I got to shake the baby-smooth hand of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller when he visited Portland.
Wow, I haven’t posted here since my early December a-fib two-night hospital stay, my first since, oh, chickenpox/measles as a very little boy? Fortunately, I got better fast when they switched me from a bad to a good pill and in time for Deb’s Stage 4 cancer battle that’s still ongoing.
But I digress, as always;-)
Blake Timm, a communications guy at my alma mater, Pacific University in Forest Grove, spotted a comment I made on a recent LinkedIn thread regarding my early career, and three special mentors that… well, here’s what I said:
Oh I always have tons of stories, you know me! But the most important of my life was the connection between two mentors, actually three. First was from Chuck Heil at John Adams High School to Fred Scheller at Pacific, then from Fred to Billy Joe McFarland, the UPI Portland bureau chief. That led to my nearly full senior year internship with UPI and the start of my journalism career. Because as I like to tell people, it’s not what you know or who you know – it’s both! I owe a lot to those three great mentors.
Blake asked to tell him more about that, so instead of just emailing him some thoughts, I figured it was worth a blog post – so here goes:
I’ve been blessed many times, before my career really began and ever since, by folks who helped me move on to the next step.
When my family arrived in Portland in early 1970, I and my three brothers began to attend John Adams High School, which drew national headlines and had just opened up a few months earlier, as four Harvard educators were sort of handed the school to test new methods of education. (Which felt like it was mostly sitting in a circle at our desks as teachers said, “What do you want to do today?” Yeah, one of those;-)
I had been writing up news at school since second-grade home room (my mimeographed – make that purple, dittoed masterpiece: The Room 210 Tooter).
But this high school was a wow in so many rabbit-hole ways, I have to fight digressing. (Some folks buried a car engine behind the school on the very first Earth Day, in 1970. The students also voted NOT to have a Rose Festival Princess. The next year, we had to.)
The most special spot for me was where Chuck Heil oversaw the daily TV news show we did, and I was the editor-in-chief. KWAP (Kids With a Purpose, but yeah) was the first of its kind. Even though it was black and white, we all learned a lot about how to put on a news show, from the set with a rear-screen projector to a very early, spendy portable video recorder, the Sony Portapak, which I seem to recall was about $1,200, so Chuck said: “If it falls, fall under it”;-)
Chuck somehow – I’ve forgotten these details, too -had or made a connection with TV/radio professor Fred Scheller at Pacific, and so I was able to go there, starting in the fall of 1973.
Fred was another great guy – very involved in the large contingent of Hawaiian students, who put on an amazing annual luau. We all learned the basics of TV and radio especially, and I can still see his smiling face and hearty laugh.
I became manager of the campus radio station, KPUR, for a year or two – no one could really hear the thing, but we painted the studio blue and moved up from a beast of a gold tube-powered “board” – from KEX I believe – to a cool, small QRK board with colorful LED lights, the whole shebang.
I did have other summer jobs during my college years – one summer, staying in the basement of Mac Hall and working for Charlotte Filer, writing for Pacific Today, the alumni magazine, helping paste newspaper clippings in a scrapbook with rubber cement, etc. Another summer I wrote news releases for the local hospital. (My first paying job actually was before college, in 1972, working in housewares, toys and bikes at the original G.I. Joe’s in north Portland.)
Again, I’m not sure how the connection happened in those pre-Facebook/LinkedIn days, but Fred reached out to Billy Joe McFarland, manager of the United Press International wire service’s downtown Portland bureau.
They arranged for me to spend my senior year as a full-time intern for UPI, starting there in the fall of 1976.
I could write a book about my 15 years with UPI, as we scrappy “Unipressers” took on the mighty Associated Press – and we logged the newspapers to help compile national logs that showed whether UPI “won the play” over AP, with the motto: “Get it first, but get it right!”
For that amazing school year (broken up by a 3-week stint back in “Frosty Grave,” under the 7-7-3 school calendar Pacific was using), I got to report for UPI, asked President Ford a question at the Portland Air Base during his re-election fight with Jimmy Carter, and lots more great memories.
Billy Joe wrote glowing progress reports on my behalf to Fred, and I still have the copies in my home-office file cabinet. I was quite the long-haired hippie then, but I wasn’t alone;-)
I got paid the princely sum of $50 a month for bus fare from my off-campus apartment to downtown Portland. I remember coming home and watching Mike Donahue on KOIN-TV reading MY WORDS on Newsroom 6! (I said I’d rather be doing the writing than sitting there reading it, later realizing he got paid a wee bit more than $50 a month;-)
Those were the days. But I owe a lot to Chuck Heil (and a great speech teacher, Bob Gerber, and the Adams Unity newspaper’s overseer, Jim Rice), and to Fred Scheller (and there, the wonderful speech professor, Hap Hingston) and then to Billy Joe McFarland at UPI, where I worked with a great group of news teachers and mentors, including Bobbie Ulrich and Clyde Jabin – Clyde was the guy who “named” D.B. Cooper, by the way.)
My career has had its ups and downs – whose hasn’t? – but these wonderful guys gave me a chance to do what I loved for a half-century or so – break the news and tell people’s stories – or as I like to say, helping others tell their stories and trying to stay out of the way.
I often say it’s not what you know, or who you know – it’s both. I owe a lot to the special people who helped me along the way.
Leave it to Barney 