Having settled on a career as a sports writer when my dad transfered to McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey, before my sophomore year, I joined the Northern Burlington High School student newspaper and shyly asked the advisor if I could write a profile on the football coach. She laughed but said go ahead if I wanted to. Call that a dim green light to my query. By the following spring I was the paper's established sports writer when the baseball coach asked that I contact the Bordentown Register-News, which needed someone to cover the team. They paid 5 cents per word. On April 18, 1974, my first article appeared (another legacy of that debut, my mom began a scrapbook of my articles, which I kept up through my career ). I covered all of Northern Burlington's sports, learning deadline pressure typing out my basketball stories after Tuesday night games and taping them to our front door for the editor to pick up Wednesday morning after I headed to school. That editor assigned me to cover McGuire's intramural softball leagues, giving me my first experience with the ever-existent enmity between reporters and military public affairs officers. In the summer of 1975 I did a series of deep-analysis stories for the Register-News on the recently published Title IX regulations. I moved on from sports when I got to college, but I've continued writing sports-related features, and was pressed back into baseball beat writing duty at the Anderson (South Carolina) Independent-Mail to cover the Atlanta Braves' 1991 pennant-clinching game, including locker-room celebration interviews. (Click here for that scrapbook entry.)
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