Like any job, there are ups and downs to working in the sports industry

Terry and me with our son Jared at Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg, Florida...before the place was torn up by a hurricane.

My son Jared, who works for Major League Baseball's Tampa Bay Rays, put it better than I could have when he said, "Everybody wants to work in baseball until they actually work in baseball."

What he meant was that lots of people are anxious to work for a professional baseball team, but when faced with the reality of what that means day to day, it's a career choice some quickly regret.

Jared's words resonated with me because I started my career in sports media as a newspaper journalist here in Northeast Ohio. I was a sports agate clerk/staff writer for The News-Herald, a large suburban daily paper, from 1988 to 1990 while in college, spent nearly a year as a sports writer at the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau in 1991 while still in college, then returned to The News-Herald in late '91 as a full-time sports writer.

I worked for the paper until the fall of 1996, when I switched gears and began writing plan documents for a health insurance firm.

That's a big change, but it was necessitated by two key factors that still loom large for local sports journalists:

(1) Terry and I were starting to have kids, and I needed a larger salary than The News-Herald could provide. Very, very few people in sports media are anywhere near what you might call "rich."

(2) Along those same lines, I worked nights, usually until 1 or 2 in the morning. That is not conducive to a growing family, especially when the kids start playing sports or have evening school events.

The work itself was fun, but it could be tiring. There were many nights when I would cover a game, come back to the office and write my story, then start editing articles and laying out pages for the next day's paper. THEN we had to stick around until the first papers came off the presses to check that no glaring errors had made it through the editing process.

Similarly, during the baseball season, Jared's days are long no matter whether the Rays are home or away. As Senior Coordinator, Baseball Information & Communications, he researches and writes pages and pages of media notes (starting in the morning on game days). After games he's doing more writing, researching and generally helping media do their jobs well.

If you're a sports fan, you might know the Rays are playing this season at George Steinbrenner Field, a minor league baseball facility, since their home park at Tropicana Field is unplayable after being damaged last year by Hurricane Milton.

I texted Jared on the day of the Rays' home opener this season and asked him how it went.

He reported that the bullpen cameras at Steinbrenner Field had been installed incorrectly so that they couldn't tell which relief pitchers were warming up. That's information usually announced right away in the press box.

And speaking of announcing information, I don't think the press box microphones were working, either, so Jared or someone else on the Rays' staff had to yell out relevant information to the assembled media as it became available.

All of this was happening while Jared was trying to do his regular job and also training two new Rays communications staffers. It was a long, exhausting day, I'm sure, but certainly nothing out of the ordinary for people who work in professional sports.

That's just the way the job goes, and if you don't want to do it, they can always find someone who does.

I'm a big fan of the current sports staff at The News-Herald. Among those writers is a guy named Chris Lillstrung, who covers many of the "niche" sports I like to follow closely like soccer, hockey, and track and field.

I'm also Facebook friends with Chris. He often posts about the sacrifices people like him have to make in order to survive in newspaper journalism these days. It's still relatively low paying, and it still involves long evening hours that make it difficult for him to spend time with his daughter.

None of what Chris posts is whining, though. It's just fact.

I pay for a subscription to The News-Herald to read what Chris, John Kampf, Ben Hercik, Jay Kron and other N-H sports scribes write, but my few bucks aren't enough to give these professionals the type of compensation they really deserve.

The economics of the industry are such that they're simply not going to be paid large salaries, and instead they must take some solace in the fact that what they're doing is also providing a valuable community service.

That's heartening to think about, but it doesn't pay the bills.

The point is, any time you think "how cool!" when you hear about a friend's kid working in professional sports, or if you yourself are considering a career in that field, make sure you go into it with your eyes wide open.

It IS cool and personally rewarding, and it can be done, but understand what you're giving up in return.

When it comes to the sports industry, there never has been any such thing as a free lunch.

30 years ago, my pregnant wife delivered newspapers with me (the paper for which I was also a sports writer)

Terry looked like this and still helped me deliver papers. What a trooper.
(Photo used with the express permission of Mrs. Terry Tennant.)

It was 1993. Terry and I had been married a little more than a year and she was pregnant with our first child, Elissa. I was about a year and a half into my stint as a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, and generally loving life.

I've written before about my time at the N-H. I started as a sports clerk a week before college, left for a year to join the Cleveland Plain Dealer while still at John Carroll, then came back full time in November 1991 while still six months away from earning my degree.

My tenure at the paper spanned a combined eight years, during which I covered a wide range of high school, college and professional sports. What's more, while the paper itself was one of the largest suburban dailies in Ohio, the staff was relatively small and we all had to do double duty.

That meant nights when I would travel somewhere to cover a game, come back to the office and write my story, then grab a few pages from the next day's sports section to lay out before our midnight deadline.

It was an exhilarating way to make a living for a young newlywed, coming as it did at a time when people actually read newspapers.

The job didn't exactly pay well, so I looked for extra sources of income wherever I could. One of my side jobs was as a carrier for the same newspaper where I was employed.

