An Adrenaline Shot of Inspiration

Today I was a panelist at communication workshop at La Salle University, my alma mater. The audience was full of high school students and their parents, and our job was to tell them what it's really like to work in broadcast and print journalism, film or mass media. The panel did a great job of telling the truth (e.g., "Newspapers are dying") while still encouraging the young people who want careers in these fields.

I would know. I used to be one of those kids.

In April 1989, nearly 18 years ago (as impossible as that sounds), at the tail end of my senior year of high school , I attended a similar workshop at La Salle. The topic: newspaper journalism. I went because I was a staffer at my high school paper, even though I only wrote book reviews of horror novels I liked. A budding Woodward and/or Bernstein I wasn't. Newspapers were boring. Except for the comics and movie ads.

Midway through the morning, I shuffled into a classroom to hear Frank Rossi, then a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist, talk about his job. I expected it to be deadly boring. And when he started discussing one of his recent columns, which was about the plight of watermelon farmers, I knew I was right.

In fact, if you had asked me to come up with the most boring topic for a newspaper column, like, EVER, I would have said:

Um, how about the plight of watermelon farmers?

But as I listened to Rossi speak, something astounding happened. I started to put myself in the heads of those watermelon farmers, and goddamn if it wasn't tough. There were business pressures. Environmental nightmares. The hope of a full crop, and the harsh reality of that season's yield. For a few minutes, the fate of the crop was the most important thing in the world.

And that was the moment when it clicked for the first time: You could actually do this kind of shit in journalism. Go inside someone's head. Take the reader to a place where they wouldn't (or couldn't) go otherwise.

I thought only fiction writers had that kind of fun.

Between the end of my senior year and my first day of college, all of this stuff was kicking around in my head. Rossi's lecture had sparked something in my brain. A few weeks after that workshop, I sat down and typed Rossi a thank you letter.

A short while later, I received his hand-written reply, which I've pasted above. (Click it to enlarge.)

It was like a sign. Or a benediction. Or something.

But it jazzed me all summer, and when I entered La Salle for real in September, I brought a bunch of writing samples up to the Collegian office on the third floor of the student union building and applied for a job as a news reporter. Eighteen years later, I'm the editor-in-chief of a weekly newspaper, and talking to kids about careers in journalism.

Frank Rossi passed away only a few years after that workshop. I never had the chance to thank him in person. I very much wish I could have.

But I think about Rossi whenever I talk to a student about my day job.

And, of course, I think about those watermelons.