Mining his identity in his own words

Newspaper columnists oughta come with an expiration date.

Legendary New York City journalist Pete Hamill said that to me when I was interviewing him at a stop on his book tour 26 years ago. He was experiencing one of his periodic bouts of unemployment from the Big Apple tabloids at the time, having just been fired after a brief and tumultuous run as editor in chief of the New York Post, and we were joking about which paper would hire and fire him next.

Iwas just a few years out of college then, only recently having landed a full-time reporting job with Greenwich Time. I never thought about trying to be the next Pete Hamill, as much as I admired his work. I wanted only to be Kevin McKeever, whoever he turned out to be.

Though my only professional aspirations growing up were to play for the New York Mets, newspapering always lurked in the background. I remember regularly putting a halt to my afternoons of hitting imaginary game-winning home runs in our North Stamford front yard to take in that day’s Stamford Advocate from the man with the rundown van who reliably slipped it into the green tube attached to our mailbox. In fourth grade at Northeast School, for extra credit, I compiled and published on the school’s “ditto” machine, a classroom newsletter complete with an interview of the new vice principal and the latest kickball scores. When I joined Renaissance, the student newspaper of Stamford Catholic High School as a sophomore, my fate was pretty much sealed.

Journalism major in college. Internship at the Washington bureau of The Dallas Morning News. Summers freelancing for Greenwich Time. All followed by lots rejection letters because newspapers weren’t hiring much in the 1990s. Or at least they weren’t hiring me. I still proudly hold the record for being turned down for full-time reporting jobs at the Stamford Advocate with seven.

Even when I left journalism for PR and then corporate communications at the turn of the millennium, printer’s ink remained in my blood as much as the one-point tape used in the composing room to box ads that cemented to the bottom of my shoes. So when the offer to write this column came along nearly a dozen years ago, I happily grabbed it.

I named this column “Party of One,” a title borrowed from a Nick Lowe album sitting on my desk, because it was a play on both my writing it alone, holed up in my home office, and often solely in an attempt to amuse myself. That last part held true whether I was writing about my foibles as an at-home dad or the follies of local and state government officials. However, the occasions I took a more serious tack, such as writing about my daughter’s nearly lifelong battle with the autoimmune disease juvenile dermatomyositis, the death of our dogs, or the suicide of a classmate who suffered from PTSD, always brought the greatest response from readers. It helped soothe the exhausted sadness I always felt after writing those pieces. For that, I sincerely thank you.

I periodically thought about ending this column over the past few years, and — while, in the end, the decision was made for me — this turns out to be a good time. As I wrote two weeks back, my wife (aka, My Love, Rhonda) and I left Stamford in September for her new job in northern Massachusetts. While my being a freelance writer lets me easily bring my work to wherever I can get an internet signal for my laptop, being an out-of-state “local” columnist seems fairly disingenuous. That’s just not who I am because, after nearly a dozen years, I finally did figure out who Kevin McKeever is.

I named this column “Party of One,” a title borrowed from a Nick Lowe album sitting on my desk, because it was a play on both my writing it alone, holed up in my home office, and often solely in an attempt to amuse myself.