For eight months or so, I delivered The News-Herald every day to residents of East 300th Street, Lincoln Road and Arlington Circle in my hometown of Wickliffe (we lived on 300th, so it was all very convenient).

On Sundays, I would load the extra-large papers into our car and Terry would drive the route while I walked and delivered to each of my customers. She would get out and deliver papers herself to the few businesses on my route, including the Wickliffe Public Library.

I will never forget the image of a very, very pregnant Terry in the middle of winter 1994 trudging through the snow in her long parka to leave a paper near the library's front door.

I will also never forget Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers on Lincoln. Many Saturday mornings she would greet me just as I was opening her side door to deposit a paper and ask me what articles I had in that day's edition. She also asked me to do a few odd jobs for her, including changing the batteries in her kitchen clock and knocking icicles off her gutters.

I was always happy to help, but the whole thing made me laugh. It was full-service journalism and then some! (And hey, she tipped well.)

Elissa was born in March 1994, and a month later The News-Herald switched from afternoon to morning delivery. That was when I had to give up the route.

I stayed with the paper another 2 1/2 years as a sports writer before moving on to technical writing and eventually corporate communications.

But if there was ever a time when I built a work ethic, it was back in those days when I would work in the newsroom until 2 in the morning, go home and sleep, and be up again mid-morning the next day to deliver my papers.

To be young again.

The office dad joke calendar plays an important role in my life

 

Creature of habit that I am, I follow essentially the same routine every day when I arrive at my office.

Once I put down my stuff and fire up the laptop, I take the salad and anything else from my lunch that needs to be kept cold and haul them to the refrigerator in the nearby kitchen. There I also grab myself a cup of coffee (always black, always my second cup of the day).

Then I walk back to my office, open up OneNote and Outlook, and glance to the right at the bookcase where I keep a combination of knickknacks and business books. Resting on top is my 2023 Dad Joke Desk Calendar.

It is with no small degree of anticipation that I tear off the previous day's joke to see the hilarity awaiting me. Invariably I will read the latest quip, chuckle to myself, and say something like, "Well that's dumb...and funny."

And then I go about my business a little happier and, importantly, armed with yet another horrible joke to tell.

I don't have many bad days at work, so I usually arrive in a pretty good mood. Still, the Dad Joke Calendar always manages to lift that mood a notch or two, if only because they try so hard. As my former News-Herald colleague and longtime Facebook friend Darrell Dawson points out, they sometimes bold a key part of the punchline to make sure you get it.

This is either insulting or hilarious. I'm not sure which.

I've had many different types of desk calendars over the years. Once I had a Jeopardy calendar filled with daily trivia questions I always enjoyed. But I'm not sure I've derived more satisfaction from a time-keeping tool than I have from the Dad Joke Calendar.

I desperately hope they're planning a 2024 version.

I would die if I tried reading while walking

A couple of years ago, I posted here about the neighborhood characters I regularly encounter on my morning walks. The lineup included Hound Dog Guy, Nightgown Woman and Relentlessly Waddling Lady.

I still see Hound Dog Guy with some frequency, but I'm not sure if the latter two are on a different schedule or what. I don't run across them anymore.

Recently I added a fascinating new character to the list. I call her Reading While Walking Woman, and while that's not her in the photo (she's not that well dressed, though who is at 6 in the morning?), the image pretty well illustrates her M.O.

Whenever I see her, RWW Woman is holding a book in one hand while swinging her other arm and moving along at a pretty fast clip. She sticks to the sidewalk, from what I can tell, and I assume she pauses from reading whenever she comes to an intersection.

Still, that doesn't account for uneven pavement or small-but-potentially-dangerous objects in her path she might easily miss. It also assumes a level of coordination I'm not sure I possess.

I like books and I like walking, so I combine the two by listening to audiobooks while I'm out and about. This frees my eyes to watch out for cars, skunks, skittish deer and other hazards of the early morning walking trade.

If I were to hold a book in front of my face while walking at a 13-minute mile pace, I would have about a 50% chance of falling every time out. I would either trip over something or simply lose my sense of balance while trying to concentrate on Sydney Carton's thoughts as he goes bravely to the guillotine at the end of A Tale of Two Cities.

If I was lucky, it would happen in a relatively flat area of my walking route and I wouldn't be too much the worse for wear. In reality, it would probably happen near the bottom of Miller Avenue and I would tumble over the small guardrail into the ravine far below, likely never to be heard from again.

I am at once amazed and baffled by Reading While Walking Woman. She never seems to have any external injuries, so it appears she has somewhat mastered her craft.

Or maybe she is just one slip and fall away from becoming a gruesome front-page headline in the next day's News-Herald.

There is something to be gained from every unhappy experience, even if we don't see it right away

Twenty-five years ago last night, I got maybe 90 minutes of sleep.

You may rightly question why there is a small space in my brain that stores this information. Please know I don't have a satisfactory answer for you.

But it's true that the night of September 29, 1996, was a restless one for me.

