Headin' north with my son

Back in 2013, Jared and I drove to Rochester, New York, to watch an outdoor hockey game where the temperature at opening faceoff was 18 degrees (and falling). The NHL games we're seeing this week will be played in indoor arenas, so there's that.

My son Jared and I will be spending a week in Canada on what I've been describing as "a hockey trip."

Yes, we'll hit some tourist spots, but our main purpose in the Great White North will be to watch NHL hockey. Specifically NHL hockey as played by my favorite team over the last 33 years, the Ottawa Senators.

Many times I have told the story how I, a lifelong Clevelander, became an ardent Sens fan.

It started back in 1992 when I was a sports writer for The News-Herald, our local newspaper. The International Hockey League's Cleveland Lumberjacks had just arrived in town and I offered to cover the team for the paper.

Being at best passingly familiar with the rules and intricacies of hockey, I set out to learn as much as I could about the sport (which included taking ice skating lessons Sunday nights at the rink in Brooklyn, Ohio).

I also decided I needed an NHL team for which to root. Ottawa had just come into the league, and seeing as how I was fascinated by all things Canadian, I decided the Senators would be my team.

This despite knowing not even a single player on their roster.

I figured once they became good, I could say I had been a fan since the very beginning.

Admittedly, "good" has been somewhat elusive for the Sens over time, though they did have a nice run in the 2000s, including an appearance in the Stanley Cup Finals in 2007.

I have seen Ottawa play live about a dozen times over three decades in cities ranging from Chicago and Pittsburgh to Tampa and Columbus.

But never in Ottawa itself.

Until now.

Jared and I will travel first to Montreal to watch the Sens take on Les Canadiens at the Bell Centre, after which we'll make the two-hour drive west to Ottawa. There we'll see my guys face off against the St. Louis Blues and New York Rangers.

Finally, for the first time, I can proudly wear one of my Senators jerseys as a member of the home crowd, without fear that an opposing fan will toss beer at me when I cheer a Sens goal.

Well, I suppose that could still happen, but it doesn't seem as likely to happen there as it does in, say, Pittsburgh.

Jared and I have taken several sports-themed trips together over the years, but this one is the most ambitious of all. As I write this, I don't know what the weather will be like, so I can't be sure the long drive to Eastern Ontario and Quebec will be smooth sailing.

Or even doable.

Still, we already have the tickets and I've already booked the hotel rooms. So worst comes to worst, we'll fly up there if we have to.

That would be expensive. But after all, this is hockey.

It's serious business.

We're enjoying having a college kid in the family again

Jack on his first day of college

The recent birth of our grandson has somewhat overshadowed another significant family milestone, which is the fact that our youngest son, Jack, started college a couple of weeks ago.

Jack is a freshman data science major at Cleveland State University. He's a little older than the typical freshman at 19 1/2, the result of a two-year process of trying to figure out exactly what he wanted to do in life.

Lots of young people go through the same extended period of self-reflection that Jack did, and I'm surprised it's not even more common. Asking 17- and 18-year-olds to pinpoint exactly what career path they're going to follow is a tall order, especially in a world that changes as rapidly as ours.

Since graduating high school in 2023, Jack has had a brief fling with community college, considered a career in the trades, and worked full time for nearly a year cleaning cages in an animal research laboratory.

Eventually he came to Terry and me and said he thought it would be best to go to college and earn a bachelor's degree of some sort. He is interested in statistics and data analysis – a field that will surely be reshaped by the emergence of artificial intelligence – so data science it is.

Starting in 2012 when Elissa began her own four-year journey at Cleveland State, we had a kid or kids in college continuously for 11 years. For me as Dad, it was a blur of FAFSA forms, dorm move-ins, and essays to edit.

Now, after a two-year break, I'm excited to get back into that world.

Like me so many years ago, Jack is a college commuter. He lives at home and drives downtown five days a week to attend class. There are advantages to doing that (particularly financial ones), but it can also mean being somewhat disengaged from school activities outside of the classroom.

I made an effort to be involved in the band and the school newspaper when I was at John Carroll University, at least until the demands of a nearly full-time work schedule at The News-Herald made those extracurriculars impossible. Jack has talked about joining the CSU pep band, and I hope he does. It would be good for him.

You know, becoming a grandparent can make you feel old. But I'm finding that once again having a college kid in the family balances that out. It makes Terry and I realize we're still very much in our primes.

Good luck to Jack, and go Vikings!

My brother-in-law's birthday reminds me of a time when slow-pitch softball was all the rage

You can't really see it, I know, but when I was with the Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1991, I wrote this feature story about my brother-in-law Jess and some of his longtime softball buddies. Jess is the guy standing in the very middle of that group of seven players.

