Member-only story
My Holiday Story (of Nonprofit Journalism and the Bay City News Foundation), channeled by John Steinbeck:
Long ago, writing wasn’t something I did, but leaned toward, like a plant reaching for the sun. I yearned, for what I did not know. But one day, in a classroom that smelled of dusty afternoons, a teacher grabbed my arm — not hard, but firm enough that I listened.
“You’re a writer,” she said.
And just like that, I was. Some words are that fast, working their magic, coupling one mind, one heart, to the next.
I wondered what this power could do in the world. Journalism! — but it felt big and out of reach. Enter a mentor, a man with the kind of lines on his face that come from looking straight at life. He caught me thinking about newspapers. “You’d be good at that,” he said, his voice as certain as a farmer’s talking about the rain.
Still, I fretted. Then a kindly professor picked up his phone and told a weekly paper: “I recommend him.”
Three people. Three moments. Without them, for me there would have been no fifty years in news, no stories told, no truths revealed. No clear path from copy clerk to big city managing editor, museum creator, innovation professor, news philanthropist.
