I tried to speak in complete sentences
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- June 1, 2024
- 426
The pink “While You Were Out” memo on my desk listed just a scrawled name and a phone number, neither of which I recognized.
My initial thought was, “What did I write last week?” Because nine times out of 10, folks who took the time to call me at the office had something to say about my work, nice or not so nice.
I hadn’t been at The Sun Journal very long, less than a year, but I had begun to develop a small following of those who came to look forward to my Sunday column, which was just a slice of my job.
Mostly, I was what was called the senior night editor, which meant that after the big bosses left for the day, I handled page layout, story editing, technical problems and anything else that happened between about sundown and our 2:30 a.m. press run.
We weren’t a large operation — five reporters, a couple of sports guys, two photographers and someone else on the copy desk — but we did the best we could and everyone took pride in their work.
Being new to the American South and adjusting to life far from my Ohio home made for an interesting transition, but after a while, I found my footing, helped immensely by being in print every week.
My first column appeared on Christmas Eve 2000, about a month after my fiancée and I had moved to North Carolina. In it, I introduced myself the only way I knew how, which was to begin with a sentence and see where my thoughts took me, hopeful that by the time I reached the end of what I had to say, readers would find something of value and perhaps stay with me on the journey.
It was a bit intimidating in the beginning, but in time I knew most readers were kind people, happy to have a new voice in their midst, and that gave me the confidence to write even more personally than I’d have thought possible when I had started.
I patterned myself after columnists like Mike Royko and Joe Falls, d.g. fulford and Michael Heaton, not to mention Hunter Thompson, whose incendiary work in Rolling Stone I consumed voraciously while I was in high school. Not that I labored under any misapprehensions of attaining that lofty status, but I tried to make myself a character in whatever stories I told, for better or worse.
Because it’s a risky thing, writing from a first-person perspective.
Say, for example, I used my background as a recovering Catholic and a Notre Dame graduate as essential building blocks as I built the foundation of who I was and what’s made me the person I am.
Instantly, that set me apart, so what I needed to do was blend in some familiar ingredients, things like family and friends, love and loss, films and books, not to mention the unifying magic of music.
With that established — and that took some time — those weekly essays took on my particular way of seeing life, which, luckily for me, didn’t so much alienate strangers but involved them instead.
Occasionally, someone would stop me and ask, “Hey, aren’t you the guy who writes those stories in the paper?” and that was flattering, a true ego boost, which didn’t hurt my self confidence.
And then I was invited to speak to a couple of groups — the Knights of Columbus and the New Bern Newcomers Club — which gave me a chance to take questions from those who had them because nothing would have been worse than to listen to me talk about myself for an hour. I mean I did enough of that every Sunday.
All of which brings us back to where we started.
That “While You Were Out” memo on my office desk.
All I knew about cable-access TV was what I learned in “Wayne’s World,” the movie with Mike Meyers and Dana Carvey, which I thought was very funny, very well written and a lot of fun to watch.
So the number I called put me in touch with a gentleman who hosted two weekly shows on Channel 10, our local outlet, and he asked if I’d be interested in sitting down with him for an interview.
“Why me?” I said. “I have no experience on TV. Nothing, zero.”
“I like your work,” he said, “and I know I’m not the only one.”
And that’s how I found myself in a studio, with two cameras running and a guy who ran the technical side of things, who said things like, “In one … in two … ” and pointing finger our way.
I made two more appearances on that show before my time at the newspaper came to an end, and I look back on them with fondness. I was gifted with VCR-taped copies of each program, and though it’s been many years since I played one, they’re down here in this quiet basement somewhere, nestled in a carton I’ve yet to unpack.
When I agreed to return for my last show, I’d already written my farewell column, so everyone knew that the game was over, which was liberating, in the sense I’d done my best for as long as I could, knowing my job was leaving and I couldn’t follow it.
This was at the height of the Great Recession of 2008, a time when many, many Americans were experiencing upheavals in their lives.
By comparison, mine was minuscule, and I took four years off to travel the country while spending lots of free time on the beach.
Thanks for continuing to read my words … means the world to me.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where nothing is ever recorded on film for posterity.