Perhaps it was the interview with astronaut Gene Cernan, the last moonwalker. Or maybe it was the interview with well-oiled rocker Joe Walsh. Then again, it could have been as I stood surrounded by 20 or 30 Minnesota militia men snapping photos of them they didn’t want taken and shoving my way out of the room. When the realization descended on me hardly matters, but I knew my life changed forever due to the time and mentorship I received at Wichita State University.
It transformed in the basement of Wilner Auditorium when the late Professor Les Anderson stopped me after class to ask, “What’s your major?” I told him I didn’t really know. “It needs to be journalism,” he said. From that moment everything fell into place. It was a movie moment experienced by few, but real and profound.
Professors pounded into my malleable brain the fundamentals, the ethics, the importance and responsibilities of the profession. Those lessons didn’t leave me and bore so deep in my noggin that I refused to veer from them. Even during the most difficult times, I’ve held fast to the tenets and the sometimes brutal honesty they require. If all else failed, I could look in the mirror and say I didn’t waver when it mattered most.
Les Anderson steered me into a life I never conjured. When I walked onto the WSU campus during an orientation session on a sweltering August day in 1988, I had no clue what I’d pursue academically. Within a year my future was laid before me, and I knew exactly where I was headed.
Early on in this process I dreamed of working for Newsweek and covering wars in far-off lands. As a nontraditional student 10 years older than many of my classmates, I had to be serious, waste no time and take risks. Lack of experience never stopped me. I’d heard how hard it was to land a job in journalism and was determined to make it happen.
Les convinced me that community journalism was the career path I should pursue, his first love. No war correspondent stories. No giant metro papers. Community journalism fit me perfectly. I was a small town guy before beginning classes at WSU.
What I learned in the Elliott School of Communication was that I could pursue all the dreams I held, at whatever level, and make a difference. That has held true, and I suppose you could say the same about any profession pursued by anyone attending college.
As editor of newspapers from weekly to daily, the stories we tell make a difference in people’s lives. They are carefully cut out, pasted in scrapbooks and stuck on refrigerators, and that makes me happy. Different from some community newspapers, though, those lessons of doing important, hard-hitting stories never left me. As a result, even in the smaller papers where I’ve worked, we have unflinchingly reported the news, even when it’s difficult. Often the people we write about in an unflattering light are the same people who live a few blocks away or I see in the grocery store.
There’s no hiding in a small town, and I’ve felt the heat and the knot in my stomach knowing that the stories we sometimes write will not make me friends. I always figured I’ll just tell the truth – beautiful or ugly – and let the rest take care of itself. It’s worked as far as I’m concerned. Being editor at smaller papers allowed me to continue my own love of writing while directing coverage, but also allowed no cover when the hate flowed. The buck definitely stopped with me, and still does. I’m okay with that.
We’ve written big stories about the president of the Aryan Nations moving into our town. The phones rang with angry readers not thinking our paper should do stories that made our city look bad. Others stopped in to share those same sentiments, claiming I just wanted to land a job at the New York Times. A few callers, however, thanked me for writing the story, and in three months the monster who moved into town had moved on. Those little victories reinforced everything I learned in those classrooms at Wichita State.
The values, ethics, lessons and training I learned from my professors and mentors have lived on, and I’ve passed them on. Mistakes were made, of course, but never for the wrong reasons. I can live with that, too, and it’s served me well. It’s funny what dreams and careers are made and eventually realized in a hallway, outside a classroom, by a caring professor.
What I learned in the Elliott School of Communication was that I could pursue all the dreams I held, at whatever level, and make a difference.
