I Kept the Change

                  Fifty years ago this month, the world changed. My world, anyway.

                  Wasn’t a huge deal, I guess — a report on a local government meeting, published in a small-town newspaper. A couple dozen column-inches of copy. Nowhere near Pulitzer Prize-winning, for sure. 

                  The significance was that I wrote it. So, it changed my world, starting a 40-year career in journalism.

                  It was, as J.R.R. Tolkien pronounced through Gandalf the Gray, “a chance meeting in Middle Earth.” I was living in the vicinity of Sauk City, Wis., as were two of my high school classmates, a married couple. He had been hanging out at the local newspaper, hoping to catch a job, when another friend, who had been a “stringer” covering village board meetings, quit the gig to move out-of-state and further a relationship.

                  The male half of my classmate couple thought he had found his opening. But his better half observed that “Scott’s the writer” — probably based on nothing other than the common knowledge that I had written some (mostly bad) poetry in high school.

                  So, within the matter of week or two, I was sitting in the Prairie du Sac village office, twice a month, recording the business of that burg. I think I was literally sitting at the desk of some village employee, banging away at a Smith-Corona or some such typewriter. (Which was also a new experience. I was in the College Prep program in high school seven years earlier, but for some reason known only to the guidance counselor, that course of study in my case did not involve typing. Why would anyone need that in college?)

                  Did I, leaning back in that office chair, sometimes nod off? Was it because the government business I was covering was THAT boring? Could be. But, with no idea of how, other than the rudimentary guidance provided by Sauk-Prairie Star Editor Pat “Pecky” Peckham, I somehow managed to turn it into readable news copy.

                  Or at least close enough to readable that I was allowed to continue, at $15 per story. (Seems pretty pathetic now, but those were 1974 dollars. Oh, OK, even at that rate, pretty pathetic.) A year or so later, the Star’s sportswriter quit, and I was offered that gig — something hard for a jock wannabe to turn down, even though it paid only $25 a month.

                  But after two years of chasing the Friday Night Lights and otherwise covering boys’ high school sports, and the then-evolving girls’ athletics and an adult amateur baseball team, it occurred to me that I could make a full-time living at this. So I put a listing in the Wisconsin Newspaper Association newsletter.

                  The first offer I got was from the newspaper in Blanchardville, which seemed like a good place to start — close enough to Madison to maintain my ties to the place where I had lived for much of the previous decade, and the friends I had made there, and also closer to my parents and my “hometown.”

                  But as I was about to go out the door and make the hour and a half drive to that job interview, the phone rang. The publisher’s wife was calling, saying that her husband had had a major heart attack, and would not be able to meet with me until further notice.

                  So I went back to the stack of offers, a half-dozen or so, that had continued to come in from my WNA ad. I decided to address them in alphabetical order (which moved Minocqua, an area where my family had vacationed, and where I had always wanted to live, down the list). Arcadia was first on that basis, even though I had never heard of Trempealeau County and had no idea where it was.

                  I never got any further down the list. Somewhere on Hwy. 95 between Blair and Arcadia, I decided Trempealeau County was where I wanted to live, and whatever the Arcadia News-Leader was offering, I was taking it. A month later, I began my full-time career in journalism — learning on the job, again.

                  That continued for two and a half years, until a disagreement with management over an editorial issue prompted me to resign. But I didn’t want to leave the Arcadia area, so I took some non-journalistic jobs to keep a roof over my head and food on the table: driving a 15-passenger van for a sheltered workshop, installing and servicing dairy pipeline systems, waiting on customers in a hardware store, etc.

                  In the summer of 1980, I was working as an auto mechanic, and not particularly interested in returning to journalism, by leaving a job that ended when I punched the clock and didn’t follow me home. But when the Whitehall Times unexpectedly called and offered me their editorship, the idea of having clean fingernails — and a career — appealed to me, and I returned to journalism.

                  I didn’t know at the time how long that return would last, or how long I would be in Whitehall. But changes began happening quickly: a lack of rental housing in the Whitehall area crowded me into looking into ownership; owning a home allowed me to become a dog owner for the first time in my life; and the stress of the job caused me to revert to the pipe-smoking habit I had quit with much difficulty two years earlier.

                  There were more changes to come: a marriage, a brief departure from the newspaper in search of different calling, a child. But, after that two-week hiatus from working journalism in 1989, I continued asking the questions, taking the notes, laying out the pages, pounding the keyboard and pushing the shutter button for 25 more years, until burnout and retirement age arrived at about time same time, 10 years ago this month.

                  What I’d have done with my life otherwise, I don’t know.