Chapter 9 • 1990 • Going Solo

Being fired has a certain air of finality. Friday afternoon was the end of one life; Monday morning was the beginning of another. In between, I had reorganized the little room I used for my home office and prepared to test the job market. Despite my best intentions to think before I took any precipitous actions, old habits die hard. In the past, when I was out of a job, I had to find another one immediately. This time, I could afford to take a break, but I had not yet made the mental adjustment to my new reality.

As I thumbed through my Rolodex, I had doubts. One was that no one would remember me; the other was, to find a job at my level, someone would have to die. No one I knew was going to quit a perfectly good job unless they found an even better one, and I doubted there were many of them out there.

I made three discoveries almost immediately. People did remember me, very well in fact. I had been cloistered for ten years. I was amazed at how my peers out in the communications community had kept up with my career. More than one could recite my resume. The second discovery was that while there was a dearth of jobs, there were plenty of freelance projects just waiting for the right writers. Several people told me they would be thrilled to hire me as a freelancer whenever I was ready to start. I had been buried in the corporate catacombs for a long time, which to my mind was akin to being invisible. Not so, it seemed. An aha moment for me—the first of many.

The biggest realization of all was that there was a thriving freelance network functioning just below the radar, and the writers in that network were earning good money! I had been oblivious, but now a whole new set of possibilities presented themselves. What if I couldn’t find a job or decided not to continue looking for a job? Could I earn a living as a full-time, independently employed writer? I had no idea, but since I wasn’t getting anywhere with the job-hunting, freelancing seemed worth investigating.

I put on my researcher’s hat and changed my approach. I asked corporate communications and public relations executives if they hired freelancers and what kind of projects they were outsourcing. I asked writers if they were finding work, who was hiring them, and what was the going hourly rate. It was an eye-opening exercise.

I have a foolproof process for making decisions. I learned it years ago from a book called Psychocybernetics by Matthew Maltz. The short version is to consciously review every detail of the subject—pro and con—until I am on information overload. Maltz called this “feeding the computer” (the subconscious mind) long before computers became part of our daily lives. The key is not to beat the computer to the answer by thinking myself blue in the face, but rather to just walk away and forget about the problem. In the beginning, that was very hard to do.

Now that we know more about how computers work, the process makes more sense than it did in 1970 when I first read about it. Then, it was more an act of faith. What matters is that it works … every time. In the middle of thinking, or not thinking, about what to do with the rest of my life, I tested the theory by taking a vacation. It was out of character, under the circumstances, but when I got home, my decision had made itself. I was going to start my own freelance business.

I had no idea what it meant to “start a business.” I figured I would need an accountant and was lucky to find a wonderful guy who had only recently hung out his own shingle. He taught me the basics: open a separate checking account, keep track of time, income, and expenses, file all receipts, decide on an hourly rate, send out invoices, get everything in writing, save for taxes. Some I absorbed; some went right over my head. But at the end of every month, I turned in my numbers, and he did whatever accountants do and met with me to be sure I was on track.

The tough part of freelancing is supposed to be finding work. Rule number one is always fill the pipeline, so that when you finish a project, another one is waiting in the wings. For a long time through very little effort on my part, the jobs kept coming. I worked on an assignment, finished it, and received my lofty fee of $60 an hour. Then, another job would fall in my lap. So, I had work; I made money; I did all the things my accountant told me do; and I was happy as a clam, oblivious to what it meant to be “in business.”

Sidebar

“A good manager wears many hats: innovator, leader, planner, organizer, liaison between staff and higher levels of management, steward of resources, productivity booster, and developer of people. The latter two roles are the foundation of proficient management, which is, by definition, the ability to meet organization goals through and in concert with others. Over the years, tens of thousands of words have been written about the best methods and techniques for increasing productivity. Management literature has explored everything from the militaristic model to quality circles and self-managing teams. But recent literature has focused more and more on the importance of helping employees grow and develop on the job.”