It was a Sunday evening, and the next day I was scheduled to start a new job as a plan document specialist at a firm called Self-Funded Plans, Inc. Basically, I wrote and edited health insurance documents.

I am now very good at being the new guy, having worked at a number of different organizations over the years. But at that point, I had almost no idea how to handle a new job.

For the previous eight years, since my first week in college, I had worked in the sports departments of daily newspapers: first as a sports agate clerk and later a staff writer for The News-Herald, then for a year with The Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau, then back to The News-Herald for a five-year stay as a full-time sports writer.

And it was great. I loved almost every minute of it.

But as I've described before, it was never going to be a long-term gig for me. I thought it would be, but once Terry and I got married and started having kids, the nighttime hours and relatively low pay made for a bad combination when it came to raising a family.

So I saw the Self-Funded Plans job in the newspaper (OLD GUY ALERT), applied for it, and got it.

And I was so nervous.

To that point, I hadn't worked in a "real" office. Newsrooms look like real offices, but they're not. They're unique.

This was also a 9-to-5 job, which wasn't something I was at all used to.

I also didn't know if I would like it, which made me nervous.

All of these things came together to render me sleepless most of that evening. Midnight came and went, as did 1am, 2am, and 3am. I went out into the living room somewhere between 3 and 4 and still mostly couldn't sleep, but I strung together those 90 fitful minutes of rest on the couch before rising miserably at 6 o'clock.

It was a rough first day, both physically and mentally.

Ultimately, it wasn't a job I enjoyed very much. I spent most of my seven months there thinking I had made a big mistake leaving the comfort of newspapers and entering the world of health insurance.

But over time, it turned out to be a great move. From Self-Funded Plans I went to Advanstar and became the managing editor of Urology Times. It was largely my health care experience at Self-Funded that got me that position.

Then it was the combined health care experience at Self-Funded and Advanstar that helped me land my first PR position at The Cleveland Clinic. And that in turn led to a few very enjoyable and productive years at the prestigious Cleveland PR firm Dix & Eaton.

And so on. One position built on the next, and it has all landed me at a very happy, challenging, and frankly fun place in Goodyear.

All of which is to say that, as in many things, we have to force ourselves to consider the long term when we're unhappy in our current situation. Yes, you may need to make a change, but don't underestimate what you've learned from that miserable job or dead-end relationship.

Each of those experiences have made you you. And, if I may say it, you turned out pretty darn well.

Deciphering what "business casual" really means in your office

Over my 30 years in the full-time workforce, I have worked in enough places for enough companies with enough people to know that the single most difficult thing for many employees is figuring out exactly what the "business casual" dress code means.

It seems simple enough, but there's a whole lot of room for interpretation under the business casual umbrella. As with many things in life, it's probably even tougher for women, but I can only speak from the male perspective here.

Look up "business casual men" online and you'll see everything from sport coats with button-up shirts on one end of the spectrum to nice t-shirts with jeans on the other. And of course a whole bunch in between.

In my first real job at The News-Herald, we in the sports department always went with the "extreme casual" look, which meant shorts in the summer and jeans with sweatshirts in the winter. The news side reporters wore shirts and ties, whereas we all looked like we had just come from a frat party.

Later, when I entered the 9-to-5 world, I also went the shirt-and-tie route most days, and even the everyday-suit look when I was at the Cleveland Clinic.

But for most of the past 20 years, business casual has been the rule with my employers. And I've always taken my cues from both company leaders and my immediate peers. Whatever they wear, that's what I'll generally wear.

Granted, if I err, it's almost always on the side of dressing a bit more professionally, which could be a generational thing and/or having learned to dress for work from my dad. He was a data processing/computer guy who always went with a shirt and tie.

I recently took one of my every-three-year shopping trips to Kohl's to stock up on work clothes, and the load of stuff I brought home was heavy on button-up shirts and different-colored dress pants. I'm already well-stocked with khakis and have enough different kinds of shoes and belts to create nearly endless color and style combinations.

But again, the way I dress is largely dictated by what I see around me at Goodyear. And what I see around me are a whole lot of engineers and tech types who, it must be said, subscribe heavily to the stereotype of how you think engineers and techies dress. So maybe the bar isn't set as high as it might otherwise be, particularly in an older, traditionally more conservative company like Goodyear.

I will say that our CEO often wears jeans, and that sets a pretty relaxed tone.

So it you're confused about business casual, pay close attention to your co-workers, particularly those of the same gender (obviously) and job level as you. You'll figure it out quickly enough.

I would leave the Led Zeppelin shirt at home, though. Even if the CEO is a big fan.

I took the SAT 34 years ago today. Why does my brain retain this information?

THINGS THAT ARE STUCK IN MY BRAIN FOR WHICH I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO USE:

• The B-side songs for every Men at Work single on 45
• The usual starting lineup for the 1979 Cleveland Indians
• Casualty counts for a host of World War I battles
• Detailed plotlines for most episodes of The Andy Griffith Show
• The quadratic formula
• My News-Herald paper route from 1981 (seriously, I could deliver that route today and not miss a house)
• The fact that I took the SAT on this date in 1987.

