Tag Archives: newspaper-reporting

November 5, 1977, a date that will live in infamy, also known as my first published article, 49 years ago today

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I could lie and say that this date 49 years ago seems like only yesterday, but truthfully it seems like eons ago.

After I woke up this morning, I opened Instagram to see video footage of author Stephen King leaving some book promotion event somewhere and I thought that King, one of my favorite authors of all time and a master of the written word, looked every day of his 79 years. He seemed a little unsteady and walked with a cane.

Funny coincidence, so do I. And King is more than a decade older than me.

If that wasn’t humbling enough, I opened Facebook memories and saw posts from 2017 and 2007, I believe, in which I noted the anniversary of my first published newspaper article from 1977.

Despite the inclination to turn over and go back to sleep at all those reminders of the passage of time, I decided to get up and, among other things, write about the 49th anniversary of my first published article.

That’s a screenshot from newspapers dot com above, and you can tell the gist of the article: friends and fellow students from Cowan High School in Delaware County, Indiana, let me interview them about what they did on a “big night out.” The gist of it was go see a movie, go see a concert, have dinner as well as a few more nefarious activities, like illegally obtaining beer – all of us were three or four years too young to buy carry-out liquor – and drinking and sometimes riding around in the rural countryside, throwing beer bottles at signs.

(I can write about this now that my son is years past the age to be encouraged to do this by my example.)

The article was hugely controversial, and a good indicator of why the less-legal activities were not attributed to anyone on the record: My school system apologized in the school newsletter to the poor students scandalized by the implication that they would do this. Somewhere, in a box somewhere, I not only have a clipping of the article but also a snippet of the apology (not from me, but from school administrators) in the newsletter.

The article came about because I had volunteered to fill in for a friend also on the school newspaper and yearbook staff. She had a ton of studying to do and wouldn’t have time to write the article for the Muncie Evening Press newspaper. (The newspaper regularly published articles written by local high school students, although most were of the “Big school fundraiser next week” variety.) I said I would and that kicked off a newspaper career that didn’t end until I took a buyout in January 2019. It didn’t completely end even then: I wrote freelance for the newspaper for a year or two even after the buyout, covering stories like Covid.

After a newspaper editor called the school guidance office (heh heh) and offered me a regular gig as the paper’s “teen columnist,” I wrote for the Evening Press all through college and for a couple of years after before they offered me a full-time reporting job in 1984. I started on my dad’s birthday, which was appropriate because my parents had never been anything but supportive of me going into writing rather than my original plan, which was to become a lawyer. My tenure at the newspaper continued even after my beloved evening paper merged with the hated morning paper in 1996.

The moral of this is: Kids, stay in school.

No, the moral is that you should take a chance every once in a while, trying something new and daring that might have an unexpected outcome.

You, too, could become a lifelong writer and pass up your chance to practice law and make far, far, far, far, far more than you ever would as a newspaper reporter.

Yeah, that’s the moral of the story.

You’ve somehow stumbled upon the latest of more than 1,100 posts on keithroysdon dot com, stretching back to the early 2010s. Books, writing, movies, TV, obscure pop culture, Halloween, snark and more snark. I’m the author of crime novels THAT OCTOBER and SEVEN ANGELS, co-author of four true crime books including the award-winning THE WESTSIDE PARK MURDERS and hundreds of short stories, news articles and pop culture pieces in spots like CrimeReads, Daily Yonder and elsewhere. You can contact me by leaving a message anywhere on this site or by hollering at me on one of my too many social media outposts.

To nom-de-plume or not to nom-de-plume? Too late for me!

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Every once in a while, I’m taken aback when a writer who I kinda thought I knew isn’t actually who I thought they were. I’m not talking about any kind of betrayal here, dire or otherwise. I knew them only as a pen name and didn’t realize that fact.

There are a lot of worse identity crises out there, such as what happens when you deadname someone. But I still get surprised when Facebook suggests I send a friend request to someone and I don’t recognize the name but I know the face.

I realize, stupidly, belatedly, that they publish under a pen name.

I am, unfortunately, 50-some years past the time I could have used a pen name. That’s because in a very small circle of people, I’ve been known since I was in high school. That’s when my first article, under my byline, was published in the newspaper. I haven’t been out of print since 1977.

And when you have an unusual last name like mine, you’re pretty easy to find. Remember the days we were all listed in phone books, no less city directories? (The latter, if you don’t remember them at all, were phone book-style directories that let you look someone up not only by name but by address and, in reverse-directory style, by phone number. And when you looked them up, it told what they did for a living. I’m not sure city directories were any worse than the many ways you can find out about someone now, but they were handy tools for newspaper reporters and probably nightmarish for everyone else.)

(I literally remember using the city directory to find people who, according to court records, might have been victimized by a corrupt judge, some willingly. It made for some awkward conversations when someone came to the door, let me tell you.)

So I’ve never been able to take refuge in anonymity. I know this was frustrating for me and for my family, particularly when someone would call on our home phone – remember those? – to give me grief about something I’d written.

My relative high profile, as compared to people who didn’t work for a newspaper, led to some pretty awkward moments. Sometime I’ll recount one for you over a beer or coffee. You might throw your drink in my face when you hear it, though.

Anyway, it’s too late now for me to adopt an anonymous personna like the superhero the Question, pictured above. Moving to another state has given me some relief from running into people I wrote about, though.

If I get that kind of “hey, it’s that guy” notoriety again, maybe I’ll start wearing a full-face mask and fedora.