I worked for the San Diego Evening Tribune for approximately eight years and 11 months. I was just 13 months short of being vested in the retirement program when I quit. That’s okay.
If I’d stayed on at the paper I might have gone fully crazy.
I was 28 when the Trib hired me out of a small-town daily in New Jersey’s rural northwest. I think somewhere I still have a picture of myself at the Sussex County Fair — taken by the staff photographer who’d accompanied me — as I tried to milk a Holstein. Standard stuff for small-town dailies back then.
I asked the wise guy Italian Assistant Managing Editor named Larry Lusitana why he’d hired me, and he said: “We’ve had good luck with people from New Jersey.” It was only after I’d left the paper that I found out Lusitana was from that state. [Read more…]