My journalism journey Part 31

Somewhere along the path, I got burned out writing sports. I even thought of changing careers. I was getting testy with my editor, Ron Feickert, had run-ins with readers at the grocery story over stories. I was tired of covering games, sitting in bleachers, dealing with parents, coaches, athletes.

Looking back on it, I was probably depressed. I kept applying for jobs and wasn't getting anything. I really wanted to get into feature writing. I did a lot of sports features, so I would use those as my clips, and really, most of my game stories were more like features. But when I applied, I wasn't taken seriously as a feature writer.

So I applied as a sports writer, too. And even then, I wasn't getting any bites. I had been in Aberdeen, South Dakota, for five years and I was desperate to move on. But with 15 years of experience, I couldn't get any takers. I was too old to get a job as a sports writer; larger newspapers wanted a young writer so they could pay him/her less. I didn't want the smaller papers, of course. I wanted to move up.

So sometime in the summer of 1996, my boss, Cindy Eikamp, suggested I take a vacant copy editor job on the staff. I already did desk work twice a week. But on the news desk, I would learn to paginate. I would do the front page and the back of the A section in QuarkXpress. It would be a totally new experience for me. Did I want to give it a try?

Wow! What a decision to make! Did I want to try it? I didn't have to think long on that one. I would be giving up writing, which I loved. But it would be a step on a new path, a new direction.

Yes. I told her yes, right away. In August, I began my training as a news copy editor.

I started doing mundane things such as the people column, where I learned we ran far too many items on Michael Jackson. I worked my way up to the state pages and state briefs, the local page, the obituaries, and then learned QuarkXpress and the back of the A section. And finally A1.

Quark was fun to use, it was so intuitive. I found it was an easy program. We used it on a Mac, but we had to read the stories on our regular computer programs and then transfer the stories over on a disc to the Mac. That was the one problem with Quark back then; it didn't have a good database program for stories. But otherwise, it was a sweet pagination program, the one every pagination wanted to be like.

I did the front page the night the Grand Forks Herald building burned down and the streets of Grand Forks, North Dakota, flooded; and the night Lady Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris. I also did the page when Mother Teresa died.

I was on the desk for about a week when Ron's wife, Darlys, had a heart attack. Ron had to take time off from work to be with her in Sioux Falls. It was the start of the football season, and we had hired Scott Waltman as an intern to fill my spot on the staff, but we had no one to work on the desk. So I moved back to the sports desk full time for awhile until Darlys was well enough to come back home.

I also had to pitch in as a reporter during the floods after the winter of 1996 during the spring of 1997. The floods were massive and we needed help making phone calls. I called around to various area law enforcement agencies trying to find out how bad things were.

I remember talking to one woman in the rural Redfield area who woke up to find water coming up to the second floor of her house. She had to call for a rescue off her roof. It was a different kind of exciting reporting than that of reporting from a championship basketball game.

Eikamp assured me that I would find a job elsewhere as a copy editor after a year of working on the desk. She was really close. I started sending out resumes looking for copy desk work in the summer of 1997 and got more than just nibbles. In September, not long after Lady Diana's death, I went to Macon, Ga., for an interview with the Macon Telegraph. Not long after that, I interviewed at the Wichita (Kan.) Eagle. Both were Knight-Ridder papers, as was the Aberdeen American News.

I could be on the move again, maybe. I waited and waited for phone calls. Where would I go? Or would I stay?