1992 • Trainer’s Workshop

Years later that I read another little book called The E-Myth Revisited, I understood my mistake. I had what the author David E. Gerber called an “entrepreneurial seizure.” I assumed if I could write for someone else who would pay me, I could write for myself. That is the E Myth. The most important message in the book was this: Running a successful small business takes three people, or one person who can wear three hats: a technician, who creates something; a manager, who runs the office; and a marketer, who has big ideas and grows the business. I was a writer—a technician. Either I had to become a manager and a marketer or hire them. But I didn’t know that then, and even if I had, I had neither time nor money to fill the other two crucial roles.

If I had it to do again, I would sign up for a business course. Instead, I just kept on being a technician, never suspecting there was a better way. Somehow, I did OK for several years—OK meaning grossing about $50,000 a year in writing fees—sometimes less, sometimes more. Those were the good years; there were some not-very-good years in there.

When I glance across my office at the five shelves of binders filled with writing samples, I am amazed at the variety and volume of work I did during those first few years. Corporations were hiring freelance writers for anything that contained words—newsletters, articles, brochures, annual reports, training manuals, corporate identity, executive speeches, audio-visual training, employee benefits programs, and later Internet and intranet websites—a virtual candy store full of tempting assignments.

I didn’t know this wasn’t the way to run proper business. Whatever I was doing seemed to be working fine. Once again, I was meeting and interviewing executives. I was learning about industries as diverse as oil refining, hospitals, machine manufacturing, paperboard packaging, and industrial real estate. I was hiring photographers and designers and acting as liaison between them and company management.

Sometimes, the jobs dried up and disappeared. Corporations with huge magazine budgets moved to other cities, pulled the work inside, or decided they no longer needed magazines at all. Large training or advertising projects were completed and didn’t lead to follow up work. Managers changed jobs and brought in their own people. With each change, I adjusted and reinvented myself, like an actor who had to keep auditioning for and learning new roles.

Sidebar

“What do the waistline and the bottom line share? You may be surprised to learn that both are affected by what and how much your employees eat. Chronic health problems, such as high blood pressure and loss of muscular flexibility, can drive up lost-time and medical costs not only for older workers but for younger ones, as well. The reason is obesity. A recent study by the Rand Corporation indicates that obesity can significantly raise health care and medication costs for overweight people, as well as costs for other health problems, such as smoking. The study notes that some younger people are showing sings of premature aging because they are carrying excess weight that has the same effect as an additional 20 years on the their lives. In fact, the problems usually associated with aging are caused by the body working harder to perform its usual functions. A wellness program could help your workers achieve and maintain healthy weights and improve their overall lifestyles.”

Winter 2003 • Health & Safety News

Two major corporations remained my best clients for many years. For one, I wrote award brochures, training manuals, and a long-running safety newsletter. For the other, I wrote speeches for three CEOs and various other executives, a mission statement and new strategic direction, annual reports, and marketing materials for various divisions. In this best of all possible worlds, I was an insider, an ex-officio member of the senior management team. I knew what was happening behind closed doors long before most managers and employees did.

My unique position allowed me to witness the end of an era. The executive management team was on the verge of announcing a major change in the company’s operational philosophy. It was big, it was important, and it was gutsy. Our team had been working on the rollout for months. Less than a week before the official event, I was called in to a management meeting in the CEO’s office. Everyone looked as if they were about to attend a funeral. Something had died. That was obvious. In a heartbeat, everything we had been planning was off the table. The company the CEO had hoped to create would never come to be.

Some changes take place gradually; others blow people away with no warning. This was the latter kind. According to that morning’s Wall Street Journal, the company had entered into “merger talks.” Those two words—merger talks—hit the team like a bomb, upending plans, wrecking careers, and sending those of us in the room into a state of shock and grief. I was no longer a member of the inner circle. There was no inner circle, anymore.

Chapter 5 • 1980 • Fear & Freelancing

Shock is a good thing, especially after a profound loss, such as being fired with no notice. Shock/denial, in fact, is the first stare of the grieving process. One walks around in a fog thinking this can’t be happening. I don’t believe it. I’ll wake up, and it will all have been a bad dream. Shock/denial dulls the pain until a person is ready to deal with the loss. I was not ready.