To that last point...who cares? Why would my brain decide this is something worth remembering?

It also likes to point out that, after I finished the test, I drove directly to Solon High School to join my track team at the Solon Relays.

Is there any practical use for this information? Of course not. But this has never deterred my brain, which delights in storing away the most irrelevant of nuggets.

On the other hand, it will not reveal to me such things as where I put my wedding ring, the exact ingredients in my wife's favorite Starbucks drink, and which light switches control which lights in our house (the house where we have lived for nearly 18 years).

Why, brain, why? Why do you do this to me?

Maybe you explained it to me one time and now I'm just forgetting.

I remember delivering papers at 3 in the morning and people's front doors were wide open

When I had a News-Herald paper route back in the Paleolithic Age (1981-83), the Saturday morning papers were sometimes delivered to my house obscenely early. Like, to the point that it was still basically Friday night when they were dropped off at the bottom of our driveway.

When that happened, I would occasionally just stay up late and deliver the papers in the middle of the night so that I could sleep until noon the next day.

This was always an adventure because, really, it's not often you're roaming the neighborhood in the dead of night at 12 years old. So it was kind of fun.

Anyway, when I did this in the summer, it was not at all uncommon for me to open someone's door and toss the paper into their wide-open, not-at-all-protected house. Only a screen door separated their living room from the outside, which was presumably to allow cooler air to circulate through their house during the night in the age before central air was common.

I could easily have walked in and taken whatever I wanted.

Not that I ever did that or even thought about doing that. The point was, many people felt just fine sleeping while leaving their house entirely unsecure.

This would not happen today. People like to say society was safer back then, but I'm not so sure. I think there was just a greater illusion of safety, and people for the most part got really lucky they didn't get robbed more often.

Nowadays, if I purposely left the front door open all night long in order to cool down our house, Terry would kill me.

Even if I did it accidentally, she also would likely kill me.

I would rather deal with a burglar than an enraged wife, if I'm being honest.

What we did right with each of our kids - Part I - Elissa

(NOTE: Parents are forever lamenting the things they wish they had done differently with their children. "I should have been more strict about this" or "I wish I had let her participate in that." That type of stuff. I see nothing productive there, so instead I choose to celebrate the things that Terry and I appear to have done well with our children. Plus, it's a good way to fill five days of blog posts. So there's that.)

Elissa is my newly minted 23-year-old daughter. I don't mean "newly minted" in the sense of "we just got her." I mean she just turned 23 recently.

Also, you will note that I did not hyphenate "newly minted" in that first sentence. Long ago when I first started at The News-Herald, Robin Palmer taught me not to hyphenate "ly" words. I don't know if that was an AP Style thing, a News-Herald thing, or just a Robin thing. But to this day when I'm editing copy, I will remove the hyphen after a "ly" word.

Anyway, Elissa. When she was little, she was shy. A borderline genius, mind you, but shy and introverted. As she grew, she became a little more extroverted with each passing year. Now, the thing comedian John Mulaney says about Jewish women also applies to Elissa: You do not need to ask how she's feeling. She will tell you.

And this is an exceedingly good thing. Women are often conditioned in this society to believe that "shy and quiet" is more attractive than "opinionated and vocal." I will take the latter any day of the week, and I like to think we encouraged her to be that way.

Here are five other things we did right with Elissa:

(1) We made her play her oboe until she graduated from high school. She was ready to be done with the instrument by her junior year (maybe sooner), but we prodded her to stick it out. I believe studying and performing music is an inherently beneficial thing. As is seeing through something you started. Elissa would disagree with me, but I think we did right by her in this decision.

(2) We let her make her own decision about college when it came to living on campus. She could have saved a ton of money living at home while she attended Cleveland State University, but she wanted the on-campus experience, and it's clear how much less she would have grown over those four years had we made her live at home.

(3) I played Barbies with her when she was little. Whatever you think of Barbie and whether she actually imposes unrealistic standards of beauty on little girls (I happen to think most little girls are smarter than that), we had some of our most fun times together playing with the gigantic stock of Barbie merchandise stored under Elissa's bed. Of course, once I got sick of playing, I would concoct some sort of fiery death for Barbie, Ken, and whomever else joined us in our adventures. But PRE-DEATH, Barbie sessions were fun.

(4) We let her make mistakes. This one is going to come up a few times in these posts about my kids, because I see great value in being allowed to screw up in your life. Protecting your children from every stumble and fall is unrealistic and ultimately counterproductive. To Elissa's credit, she has made relatively few mistakes to this point, but she has learned from the ones she has made. I'm pretty sure, anyway...

(5) We helped develop within her a healthy appreciation of 80s music. Elissa listens to a lot of stuff I like and a lot of stuff I probably don't understand. But in the end, we can always find common ground in "Come On, Eileen."

Memories of the greatest job in the world (for an 18-year-old)

There are jobs in this world the existence of which most of us are utterly unaware.

I used to hold just such a job.

