Hey, didn’t you used to be Bill White?
Former teen heartthrob David Cassidy called one of his later albums, “Didn’t You Used to Be…” I never was a heartthrob, teen or otherwise, but I know what he was talking about. As I began contemplating retirement after 44 years at The Morning Call, I took to joking about people who would see me a couple of years from now and say, “Didn’t you used to be Bill
White?”
Now that I’ve accepted a Tribune Publishing voluntary buyout offer, effective last Friday, I guess we’ll find out.
Columnists don’t get a lot of adulation, but it’s nice to have people come up to you and tell you they like your columns — or even that they’ve saved one or more of them that had special resonance.
The column I’ve heard about more than any other was the one I wrote when our golden retriever Penny died. I literally wrote the column with tears
pouring down my cheeks, and that raw grief so affected readers that I had hundreds of phone calls and emails the next day, with hundreds more to come in the days and even years that followed, some from other parts of the country. It’s still happening.
Some of them who remembered it have asked me to send them the column or reprint it. So I decided to run it one more time as part of my last Morning Call blog post Friday.
Those emotional connections are what I’ll miss most in my retirement.
One of the best, and sometimes scariest, things about being a columnist is that you can vent whatever you’re feeling — sorrow, joy, anger, amusement and every other kind of emotion — in a very public way. One of my colleagues, another dog lover, told me my dogs were lucky to have me to sing their praises, and I was lucky to be able to get my grief out of my system.
This didn’t just happen with dogs. I wrote columns about several members of my family, some of them after they died. My column gave me the opportunity to tell my mother and my father how I felt about them, words I would have been too tongue-tied to express verbally.
I always was better in front of a keyboard.
As our family struggled years ago with a potentially lifethreatening health crisis, I wrote a column that I knew never would see the light of day, expressing my grief over the diagnosis and my gratitude to the doctors, family, clergy and friends who were helping us get through it.
No one but my wife and I ever saw it, but it felt good to get it out.
I realize I’m dwelling too much on sorrow. My stories about our children, our grandchildren and my own misadventures as a husband, father, injury-prone klutz, Dancing Dad, Dancing Star, inadvertent Windex drinker and, most publicly, once-a-year glutton at Musikfest have given readers a chance to laugh at and with me.
It’s great to know that when your stupidity literally melts the floor of your kitchen — courtesy of a dish I called Exploding Salmon Surprise — at least you’ll get a good column out of it.
I have a few secrets from the people who have read my columns for all these years, but not many. A columnist’s life truly does become an open book.
I’m convinced that personal relationship buys you some slack when you write things — particularly about politics — that readers disagree with. This has come in particularly handy during this Trump era, when my anger and revulsion has led me to write much more about national politics, and in a much harsher tone, than I ever have before.
I know this has turned away some readers who used to enjoy my columns, and I regret that. But I also would regret wasting a forum that few people have to say what I feel needs to be said.
Much more common targets, over the years, have been politicians in local and state government. I still remember the time I was spotted in the audience at an Allentown City Council meeting and one of the councilwomen leaned over to a colleague and whispered, “This can’t be good.”
It is good. Lost in our growing partisan divide over national government and the performance of the media is the understanding that your local newspaper truly is your watchdog, a powerful tool for revealing and preventing public corruption and irresponsibility.
As The Morning Call’s only opinion columnist for many years, and one of only two for many others, I’ve fully understood the importance of trying to use that power for good, as I know my colleagues continue to do.
I’ve long since come to consider this job a calling. I can proudly point to many people, causes and projects I’ve helped in one way or another, more through perseverance than eloquence.
That’s why I hounded a disgraceful local kennel for years until it finally was raided and closed and its dogs transported to happy homes.
It’s why I’ve continued to chronicle efforts to help keep Allentown’s homeless safe, particularly in the winter. A column most recently prompted an incredibly generous anonymous donor to write $100,000 checks for this year and next to support a winter warming station at the Allentown YMCA.
It’s why I’ve beaten the drum over and over about the way democracy is subverted by gerrymandering, about the way survivors of child sexual abuse have been revictimized by our antiquated statutes of limitations laws, about the desperation of parents who believed their children could be helped by medical marijuana.
And yet I have to confess that my favorite part of this job hasn’t been the preaching and scolding. It’s been the opportunity to give readers a reason to smile and even laugh in the morning.
Many of you have been complicit in that by generously sharing stories of your dating misadventures, samples of your bad writing, your Christmas Lights nominations and a wealth of clippings demonstrating bad grammar and goofy errors by me and others.
Some of my favorite phone calls have been from readers who wanted to thank me for brightening a really bad day. We all need more laughter in our lives.
So what now? I’ll have to find new callings, starting with more time babysitting our two young grandsons and lots more time devoted to writing fiction, an ambition I’ve mostly set aside until now.
Once things settle down, I may find a cause or two I’d like to spend more time on. I may even start my own blog.
So although I know some of you will miss the things I’ve been doing and writing for the last quarter-century, I also know I’ll keep encountering you on Facebook, on Twitter and out in the community. My new email address is whitebil1974@gmail.com, in case anyone wants to touch base.
And if not, just know how grateful I am that you’ve been willing to read what I had to say three times a week for all these years.
I’ll miss this. And I’ll miss you.