Numb worked for me, especially since I was moderating a panel that night on—irony of ironies—“Where the Jobs Are.” After the presentation, people in the audience, who had somehow learned I’d been fired, told me they had never seen anyone so cool under the circumstances. I was not cool; I was drunk, since the whole department had adjourned to a neighborhood bar because we didn’t want to go home at 4:00 in the afternoon.

The shock phase lasted a while. I sort of stumbled around with no particular sense of purpose or direction. About the only thing I accomplished was cleaning my house. This was therapeutic, but not a long-term solution. It took teeth-gritting determination to pull out my resume and update it with one additional job. My previous job had lasted only 14 months, the shortest tenure on record, and I feared I would be labeled a job hopper. It was time to make the dreaded phone calls.

My Rolodex was pretty full, since I had met a lot of people since 1972. I began with the “A”s. Everyone seemed happy to hear from me, but it only took a few calls to figure out the reason. The mass firing of our department by a national corporation was NEWS, and I had the inside scoop. Inquiring minds wanted to know every sordid detail. There weren’t many sordid details, or if there were, I wasn’t privy to them.

My celebrity status, however, did get me a few interviews from people who probably wanted to hear the story right from the horse’s mouth. It was only two years since my last foray into the job market and not much had changed; there were still no jobs. We did get a pittance of severance pay, negotiated by our boss whose husband was an attorney, but that wasn’t going to last very long. In the meantime, I was trying not to panic.

My friend and mentor, who had given me the corporate survival guides, worked for Monsanto, one of the largest and most prestigious companies in St. Louis. She introduced me to the person in charge of Corporate Communications. He like me; he liked my work; but he couldn’t hire me because of something called “head count. But he did have a project for me. Thus began my temporary freelancing career. It was amazing how quickly my anxiety subsided as I slipped back into the groove of interviewing very important people. One project led to another, and I almost forgot I was unemployed. This was what I was meant to do, I thought, and it was nothing like my former freelancing days when the most I had been paid was $50 for an article. This was real money.

Sidebar

“This may be the age of television, but most St. Louisans wake up the sound of radio. Whether it is switched on automatically or manually by a barely conscious listener, radio begins the day. It sets the mood and provides information about the weather, the world, and what life is like out there. It entertains us from the moment we hit the deck until we pull into our parking spaces at work and reluctantly turn it off to get down to business. For many of us, the first voice we hear in the morning is that of our favorite radio personality, disc jockey, or newsman. And it is the same voice every day, for few of us switch our radio dials once we have found our station. Waking up to the same person every morning is one of life’s more intimate relationships, and that makes our choice of a station extremely significant.”

1980 • St. Louis Post-Dispatch

I could get used to this, I thought. Maybe I should give it a whirl. But when one of my daughters became ill and I was close to the end of my insurance overage, I came to my senses. Get real, a little voice whispered. You need benefits. You need a job. Freelancing became a sideline as I turned looking for a job back in to a full-time job. I’d forgotten how much I disliked the process or how hard it was. I had leads and possibilities and even probabilities but no tangible offers. Time was running out, and I was beginning to feel desperate.

My daughter ended up in the hospital, and I found myself running back and forth between job interviews, story interviews, my typewriter at home, and visiting her. On the last day of my severance pay and insurance coverage, I found myself standing in the most depressing room at Children’s Hospital, staring at the peeling paint on the ceiling and thinking, Oh boy. This is serious. I must confess I am not a religious person and don’t believe in asking God for favors but desperate times call for desperate measures. “I need a miracle,” I whispered. “Just one little miracle.” And I went home.

The next day, I had four job offers. Four!

The fourth one was at the end of a job interview with someone who had called that morning. I had to rearrange three other appointments to find time to meet with him, but I managed to schedule a meeting at 4:00 p.m. Richard was the director of Communications for the largest bank holding company in the state of Missouri. I think he had interviewed every other writer and editor in town. He was clutching a copy of my resume in his fist when I arrived.

“Are you as good as you look on paper?” he asked. “Better,” I said and almost looked around for the ventriloquist who had usurped the conversation. “Here's what I’m looking for,” Richard said, having memorized my last job description. “You’ve found her,” I replied. Where was that coming from? I had no idea. “What will it take to get you?” he asked. I was out of work in a buyer’s market, and he wanted to know what it would take to get me. A number appeared on the inside of my eyelids—a big number. “Twenty-seven five,” I said. There was the briefest silence before Richard said, “I’ll have to create a new job classification, but I don’t think that will be a problem. Let’s go meet our vice president.”

