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.

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.