Like sand through the hourglass
If you’re reading this, blame Roman and Marlena.
Next Monday afternoon will mark 25 years since I lay on my parent’s big wine-coloured couch in Corner Brook, N.L., watching “Days of Our Lives” and wondering if unlimited soap operas was the reward for finishing two university degrees.
Roman was frantic. He was searching for Marlena, who had apparently drowned.
Rolling my eyes at how much two characters could go through, I admit being entertained by “Days.” Roman’s plight was a mindless distraction of my own frantic search — for a job on TV or radio.
I had just graduated with the journalism program at the University of King’s College in Halifax, where I focused on TV, radio and cheap draft beer in a campus bar called The Wardroom.
A long-time sports nut, I had dreams of anchoring TSN’S “Sports Desk,” not watching John Black offer to help Roman, which was really Roman offering to help Roman. (I’ve long thought the writers of the show had herbal inspiration.)
Anyway, the phone rang during the show. It was Ron Ennis, managing editor of a group of weekly newspapers in NL.
He wondered if I could write a single sports story for him that afternoon. It would appear in The Humber Log, my hometown’s curiously named, but now defunct, weekly.
I believe I wrote about a hockey player named Jason Higgins, and I believe he was playing with Amherst in the Maritime Junior Hockey League at the time.
It was love at first type. I had worked at newspapers before, but these were my first words with the skills learned at King’s and the confidence I could be a professional journalist.
Ink rushed through my veins and made me high. Broadcast smoadcast. I was hooked. A newspaper junkie.
That afternoon, hearing Ron could use more sports copy, I asked for a key to The Log’s office and then wrote two more stories over the weekend
He phoned Monday and asked me if I could come back in. I’ve been with the company ever since and, through personal moves and numerous corporate mergers and purchases, find myself where I am right now — Googling what happened on “Days of Our Lives” April 30, 1993. (You didn’t really think I recalled that much detail, did you? Come on? Come on, I sometimes think Stephano Dimero stole my memory and has it stored on a disc.)
But I’m grateful and honoured to be googling ”Days,” and writing this, as an editor and columnist.
I honestly feel like I’ve never worked a day (and some of my colleagues are likely now joking that I haven’t).
This work has been a thrilling rollercoaster ride, with truly amazing experiences — from investigative work challenging governments to ”playing” with the Harlem Globetrotters to touring battlefields in northern France to, most importantly, helping people and readers.
They are the real reason this great game of newspapering is so addictive.
A sincere thanks to anyone who has ever read my words. Hopefully, there are thousands and thousands more to come.
One reader — which might be all of them — recently asked the funniest experience of my career.
Sadly, I’ve run out of space this week and will try putting that encounter into words next Monday.
Consider this a cliff-hanger. Blame Roman and Marlena for that too. Steve Bartlett is an editor with Saltwire Network. He dives into the Deep End Mondays. He’d like to thank and salute the late Ron Ennis, who he valued as a mentor and loved as a friend. If you’re reading this, blame Ron. Reach Steve via email at steve. bartlett@thetelegram.com.