I met the VP, but I wasn’t conscious, so I didn’t register anything about him except perhaps for a tiny flutter in my chest. Later, I realized that the flutter was my Jury of the Deep saying, “Uh oh. Watch out,” but I wasn’t about to listen to a naysayer at that point in the process. We went back to Richard’s office, and he could barely wait to say, “You’re hired!” vigorously shaking my hand and grinning.

The rest was a blur. “Here’s your office ... Meet your next door neighbor ... Come in first thing Monday morning and get squared away with Personnel ... Welcome aboard ... Have a good weekend.”

Starvation had been averted, fear banished. I drove to the hospital in a fog. $27,500. Where on earth had I come up with that figure? I have given myself an $8,000 raise! And I would be doing what I knew how to do—launching a series of employee publications, from scratch. When something seems too good to be true, it usually is, but that never entered my mind.

This would be my third corporation. That in itself should have given me pause.

Sidebar

“A young tennis player watches as Ilie Nastase ‘flips the bird’ in a universally understood gesture of anger. Nastase’s desire to win has been diverted from his forehand to his middle finger. This is the highest level of tennis, the quintessence of competition. And, in a sense, it has become a prototype of behavior, in perfect harmony with the popular philosophy of ‘winning though intimidation,’ ‘looking out for No. 1’ and countless other bromides that glorify the king-of-the-hill position in sports and in life. Competition, long considered a healthy pursuit that raises group and individual standards, and winning are not the same.”

1980 • Tennis Press

Chapter Summaries

For some reason known only to the blogging gods, this post fell out of cyberspace and never appeared on The Writing Life. Thus, it is out of order unless I can figure out how to magically put it where it belongs, which is after the outline and before Chapter 1. If you are confused, I don’t blame you, and I do apologize.

When I teach people how to write a book proposal, I always link the outline to the chapter summaries. I attempt to make it a seamless process, but I realize it requires much thought and wordsmithing to go from bullet points to well-crafted paragraphs. The key is that outlines and chapter summaries are based on intentions—this is how I envision my book and what I intend to write. But a book is fluid and alive and may be quite different at the end than it was in the planning phase. Think of it this way: Your outline is the skeleton of your content, and the summaries are your first pass at putting some meat on the bones.

1. 1968-1972 • You’ve Got Talent

It began innocuously in a night school class taught by a newspaper reporter. I remember only one thing from that class: the teacher took me by the shoulders and said, “I know talent when I see it. You’ve got talent. You’d better keep writing!” I believed her and I struggled to learn to write, get published, and fill one small portfolio. It took me four and a half years.

2. 1972-1973 • Instant Editor

All it took to go from obscurity, writing at a picnic table in my basement, to being a sought-after edit or of a “city magazine” was someone crazy enough to hire me. I was barely a writer, and suddenly I was running a magazine. I knew nothing but was willing to learn from anyone who would teach me. The good news was that I launched a lot of talented writers, artists, and photographers. The bad news was that I never learned to read a profit and loss (P&L) statement. That’s a failing in someone who runs a publication.

3. 1973-1978 • The Making of a Writer

My next job was at St. Louis’s well-established business magazine. My title was a comedown (assistant editor); the salary was a joke; the working conditions were abysmal; my boss was an old-school patriarch; but I did become a “real writer.” I was a one-person writing staff, and in the six years I was there, I built a strong reputation in the community and filled volumes with my articles. However, I was treated like a secretary and didn’t make enough money to go to the gas station and the grocery store in the same week.

4. 1978-1980 • Corporate Culture Shock

I was not born with the corporate gene, and my first job in “big business” was a constant, often painful, reminder. The whole department was comprised of women (a mistake); the general environment was a political nightmare; but the writing and view of the park from the 17^th floor made it bearable. The corporation owned 120 small companies, so the subject matter was all over the place. Eventually, there was a coup in the executive office, and our department was disbanded. We were out by 4:00, just before they locked the file cabinets and wallpapered over the door.