Today is my brother-in-law Jess' birthday. He was married to my oldest sister Judi from 1972 until she died very unexpectedly in 2009. I was only 2 at the time of their wedding, so Jess has always seemed a part of my life.

Jess was an accomplished athlete at Benedictine High School, and he kept his sports career going through the 1970s and 80s and into the 90s as a slow-pitch softball player in the Cleveland area.

You wouldn't know it nowadays, given the relatively low participation numbers, but when I was growing up, softball was a thing. Every city had a league, and many people played on multiple teams.

When I started my career as a newspaper sports writer in the early 90s, my colleague Scott Kendrick and I were put in charge of The News-Herald's weekly slow-pitch softball coverage. This section took up several pages in the Saturday paper, and I was once told it accounted for hundreds – maybe 1,000 or more – in extra copies of the newspaper sold.

People loved seeing their names and their friends' names in the statistics we would publish. We also printed league standings, a weekly ranking of the top area teams (the "Sweet 16"), and a notes column that Scott and I co-wrote.

We in the newsroom also played the game ourselves. Because we worked weird night shifts, though, we weren't available to play in the regular city leagues, which scheduled most of their games on weekday evenings.

Instead, we played in the Ohio Day Men's League, which as I recall had its games on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. As you might imagine, the teams were made up of guys who did night work...policemen, fire fighters, third-shift factory workers, etc.

And us.

I always looked forward to those weekday morning games, which were relatively early (9:30 and 10:30am) for those of us who had stayed in the newsroom until the first papers came off the press some 8-9 hours earlier. But they were always so much fun that it was worth losing a little sleep.

Anyway, Jess played softball at a very high level for some of the best teams in Northeast Ohio. He was primarily a pitcher and first basemen.

He let me serve as bat boy for a few of those teams, and man, I felt like king of the world walking out onto the field several times a game to retrieve the team's bats and take them back to the dugout.

When you're 8 or 10 years old or whatever I was, getting to sit on the bench with a bunch of great athletes (all of whom were very nice to me) was a real treat.

Like I said, though, softball has waned in popularity over the years. And, now in his early 70s with the battle scars of decades of competition to prove it, Jess isn't playing these days anyway.

But like me, he still has his memories. And I hope they're good ones as he celebrates another trip around the sun today.

Happy birthday, Jess, and thanks for sharing some of those glory days with your little brother-in-law.

We bought our house after seeing a classified ad in the newspaper, and I realize how quaint that is

We have been in our house for 21 years. That feels like a long time to me, but I know many people who have lived in their homes for 30 or 40 or more years.

In some cases I think these folks simply found their perfect houses and have stayed ever since. In other cases, I think it's reverse inertia at work: It's such a hassle to move that many simply choose never to do it again.

For us, it was a matter of finding a big enough home to hold our young family while staying within the comfortable confines of Wickliffe, Ohio, the city where my wife and I have lived our whole lives.

I was thinking back recently to when we were looking to move out of our first home on East 300th Street.  I remembered that Terry found our current house not on the Internet (though she could have), but rather through a classified ad in The News-Herald, our local daily newspaper.

An ad in a print newspaper. Talk about a different era.

This memory is timely because it was 36 years ago tomorrow (August 22, 1988) that I started working at The News-Herald as an 18-year-old sports agate clerk. I took game scores and stats over the phone and soon began writing articles with my byline on them, which was always a thrill.

More importantly, it was a time when The News-Herald and community newspapers in general played a much more prominent role in society than they do now. Most households had a subscription to at least one paper in the late 1980s, so I could always be sure that whatever I wrote would attract plenty of eyeballs.

Newspapers retained their position of influence for several years after that, at least as long as 2003 when the previous owners of our house, John & Lisa, saw fit to advertise in the classified ads.

Nowadays, of course, that simply wouldn't happen. Classified ads aren't really much of a thing anymore, and even if they were, no one would think to look there for a house anyway.

The comedian John Mulaney said, "I was once on the telephone with Blockbuster Video, which is a very old sentence."

I feel you, John. I can say in all honesty, "One time I bought a house that was advertised in a newspaper, which is a very, VERY old sentence."

Happy birthday to my little girl from six states away

Melanie and her parents, 21 years ago today.

I've told you that my daughter Melanie, our youngest girl and second-youngest child overall, is spending six months in Orlando, Florida, as a Disney College Program participant. She operates rides at Disney's Blizzard Beach water park, sweats profusely in the Florida sun, and takes remote classes through Cleveland State University.

She is a very busy young woman.

She is also, as of today, 21 years old. Which I'm sure means she will take a sip of alcohol for the very first time in her life.

I choose to believe this is true.