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, I reported for my first day of work as a part-time sports agate clerk at The News-Herald, the newspaper that would, a few years later, become my full-time employer.

These clerks, which I believe the paper still employs, do the grunt work that sells papers.

In my case, that meant taking dozens of calls every night from statisticians and coaches reporting the results of their recreational, high school and occasionally college athletic events.

More important than the final scores was the opportunity these callers had to give the names of up to three players on each team who did something noteworthy.

In the case of a little league baseball game, that may have been the kid who hit two home runs. For a basketball game, it was usually the guys/girls who scored the most points.

Whatever the reason for giving these amateur athletes their 15 minutes of fame in small agate type (thus the job title), having their names collected in print every day under the Community Scoreboard was a major reason why The News-Herald was one of the largest suburban daily newspapers in Ohio.

Which you can understand. If Little Johnny got his name in the paper, you can be sure Mom and Dad would rush out and buy 5-10 copies as keepsakes. So would Grandma. And the next-door neighbor.

So the work we agate clerks did had some importance from a sales and financial point of view.

Not that I cared much about that. What my 18-year-old self cared about when he walked into that newsroom for the first time on August 22, 1988, was that he was going to get to work at a newspaper. They could have had me sweeping the floors for all it mattered.

I caught the journalism bug early in life. I read The News-Herald front to back almost every day from the age of 14. Then I joined my high school newspaper and absolutely loved it. I could picture myself making a career out of journalism. And if it could be sports journalism, all the better.

Which is why I jumped at the chance when, one afternoon during the sweltering summer of '88, I came across a blurb in the "Area Sports in Brief" section saying that The News-Herald was looking to hire two sports agate clerks.

I needed a job at the time. I was a few weeks away from starting my four-year undergraduate career at John Carroll, and if nothing else I knew the cost of gas from driving to school every day (I was a commuter student) was going to be brutal.

So I applied and, thanks largely to the fact that News-Herald prep sports writer Joe Magill had been one of my high school track coaches and was therefore a nice inside reference, got the job.

I cannot tell you the thrill of typing or writing something, and then turning around 12 hours later and seeing it in print. Even if my name wasn't attached to it. I could point to it and say, "I did that," knowing that nearly 50,000 copies of my work were floating around Northeast Ohio that day.

A few months after starting at The N-H, I was given the chance to cover high school events with a byline, which was a dream come true. Eventually, at the veteran age of 20, a column mug with my photo began running alongside some of my stuff. This was, as far as I was concerned, the pinnacle.

Later, after I graduated from Carroll, the paper offered me a full-time job as a sports writer, which I gratefully accepted. I stayed there for five wonderful years, leaving only because of the demands of my growing young family.

But the experience I picked up at the paper absolutely shaped my future career in marketing and public relations. Taking those little league and high school scores over the phone for hours on end, night after night, was a great resume-builder, believe it or not.

Nowadays I think the clerks at the paper have most of the scores emailed to them, though I can't be sure of that. I choose to believe it's true, though, because otherwise I wouldn't have the credibility to say, "BACK IN MY DAY, WE USED TO TAKE 1,000 SCORES A NIGHT OVER THE PHONE. AND WE TYPED UNTIL OUR FINGERS BLED. AND WE LOVED IT!"

And honestly, we DID love it. God bless the agate clerks of the world.

Did I ever tell you about the time my wife dumped me? Twice?

I have been in love with the same woman for 27 years.

I often say this is one of my greatest accomplishments, but I don't know that you could actually classify it as an accomplishment.

"Accomplishment," to me, signifies conscious effort. And I didn't make a conscious effort to fall in love with Terry. It just sort of happened when I was 16 years old. And it has lasted ever since. So I'm not sure you can say that being in love with someone is an "accomplishment."

Now, staying together with them? Nurturing that relationship? Strengthening your bond? Those take effort. Those are accomplishments. But actually being in love? I don't think I had much to do with that. That was God's work, and He did a very nice job of it, if I may say so.

Terry and I met when I was a sophomore in high school. She was stunningly pretty. I was passable in the looks department. To the point that you could take me out in public and not be overly embarrassed to be seen with me.

After less than a year of dating, I knew I loved her.

And looking back, I was right about that.

You don't often know what love really is when you're 16 or 17 years old, but for whatever reason, I did. What I felt for her then was as genuine as what I feel for her now.

But it almost fell apart. Twice, actually.

Terry dumped me two times during high school. Once was between my junior and senior year in the summer of 1987. I don't remember much about that particular break-up, other than that it mercifully didn't last very long.

But the second time was the following summer after I had graduated. I think it only lasted three weeks or so, but I'm not kidding you when I say they were the worst three weeks of my life.

I was such a lost soul. I honestly couldn't fathom how I was supposed to go on without her. So I just kind of existed. I hadn't yet started college, nor did I have a job at the time. So I existed. Miserably.

My mom remembers. She remembers me staying up late at night listening to sad music and just laying in my bed. Occasionally I would call Terry. And most of the time she would tell me I had to stop calling her.