5. 1980 • Fear & Freelancing

I never liked job-hunting, but being a single mom with two daughters made it an urgent matter. While I was circulating my resume and making sure my interview suits were clean, I was landing lucrative freelance projects and making some great contacts in the St. Louis business world. It was a heady experience. I think I knew then that freelancing would be a great life, but I needed a real job with benefits. The prospects were not looking good.

6. 1980-1982 • Disappointed & Dejected

When I was just about losing hope, I had three job offers. I took the one that was the least chaotic and had the best salary. My boss made it seem like I was the best thing that ever happened to him … until the day I started the job. Lesson learned: interview your predecessor and check out your workspace before you accept the offer. Mine office was dismal, but it reflected the general mood of misery that pervaded the department, which was run by a paranoid, petty tyrant (I sure had a way of finding them.) Everything about the job was depressing except for the writing and photography. Once again, I was the whole staff, and I produced so many publications I could barely keep track. I was stressed out. I had to join a gym.

7. 1982-1989 • The Best of Times, the Worst of times

I was hired away by a company that seemed too good to be true, which, of course, it was. I had multiple job titles while I was there—writer, editor, account executive, and marketing manager. The crux of the matter was some doubt on the part of the top man that I could really write, despite having hired me because I was considered to be the best writer in town. So, I spent six-and-a-half years proving I could write, produced the best work of my career, and filled in the remaining gaps in my experience and education. I lost the battle, cleaned out my office, and spent the next few weeks trying to decide what to do. I was getting good at this.

8. 1987 • AMA, The Biggest Break

Hooking up with the American Management Association was the beginning of big things that created the perfect link between a full-time job and full-time freelancing. A colleague recommended me to write three “little books,” and they were little—only 50 pages each. They were like training wheels for being an author, and they led to much bigger books and many cassette-training programs. It was a great gig, while it lasted, but AMA eventually fell upon hard times.

9. 1990 • Going Solo

I had dreamed of being a full-time, independently employed writer since 1980, but it took being “terminated” to make it happen. After 20 years of loving what I did but not necessarily where I was doing it, I hung out my shingle. The freelance life in the ’90s was wonderful. There was plenty of work and plenty of money. Corporate magazines were paying $1.00 a word! I landed steady corporate clients, some of which lasted for years. My motto was, "You need it; I can do it.” And I did. It was an exhilarating time, despite no understanding of how to run a business. I still had no idea what a P&L statement was. That’s also a failing in an entrepreneur.

10. 2001 • The Bottom Drops Out

What goes up must go down, and life as I knew it ceased to be with a loud thud. The economy tanked in 2001; my clients (all very large companies) panicked and fired all their outside consultants; and I found myself with no work. That is not an exaggeration. I was already in shock when September 11^th forever changed the world. The next four years were sort of a blur. I had to start over again, and this time it was going to require ingenuity and imagination. I started writing a training program on how to write a nonfiction book. The training program never materialized, but the material evolved into a workbook I used to teach classes at the community college.

11. 2005 • Reinventing Myself, Again

I was finding work again when life gave me a gentle nudge in a new direction. I was hired to write a book for the CEO of a large hospital system that had won the Malcolm Baldrige Award for Excellence. I knew nothing about the CEO, the hospital system, or the Baldrige; but I took a six-month crash course in all three and wrote the book. Suddenly, I was a ghostwriter, albeit one who didn’t know what she was doing. My little workbook got fatter and fatter; I landed other ghostwriting and editing assignments, and I began to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. The right person came into my life at the right time—a web-marketing guru who taught me the ropes. For the first time, I was truly marketing my business, and clients were finding me on the Web. It was finally coming together.

12. 2008 • Helping Writers Write

Defining one’s mission in a single sentence is not easy. Yet, in a way, I have always known mine. For most of my 40-year career, it was, I want to write. But as I find myself in a new and different place in life, my mission has evolved. Now, in addition to writing, I want to help other writers write. As a teacher, a book coach, and an editor, I have come full circle since my first real job as an editor that allowed me to publish talented writers. My students and clients are publishing their books, and one by one, they are being added to the “friends-of-Bobbi shelf” in my bookcase. I am prouder of those books than of any that bear my own byline.

