My First Article

I don't know that I've posted this ever before, but I was going through some old papers and found the very first article I ever had published.

Mentions of it have appeared at various times, but here's the actual article as it appeared on November 1, 1984.

I can still remember how excited I was to have published something. I was so excited that I met my mother at the local store where she stopped every day on the way home from work to pick up bread or milk or something so I could show her the article. (I'm guessing my husband was at the firehouse, working.)

After that I knew I would be writing for the rest of my life, even though my mother had told me more than once that it was a dead-end career and I'd never make a living at it. While it did not make me rich, it made me happy, and it allowed me to contribute to the household coffers. It also made me quite knowledgeable about my community and what was going on during the 40 years I've written about it.

In looking through these old papers, I see I wrote about everything from soccer and basketball games to vultures to floods to new business openings to supervisors' meetings and everything in between. In all honesty, I don't remember 80 percent of these articles. But there they are in black and white.

Most days I don't think that what I did amounted to much, but honestly, it was quite a career, and quite an endeavor to keep the public informed.

If only they had actually read it.