and literature, I tried to grok math and computer science, but calculus completely baffled me and I was clearly not cut out for software programming, a job done in those days on punch cards.

Eventually the grants dried up, and I dropped out.

Curious about the world, I spent half a decade travelling around America working odd jobs in greasy spoons like Famous Recipe Fried Chicken where I learned to love gizzards. Briefly, I looked smart behind the front desk of a boutique hotel in New Orleans’ French Quarter, but a bad case of lice from the mattress in my cheap studio apartment sent me packing.

Once I hitchhiked from Kalamazoo to San Francisco to see a high school buddy living near a grimy subway stop in the Mission District. I made rent flipping burgers at the Doggie Diner on Geary St., then graduated to the swank-by-comparison Belly Deli on Pier 39.

I loved the City by the Bay from the first smell of the eucalyptus trees lining Land’s End Trail, but I was restless and poor and moved on after a year or so, hoping I could return someday under better conditions.

Left Turn, March

Standing in a long line to see the 1981 hit movie “Arthur” in Hartford, Conn., a young man struck up a conversation with me about his plans to join the Army. I thought he was a nice guy and slightly crazy. We hung out a bit after the movie. I told him I would never join the Army, but later I couldn’t shake the thought.

I was tired of living in my Dad’s basement and working as a parking lot attendant. I started jogging. Eventually, I went down to the recruiters’ office. They promised money for college, a trip to Europe and a chance to learn a new career as a surveyor working for the field artillery.

I signed up. It was a hard three years. Almost as bad as the Antique Kitchen Pancake House and just slightly more organized.

A career as a civil surveyor never panned out, in large part due to some new technology. The Global Positioning System (aka GPS) was just starting to roll out in specialized computers that took up the whole back seat of a jeep. It now fits neatly inside a piece of a chip in a smartphone. But I did spend a year in Germany and get the money to finish college.

                                Hamming it up on maneuvers in Texas. I'm holding a book of poetry.

My 20 Minutes as a Teacher

Inspired in part by a TV show from my youth, I went back to Kalamazoo to restart college. I thought I could be a high school English teacher, suave and sensitive as Pete Dixon, the character Lloyd Haynes played in “Room 222.” A few weeks of student teaching in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Mich. dispelled that fantasy. Unlike Pete, I had all the social skills of a stone. I grabbed my English major and fled the public school system.

Dejected, I considered work at a local factory. My wife wisely insisted I try something more ambitious. So, I answered an ad from a weekly newspaper in Grand Rapids. What turned out to be my career began.

I had the good fortune of being hired as the greenest cub reporter at the Advance Newspapers and assigned to cover the suburb of Kentwood for a small team managed by group editor Margaret DeRitter.

A graduate of Calvin College, the university of the Christian aka Dutch Reformed Church, Margaret discovered somewhere along her journey she was also a lesbian. She embraced both these sides of her identity with a passion. Luckily for me another side of Margaret is she was and remains a helluva a good writer, editor and mentor.

Under Margaret’s tutelage, I slowly, painfully learned how to express myself less awkwardly with the written word. I learned this by writing up the dozen of new business announcements and other tidbits that every week filled my inbox (in those days an actual wire mesh basket) as well as anything that smelled vaguely like a story at the Kentwood school board and city commission meetings I regularly attended with two pens, a steno pad and an extra large cup from 7-Eleven of what was then called coffee.

Once a week, Margaret called me into a conference room to review a couple of my stories, autopsies where I got to see the bloated livers and sickly spleens in my writing with a good-natured laugh and a pat on the back to keep trying.

It was hard. Despite the best efforts of my high school and college teachers, I was a lousy writer. But the job forced me to write every day. We had pages to fill.

Slowly, fitfully, my writing started to flow. 

A Ride in a Helicopter Ambulance

The height of technology in those days at the second largest newspaper in Grand Rapids was the linotype machine. It required a trained specialist to operate it. She printed out our stories on long, narrow plastic sheets. Every Friday, we would run our printouts through glue machines and, using Exact-o knives, literally cut and paste our stories on to dummy cardboard pages. In the rush to get seven suburban newspapers to bed and start the weekend, we’d haggle over an odd word to fill out a line or a period to finish a shortened sentence. 

Somewhere along the way, we got a TRS-80 Model 100 portable for use on special occasions. Typically, the sports editors kept it for weekend and evening games.  I got to use it once. Pecking out a story on its two-line, monochrome, non-backlit display while overdosing on bad coffee at a Denny’s, I felt I had arrived as a modern man.

My shining moment came when I scooped the local daily. My rival and I were both working on features about the helicopter ambulance team at the airport. We’d spend nights there hoping for a call.

Early one morning when she was away and I had just fallen into a deep sleep on a creaky military cot, a call came in. A kid was hurt in a motorcycle accident. Someone yelled at me to hurry up or I’d be left behind. I scrambled into the copter, and we took off.

At the hospital, I bumped into the hurt kid’s parents, expressed some sympathy and snagged their permission to take pictures in the trauma room. The attending doctor struggled for a few minutes to intubate the young man. Once he got his patient stabilized, he turned to me standing on a table taking pictures and barked, “who the hell are you?”

The story ran in all our editions and netted me an award with a small cash bonus.

It was one example of over-the-top efforts Advance reporters made on a regular basis to add sparkle to a free newspaper. Sometimes disparagingly called the Advertiser, it got tossed on to porches where it often languished unread, an ugly lump of ice under the snow, a slowly disintegrating grey mass in the rain.

Next chapter: High tech in Hong Kong