At one point she told me I needed to find someone else to be with, that it would be good for me. So I gave it a try. I went out a few times with a very pretty and smart girl.

But Terry (this is my favorite part of the story) didn't like that. I had started my job at The News-Herald during our break-up period, and one night I came out of work to find a rose and a nice card from her tucked under the windshield wipers of my 1979 Chevy Chevette.

I drove straight to Terry's house.

We got back together for good that night.

A few months later, when we were both 19, we got engaged. Less than four years after that, we were married. To the extent that I had anything to do with making this beautiful relationship last, I guess that is one of my greatest accomplishments.

But I realized the other night that there's also a potential dark side to all of this. Well, not a "dark" side, really, but there is a risk.

I have put everything into being with this woman. Everything I am is wrapped up in her. If something were to happen to her, I would be a lost soul again.

And knowing that is scary. I don't want to go back to that horrible feeling again. But the fact is, I just might have to. One day, anyway.

The reality of our collective situation as humans is that we have an expiration date. Whatever we build in this life simply ain't going to last forever, and that includes romantic bonds cemented by red roses left on Chevy Chevettes.

An extremely selfish part of me hopes that I'm the one to die first, if only so I don't have to go through that dark time again. And I have biology on my side, what with woman living longer on average than men.

But there's nothing to be gained by having these morbid thoughts, so I try to shut them out.

Sometimes at night just before I fall asleep, I turn my head toward her side of the bed and try to make out her face in the darkness. Often I can. Sometimes I can't.

No matter, though. I can always see her in my mind.

Sometimes when I picture her it's the current mom-of-five Terry. Other times it's when-we-just-got-married Terry. And occasionally it's 16-year-old Terry.

Every one of them is beautiful. And every one of them is mine.

Then, and only then, do I drift off to sleep, content in the knowledge that whatever else may eventually happen, the girl I loved in 1986 is still laying next to me.

Twenty-seven years of that is worth just about any price, to tell you the truth.

This is not the post where I inspire you to achieve your life goals

Actually it's not really a depressing post today as far as you're concerned. But it sort of is for me.

Here's my problem:

After graduating from John Carroll University in 1992 with a bachelor's degree in English and history, I stopped going to school. My dad told me I should stick it out and get a Master's degree, but I was tired of working full time AND attending college full time, which I had spent the previous couple of years doing.

So I decided a B.A. was good enough and I stopped there. At the time I was a sports writer at The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, and my career path was pretty well laid out for me: Work my way up the journalistic ladder and eventually become a beat writer covering a Cleveland professional sports team.

It was that simple. That was my goal, and one certainly didn't need a Master's degree to get there.

So like I said, I stopped the whole school thing. And I kept on sports writing for four more years, at which point I realized three things:

• Sports happen at night, and it's difficult to raise a family and participate in kids' activities when you have to be at work every evening.
• You're never exactly going to be independently wealthy as a sports writer.
• Eventually the industry was going to change, and there was no guarantee of long-term job security in sports writing (20 years later, it turns out I was actually right about this one)

So I moved away from sports writing and got into technical writing, then trade journalism, and eventually marketing and public relations.

And now, two decades down the line, I desperately wish I had a Master's degree.

Specifically, I'd like a Master's of Business Administration (MBA) to help make up for the fact that I never studied business in any formal way.

And because obtaining a graduate degree would be extremely personally satisfying to me.

Happily, my employer has an excellent tuition reimbursement plan. Probably the best one I've come across. I almost wouldn't have to pay a dime for an MBA.

But what my employer can't give me, what I can't even give myself, is time.

And time, you see, is the problem here.

I'm barely two months into my job, but already I can see that it's always going to be fairly time-consuming. I enjoy and appreciate the position, don't get me wrong. But things aren't ever really going to calm down when it comes to the day-to-day chaos.

Even if you only take one MBA course per semester, you still need considerable time to attend class, study, get through your reading and homework, work on group projects, etc.

In addition to having a crazy job, I also have a wife and five kids. They deserve a significant amount of my time and attention, and I want to give it to them.

The math just doesn't work out.

If I'm getting anything close to the proper amount of sleep, exercising, doing my job well, and staying closely connected with my family, that pretty well accounts for a 24-hour day right there.

Unless we figure out a way to move to 28-hour days, I'm in trouble here.

Yet many people at work are encouraging me to go for it and get after that MBA. Which is nice, but none of them has offered me that gift of time. Nor do many really seem to understand the stage of life I'm in.

So it appears I'm stuck.

The obvious solution - the only solution, I suppose - is to set this particular goal aside and come back to it someday when the kids are older.

And I may just go that route. But I could really use the knowledge and experience you gain in an MBA program in the next few years. It will still be personally satisfying if I get the degree in my 50s, but I feel like it won't help me as much professionally if I wait that long.

So....yeah.

At this point I invite you to do one of three things:

(a) Tell me to suck it up and quit whining about my first-world problems, something with which I can't disagree.

(b) Tell me how you personally overcame similar obstacles and got a degree or achieved some other life goal, thus inspiring me to get out there and reach for the stars or whatever.

