In 1969 I was full of youthful promise.
I graduated from Fleming County High School in Flemingsburg, Kentucky, an honor student and co-valedictorian, with admission to Michigan State University in my hand.
At Michigan State I was enrolled as an English-education major, because my initial ambition was to become a high school English teacher like Lynda McKee, who had been my mentor. But word leaked out quickly about the appalling boredom of classes in Education,* and I imagined that I had it in me to be a writer.
I took classes in creative writing as well as the academic subjects, and my senior thesis was an uncompleted chunk of a novel that ceased to hold my attention. It turned out that I lack the imagination to be a writer of fiction. But when Walter Sutton, then chairman of the English department at Syracuse University (which had rejected me for the creative-writing program), called to offer me a university fellowship (free tuition and $20,000 a year) in the academic program, I accepted instantly.
At Syracuse I fell in love with eighteenth-century English after a course with the genial Arthur Hoffman and began to imagine that I could be an eighteenth-century man--even though in a seminar on Swift and Sterne I wrote an amateurish paper that the professor (since denied tenure and dead) eviscerated with four single-spaced pages of sarcasm. I loved reading books and talking about them, and teaching as a graduate assistant, but that first experience left a blight on writing academic papers. In six years, I wrote one paper that I enjoyed writing and that had merit.
My first wife (yes, the first marriage proved to be another failure) landed a job as a librarian at the University of Cincinnati, and we moved there. I had, without acknowledging it, abandoned my dissertation on themes of decay in the poetry of the Earl of Rochester and Jonathan Swift (Don't even ask), and I needed work.
By chance I landed a tryout on the copy desk at The Cincinnati Enquirer. (My hiring as a minority employee is a tale for another day.) Discovering quickly that smart and irreverent copy editors were good company, I also found that I had a gift for editing.
Working for Gannett's satraps palled after a few years, and I was encouraged to accept Andy Faith's offer to work on the copy desk at The Baltimore Sun. When I was hired in 1986, local ownership of The Sun had just passed to Times Mirror, and the glory days of the 1990s were ahead. Under John S. Carroll as editor and then Bill Marimow, I was made head of the copy desk and encouraged to hire, train, and mentor the smartest young copy editors I could find, and we developed a national reputation for editing. My hires were eventually picked off by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and others.
But the purchase of The Sun by Tribune in 2000 led to the steady deterioration of editing, among other declines. By 2019, the last copy editor left The Sun. Two years later, after vulture capitalist Alden Global Capital acquired the paper, I accepted a buyout and retired. Now The Sun is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting's David Smith, who is systematically destroying what integrity the paper has left. What passes for editing there can be imagined.
Now in retirement I work as a freelance copy editor for The Baltimore Banner, an online local-news organ. It has made a promising start and has an interval in which to attract enough support to become self-sufficient. I am rooting for its success, devoutly hoping never to include it among my roster of personal failures.
* Pray forgive me, those of you who endured that curriculum to qualify for the profession. I mean you no harm.