Do you remember where you were or what you did on your 21st birthday? I was covering the Ohio high school state volleyball tournament in Dayton with my News-Herald co-worker Matt Kantz. I went through a drive-through beverage store to buy a six-pack of beer, mostly because I could.

The beer wasn't all that great, as I recall, but the fact that I could legally purchase it was very cool.

There are many things about adulthood that make you wish you were a kid again. But on balance, being a grown-up beats being a child, in my experience.

So here's hoping little Mel has the best of all possible 21st birthdays. If she does decide to have a beer today, I hope she doesn't also have to work a shift at the water park. Otherwise, her buzzed self may send an unsuspecting child down a water slide at the wrong time to his/her doom.

Happy birthday anyway, kid.

When we used to take little league scores over the phone for the next day's newspaper

I often bring this up on Aug. 22nd because it was such an important milestone in my career progression, but today is the 33rd anniversary of my first day working in The News-Herald sports department.

The News-Herald is our local daily newspaper. I was 18 years old the first time I walked into the newsroom in what is now referred to as "the old building" on Mentor Avenue. In 1994, when I had become a full-time staff sports writer, we moved into newer digs a little further down the street and behind the old site.

There was a certain smell that hit you the minute you walked into that place, and I will never forget the first time I experienced it. I couldn't nail down exactly what it was, but I always assumed it was the smell of ink and whatever chemicals they used to print the paper every night.

To me, it was a smell that meant I got to play some part in putting out that paper. And it was exciting.

I started at The News-Herald as a college freshman sports agate clerk, taking the results of local community and scholastic sporting events over the phone and typing them into the computer system for inclusion in the following day's sports section. We also wrote up little briefs/articles.

Later I began covering games and writing columns under my very own byline. I never, ever got tired of seeing my name in that paper, even though it had become somewhat old hat after a year or two.

All told, I spent eight years in the newspaper business before moving on to technical writing and later corporate communications. Those were formative years for me in a number of ways. I developed and honed skills that continue to serve me well even now.

Until recently, I had three print newspapers delivered to my house every day. But now I've stopped home print delivery in favor of digital subscriptions, as that's the way the industry is going anyway. Print isn't quite yet dead, but it does have one foot in the proverbial grave.

Maybe the thrill is the same for young people doing online journalism today, but I can't believe there's anything really like the feeling of writing a story, editing copy, and laying out pages for a paper that comes out hours later and is distributed to thousands of your neighbors.

It was exhilarating. It really was.

And now we've all moved on. Progress, I suppose.

But 33 years ago, it was all about that newsprint. I loved every minute I was a part of the process.

The pressure we put on young people to make definitive career choices

 

When I graduated from college in 1992, I had what I thought was a pretty clear career path.

I had been working full time as a sports writer for The News-Herald in Willoughby, Ohio, since the previous November. I started four years earlier as a sports clerk at the paper (and subsequently spent a year at the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Lake-Geauga Bureau), and figured journalism was what I would do for the next 40+ years.

As a sports guy, my thought was that eventually I would take over a professional beat at a local paper (Browns, Indians, or Cavs), travel with the team I covered, and maybe someday even become a columnist. I loved what I was doing, and that was the obvious way forward.

Except, as is almost always the case, the path had some unforeseen twists and turns.

For one thing, Terry and I started having kids. Covering sports is, as you might imagine, a night job. Games take place in the evening. The paper is put together then, as well. It was clear that, if I remained a sports writer, I was going to miss out on a whole lot of kids activities.

There's also the little matter of salary. Well, the matter itself was not little, but the salary certainly was. I needed to make more money.

Those were the two factors that drove me to leave the newspaper biz in 1996 and get into technical writing and editing, and eventually move into corporate communications, where I enjoyed better hours and better pay.

It all worked out for the best.

The point is, I could not have known what was going to happen when I was in my early 20s. No one can.

That's why I never understand why kids are forced to make potentially life-changing career decisions at the ages of 18, 19, 20, etc. Through no fault of their own, they can't begin to imagine what life will be like when they're in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, let alone how they're going to make their living then.

People change. The job market changes. Technology changes. Sometimes in ways we can predict, most often not.

So if you're 20 years old and worried about the fact that you don't seem to have a life plan like some of your friends, may I offer you some advice?

Take a deep breath and relax. You're just fine. I understand the need to gain some sort of focus so that you begin to prepare yourself for the world of work appropriately, but as you do it, take it all with a grain of salt.

Your life is going to evolve. There are certain skills and work habits that will help you no matter what vocation you choose, but when it comes to specialized knowledge, understand that you'll never stop learning.

Nor should you.

What you choose to do now may not be what you choose to do in 10 years. Or 20. Or 30. Or maybe it will be.

The point is, your life will not be ruined if you eventually deviate from whatever career path you select here at the outset.

That's OK.

And so are you.