Chapter 1 • 1968-1972 • You’ve Got Talent

It is time to begin writing this book. I am so ready, I really can't put it off any longer. But first, I want to slip in a reminder and a thank you. The reminder is this: Every writer needs an editor. Every writer. No exceptions. The thank you is to my editor, who continues to remind me by the mistakes she finds and the great suggestions she makes that every writer needs an editor. Thank you, Judy!

Words have power. They can take an ordinary life and make it extraordinary in the time it takes to say them. In my case, words became a compass that pointed me toward my life’s work, though I could not possibly have known that at the time I heard them.

I was a 30-year-old housewife and mother. I wasn’t looking for my destiny; I was just looking for a night school class to take on Monday nights. Any class would do as long as it wasn’t yoga. My friend was taking yoga, and I thought that sounded ghastly. I read the catalog twice and finally signed up for something called “Writing for Fun and Money.” The teacher was a newspaper reporter who fit the stereotypical image of hard-boiled, straight talking, and tough. Writing for fun and money didn’t seem her style.

The first night she asked if anyone had ever made any money from their writing. I raised my hand; no one else did. I was embarrassed to admit it was only $25 for giving a book review to a women’s group. Still, that made me something of a star in our little class.

Looking back, I don’t think I learned anything useful about the subject. In fact, the only advice I remember was from a guest speaker who told us to “Write what you know.” While I was trying to think of something I knew, she described sitting in her children’s playpen and writing funny little pieces for parents’ magazines. I remember wondering where the children were while she was in their playpen. Other than that, I remember nothing … except, of course, the words that changed my life.

On the last night of class, we were all exchanging handshakes and hugs. As I approached the teacher to thank her, she grabbed my shoulders and gave them a good shake. “Listen to me,” she said. “I know talent when I see it, and I see it in you. You’d better keep writing!”

I had no idea what caused her to say that. We hadn’t shown her samples of our work or done any writing in class. But it really didn’t matter. She had said it and I believed her. Her words affected me so profoundly that for 40 years, “You’d better keep writing!” has remained a kind of sustaining mantra.

What comes after such a watershed moment? Well, certainly not instant success. On the other hand, I finally had some sense of direction, however vague. I announced to my husband that I was going to be a writer. He rolled his eyes, but to his credit, he helped me carry the picnic table from our minuscule patio to my new “office” in the basement under the stairs. And he did buy me an electric typewriter, which I used for 20 years until I got my first computer.

Okay, so I should keep writing; but I didn’t know what to write about, how to begin, or where to send what I managed to write. Write about what you know was the conventional wisdom. My life at that time consisted of cleaning, grocery shopping, doing laundry, cooking dinner, and taking care of little kids. This was 1967. Everyone I knew was leading exactly the same life. It didn’t seem worth putting on paper.

How to begin? When in doubt, read a book. Off I went to the library to arm myself with books on writing. The only books I found gave copious instructions on how to write fillers—little stories and clever observations on life—for women’s magazines. So, I bought every woman’s magazine I could find, read all the fillers, and struggled to write something scintillating. Unfortunately, the books didn’t provide much information on the mechanics of submission (paper, format, cover letters, etc.), and those things are not intuitive. I did everything wrong, but I think the biggest faux pas was using flimsy, erasable typewriter paper. Had I read even one article on the mechanics of submitting work to national magazines, I would have known better. Even worse, I made full use of the erasable feature, since I always was (and remain) a lousy typist.

Success eluded me, unless you count the colorful rejection slips that seemed to arrive almost daily. They came in all sizes, shapes, and shades of pastel. (They just don’t make them like that any more.) I considered each one a badge of honor and wallpapered one whole wall of my basement with them. They made a nice collage and at least proved I had been writing, even if my words never saw a printed page.

I didn’t seem to get the hint for quite a while that I was on the wrong track. If I had stayed on it, I probably could have wallpapered my whole house with multi-colored postcards. But at last, quite by accident, I did something right. I wrote a humorous article on what it was like to be handball widow. The title was “H.B.A.A. – Handball Above All.” It was very funny, if you like sports humor, and my husband urged me to send it to the editor of ACE magazine, the handball bible.

