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| Not Danny Murphy. Wikimedia Commons. |
I’ve been a news junkie since I was a boy. My first job in a
suburb of Boston was delivering The Boston Globe, The Herald Traveler, and for
a handful of discerning readers, the Record-American. Eighty or so newspapers
on a bike, long before I started driving a car. There was another guy in the neighborhood who delivered the Patriot Ledger in the afternoon.
My father worked in the
Mailers’ Union for the newspapers. When I was in high school, right across
Morrissey Blvd. from the Boston Globe, he got me a few shifts on Saturday
nights putting the Sunday papers together at The Globe. That was back when the
Sunday newspapers were gigantic. When I went on breaks, I enjoyed reading the
paper in the middle of the night, before anyone else had an opportunity to.
I did well at writing in high school and I took writing
classes in college. One of those courses was Magazine Feature Writing at the
University of North Florida. That class was taught by the incomparable William
Roach. Students in that class had to go through the process of writing and
submitting four articles to magazines. One of mine got published! It was a
thrill to see my name in print. I went on to write book reviews for the Florida
Times-Union and numerous articles that were published in excellent magazines
like Onyx, The Wittenburg Door, and National Business Employment Weekly.