(c) Ignore this post completely and move on with your day, which honestly is probably the approach I would take if I were you.

Because, really, who has the time for that?

(NOTE: Since I wrote this, I came across an excellent post from my friend, former colleague and blogger extraordinaire Tara Pringle Jefferson with practical tips on balancing work, school and family. So it CAN be done. Hopefully one doesn't need to be as awesome as Tara to pull it off, though...)

When I was a paper boy...

The Cleveland Plain Dealer recently announced that it is going to cut home delivery of the newspaper back to three days a week beginning this summer. The paper will still publish every day, but you'll only be able to get it delivered to your front door three times a week.

Actually, "delivered to your front door" is a phrase that probably dates me. Of the relatively few people who still receive a newspaper at home, even fewer actually get it placed in or even near their front door. Most of the time, it's thrown into your driveway or placed in a newspaper tube in front of your house.

Another highly visible change is in the people who still deliver newspapers. When I was growing up, those people were almost always kids with paper bags slung over their shoulders. Nowadays, they're almost always adults driving cars.

I understand the economics of this. Newspapers, which are running on razor-thin profit margins, are better served giving larger routes (i.e., hundreds of customers) to adults than smaller routes (i.e., dozens of customers) to kids.

But that doesn't mean I don't miss the prototypical paper boy/girl. I was one myself.

Back in the early 80s, I delivered The Lake County News-Herald to 40 or so customers in my Wickliffe neighborhood. I had the brown and orange News-Herald paper bag, and every day I would make sure those customers received the news of the world.

This is back when people actually got their news from print newspapers, of course, and not from phones, tablets, iPods, etc.

I never minded delivering the papers. That part was actually kind of fun. It was the collecting I hated. Every two weeks you had to walk around to your customers' houses and hound them to pay you. And for some people, you really did have to hound them.

The good part about collecting, though, was that was obviously how you made your money. The lady from the newspaper would come around every two weeks to take the money and leave me with $30 or $40 profit, which I would use at arcades and to buy video game cartridges for my Atari 2600 system. In retrospect, I probably should have saved some of that cash...

I gave up my paper route in 7th grade once I started getting into more extracurricular activities at school. But I returned to the delivery business several years later as a 24-year-old adult.

By that point in my life, I was a full-time sports writer for The News-Herald. We didn't have any kids yet and we needed the extra money, so I took on a paper route. Again, didn't mind the delivering, but the collecting was less than fun.

I only kept that route for about six months, then dropped it once Elissa was born. But two memories stand out in my mind from the experience:

(1) It was fun doing full-service journalism. I would write articles for the paper, edit copy, help lay it out, etc., then get up the next day to actually deliver it, too. How often do you see that in anything other than a really small town?

(2) Mrs. Piacente, one of my customers, would always wait for me to show up with the paper on Saturday mornings. When I got to her house, she would ask what page my weekly Bowling Notes column was on so she could read it (she was a big bowler, that Mrs. Piacente). She would also occasionally ask me to do little odd jobs for her, including knocking the icicles off her house and changing the batteries in her kitchen clock. These were clearly tasks that fell under the "other duties as assigned" section of the paper boy job description.

And now the slow, painful death of newspapers is upon us. The three-day-a-week-home-delivery model, or other scenarios like it, will become increasingly prevalent. And eventually the print newspaper will die out in favor of e-news.

Which I'm actually fine with. But I'll always miss the feel and smell of newsprint. Newspapers have been a part of my life for decades, and they never really go out of your blood.

As long as we're being nostalgic here, may I suggest you watch the following video of a song written by a favorite artist of mine named David Francey? It documents his experiences as a paper boy back in his native Scotland. It's a tune I almost could have written myself. Enjoy:

Life among the ink-stained wretches

You may have noticed on the right side of your screen that the blog is now carrying headlines from the News-Herald, our local newspaper in Willoughby, Ohio.

This was the small tradeoff required to have "They Still Call Me Daddy" listed in the Herald's Community Media Lab. Being the latest addition to the Media Lab, the blog is listed waaaaaay down at the bottom of the page, but hopefully it will bring in a few new readers from around Northeast Ohio and parts unknown.

As many of you know, I spent the first part of my career as a sports writer for the News-Herald. I started there in the summer of 1988 as what was known as a sports agate clerk, taking little league and high school sports scores over the phone, writing up small articles on community athletic events, etc. It was a great job for an 18-year-old sports fanatic, and I loved being around the newsroom every night.

Because it was a night job, of course. Sports tend to happen at night, so sports writers tend to work at night. By the time I was a sophomore in college, I was working there a solid 30-40 hours every week, occasionally doing the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift. The News-Herald was an afternoon paper at the time, and the presses didn't roll until 3 in the morning or so. A couple of us would always work late to make sure the sports section articles and photos looked good and didn't contain any obvious swear words.