Sidebar

“Handball players are like no other sportsmen in the world. They are a breed apart, and they can locate or recognize a fellow fanatic a mile away. Put two handball players together, and they establish instant rapport, even if they have never seen each other before. A party where more than two of the guests are handball devotees is a certain disaster from the point of view of the unsuspecting hostess. They will gravitate together as if they were magnetically attracted. If this is allowed to happen (and just try to stop it), there is little chance of separating them before the evening ends.”

1968 • ACE: The Official Voice of Handball

ACE not only ran it, it did so in the issue that was distributed at the national handball championship matches that were held right here in St. Louis. I was an instant celebrity among the players, but more important, I was published! I immediately bought a portfolio.

That purchase may have been a bit optimistic since it remained empty for quite a while. This was my first foray into freelance writing, and with only one article to my credit, it was difficult to convince editors to take a chance on me. One at a time, however, I carefully scotch taped articles into my book. They were published in newsletters and free newspapers at first, but my first real break came when I was offered a job selling advertising space for a weekly newspaper called The St. Louis Jewish Light. “I really want to write.” I told the general manager, who didn’t need another writer. “I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “If you learn to sell space, I’ll find some things for you to write.” I took the job.

What he found for me were stories no one else on the editorial staff wanted to cover: meetings, programs at night, book reviews, short personality profiles, and little news items. If the subject was deemed boring or inconvenient, I wrote about it, slowly filling my portfolio with feature articles. Amazingly, ACE kept publishing my stories, first on notable local handball players and then on the emergence of racquetball as a serious sport. I interviewed many sweaty men in what looked like white underwear and became known as the “handball writer” around the courts. It was a heady experience.

I’d love to say that I made all my own breaks, and luck was not a factor; but that’s not true. Sometimes, just being in the right place when the right person shows up is like finding a four-leaf clover. I was still selling space, writing for the Jewish Light, and trying to interest editors of obscure publications to give me assignments or print my articles, when one of those right people came into my life. He was in charge of advertising for a company that owned, among other things, a small sports magazine for country clubbers. He liked my writing and introduced me to the editor, who paid my $50 for my H.B.A.A story. That was big money in 1970; in fact, it was the first money I had earned for anything I wrote. The editor hired an illustrator and published my “humor piece” in Replay. This was my second big break, and it turned out to be bigger than I could have imagined at the time.

Replay had a very short life. It was mailed free to a small, elite readership that had never asked for it to begin with. The publisher had a stroke of genius. He used Replay to give birth to a new city magazine called The St. Louisan. It simply appeared one month as an insert; the next month Replay ceased to be, and The St. Louisan was launched. I was launched right along with it.

Being able to write about subjects that were outside of the Jewish community was liberating. I wrote about a innovative day camp on a farm, a rehabilitation center for trouble teens, a relatively famous restaurateur, and my greatest challenge so far: kidney disease. I truly felt like I had died and gone to heaven, as I met more and more talented people. One of those people was one of the most talented photographers I have ever worked with. Portrait artist turned commercial photographer, Denny had a magic touch with people and pictures. From our first assignment together, we knew we had an unbeatable creative partnership. It was one that continued for a decade.

Sidebar

“Metropolitan St. Louis, with a population of approximately two-and-a-half-million people boasts two medical schools, numerous hospitals, and a reputation for being an outstanding medical center. Yet, only five short years ago, in the midst of all of this bustling medical activity and research, if a person was told he was suffering from kidney disease, he could be relatively certain that he would die. In 1966, there were two research units for kidney disease—one at Washington University and one at St. Louis University. The very small number of patients (two) at these centers was treated for education and research purposes only.”

1970 • The St. Louisan

In the meantime, I was still selling space, juggling a house, a family, and a large dog during the day, and writing almost every night. Ah, the energy of youth! That pace, as well as other circumstances, took their toll. I ticked off all the top items on the list of significant stressors—divorce, a major move, my boss’s untimely death, becoming a single mom, and a new job I was ill prepared to tackle.

Phase one of my writing life was coming to an abrupt end.