TRUE STORY: One time a classified ad ran in the News-Herald for a house that someone had put up for sale. The ad described every feature of the house, including a "party-sized deck." Only the ad didn't say "deck." Instead it had a word that's very similar to "deck" and is in fact only one vowel away from "deck" and which made the ad absolutely hilarious. I'm going to let you figure out the word AND perhaps come to some understanding of what exactly constitutes "party-sized" in this context.

Anyway, I left the News-Herald for nine months during my junior year at John Carroll to take a similar position at the Plain Dealer, the large Cleveland daily paper, working out of the Lake & Geauga County Bureau. That was a good experience, but as I neared my college graduation, knowing I was going to get married, I realized I needed a full-time job with benefits. And while the 32-hour-a-week Plain Dealer position was fun, it didn't include insurance and the like.

So the News-Herald graciously accepted me back on a full-time basis, and I worked there for five happy years from 1991 through 1996. I got to cover a lot of sports in that time, mostly high school but with doses of college and professional assignments to keep me happy.

ANOTHER TRUE STORY: One time I was standing in the Cleveland Indians' clubhouse waiting to do a player interview, and third baseman Carlos Baerga walked by me carrying a plate of food from the sumptuous clubhouse buffet. With his mouth full and still chewing, Baerga looked at me and said, "You want some chicken? It's good!" I politely declined, but I love the fact that it even happened (plus, I don't think media members were technically supposed to have any of the food anyway).

I figured I was set. I would work in newspapers the rest of my life, eventually taking over a pro sports beat and traveling with the team I covered. That was my professional goal and it seemed a worthy one.

But three things got in the way:

(1) Terry and I started having kids. Kids cost money. Sports writers don't make a lot of money.

(2) Terry and I started having kids. As a parent, I wanted to spend time with my kids. Looking ahead to the time when they would be in school, I realized that working night hours would not be conducive to attending their sporting events and concerts, helping them with evening homework, etc.

(3) Newspapers and their budgets began shrinking, and beat writers no longer traveled to all of the road games, thus taking some of the luster away from what I had considered to be among the most glamorous professions.

And so I moved into other types of writing and journalism, and eventually got into marketing and PR. I still miss the newspaper life from time to time, but I know I made the right choice.

As I've mentioned previously, I also still read a newspaper every day. I like to think of it as my small contribution to a rapidly evolving (some would say "dying") industry. But honestly? I also really appreciate being in my bed at 3 a.m. these days instead of in a newsroom.

Yes, I still read a newspaper every day

Every morning I follow essentially the same routine: I get up, I feed the cats, I go downstairs and clean out their litter boxes, and then I go outside and get the newspaper. Only one of these things truly makes me happy.

The getting up part I don't mind but I don't love. The cat-related jobs are necessary evils, the kind of thing you do because over the years it has become your job and there's no real need to change. But the newspaper...that's one of the highlights of my day.

Seriously. I love getting the paper. I love taking it out of the bag and scanning the headlines. No matter that the news may already be 12 hours old (or more) and I could have found the same information online soon after it happened. The point is, there's nothing like holding and reading a real newspaper.

I understand that I am a dying breed. Relatively few people read physical, hard-copy newspapers anymore. And in no way am I a technophobe. I still get a lot of my news online. But you have to understand, I started my career in a newsroom. Night after night, I got the thrill of producing a publication that would be distributed to thousands of people within hours after we finished it. It was a rush.

Of course this was back in the 80's and 90's. Even then people were predicting the downfall of print journalism,  but I wanted to make a career out of being a sports writer. I loved covering a game, writing about it, and knowing that my work was being read at breakfast tables around the area the next morning. Or would end up being pasted into some kid's high school scrapbook. That was a natural high.

In time, I realized that a career in journalism wasn't to be. I had a growing family to support, and honestly, you ain't gonna get rich as a newspaper reporter. So I eventually moved into marketing and public relations, a move a lot of reporters make when they decide it's time to get a "real" job, for whatever reason.

But I hang on to my newspaper addiction. The paper shows up every day, rain or shine, in front of my house, and I read it cover to cover. I still read the comics and do the little word puzzle that runs next to them when I have time. I scour the sports pages, especially, but I also read every story in the metro and business sections to make sure I haven't missed anything work-related.

There will come a time in the not-so-distant future when newspapers will go away, and I'm actually OK with that. I know it's unstoppable, and progress is progress. But I think back to the days when I delivered the Lake County News-Herald and practically every house along my route got the paper at least on Sundays, if not every day.

Nowadays, the paper is delivered by adults with huge routes and hundreds of customers. The routes HAVE to be huge, because the vast majority of houses don't subscribe any more. I used to ride my bike and place the paper inside people's front doors or in their side milk chutes. Now it's thrown from moving cars, though sometimes (as in our case) you can ask for a delivery tube to be placed in front of your house and the paper will be stuffed in there every morning.

This is the second nostalgic blog post in two days, if you're keeping track. I guess that's another sign of advancing age -- when you start talking about the "old" days. But I'll tell you one thing: If reading a newspaper is a sign of old fogey-hood, you can book my ticket on the Geezer Bus today.