After the excitement and trepidation of my first week in the Rockford sports department, I fell into a nice rhythm. Since I was the "extra'' guy on the staff, I became the relief man, filling in for days off and vacations where I was needed.

I wrote stories from announcements and other handouts, covered more high school games, filled in as the beat writer for the Rockford Rams, a semi-professional football team, and wrote a variety of feature stories.

I had never interviewed anyone and I felt more than a few butterflies when I was told to head over to the Elks club and do a story on the speaker that night, Rodger Ward.

I suppose it's a coincidence - or maybe just a bit of irony, considering my future career - that my first interviewee was a retired Indycar driver who had won the Indianapolis 500 twice as well as winning two national championships. By the fall of 1967, Ward was doing a lot of public speaking in support of safe driving and was also a commentator on ABC's Wide World of Sports for its NASCAR and Indycar coverage.

I knew nothing about auto racing and had never even been to a car race, although I did watch motorcycles race once at Angell Park Raceway in Sun Prairie, WI. The only thing I remember about that event was getting hit periodically with big chunks of mud flying off the wheels of the motorcycles on the one-third mile dirt oval. It did not attract me to the sport.

There was no internet or Wikipedia back then and I had very little background for the interview. So I decided to be up front with Mr. Ward and ask him to talk about whatever he would like me to write about.

It was a real rookie move, but I lucked out that Rodger, who I later got to know pretty well, was a nice guy. And he had an agenda, talking about driver safety on public roads, lack of opportunities for young drivers in racing and upcoming safety measures at Indianapolis. I wound up with far more information than I needed for my stories - and far more than I deserved.

Rockford turned out to be a fertile learning ground for my interviewing skills, thanks to the Elks, Jaycees, Chamber of Commerce and other organizations that brought in celebrities to speak. I spent a lot of time at the bar of the Elks club, the venue for most of the meetings, interviewing people like Ward, Ernie Banks, Mike Ditka and Bart Starr before their speeches began.

I immediately loved covering games and interviewing people. What I didn't look forward to was Fridays, when I filled in as the desk supervisor, meaning I had to lay out the morning paper. That may well be the most stressful thing I've ever had to do, mostly because I had no background in it.

Fortunately, I got plenty of help from the guys in the back shop, most of whom thought it was amusing that I was so helpless, at least in the beginning. I actually got pretty good at it after a few weeks. But that didn't make it any less stressful.

Rockford had both the AP and UPI wires, which was a treat for me. I loved reading the competing wire services and seeing how each handled their stories, both breaking news and features. This insight served me well later in my career, especially when I found myself editing the wire in the AP's Chicago bureau a couple of years later.

But, at that point, the most important aspect of having the two services was speed. When a story was breaking, we usually used whichever one showed up first - another good lesson to carry on to my years at AP.

One of the first things I did after starting my job in Rockford was to buy my parents a mail subscription to the morning paper. They got the final edition a day or two late. But at least they could keep track of my budding career.

When I flunked out of Wisconsin after my freshman year, my father tried to convince me that it was for the best and that I needed to come to work for him, helping him in his job as a traveling salesman for Campus Sportswear Company. His territory was Wisconsin and Illinois, which is the reason we moved from our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, to Madison when I was seven years old.

It was a very lucrative and very demanding job. He was often gone from Monday to Friday. And, by this time, he was looking for some help. Unfortunately, I wasn't the slightest bit interested. I had other plans, which dad was not very keen about.

Then I got back into school, graduated and got a job. When he started to see my by-lines pop up in the paper, dad suddenly decided I was doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing - particularly when I got back into sports.

He went out and bought a giant scrapbook, pasted a piece of red construction paper inside the cover with clippings of football scores from the newspaper and a series of headlines.



With Judy still in school, I was driving the 60 miles to Madison almost every week on my days off, which were usually Monday and Tuesday. I would stay at my parents' house and meet Judy between classes for lunch or just to hang out. And we would go out for pizza, usually with whatever brothers and sisters were around, on Monday night. I would head back for Rockford right after dropping her off at her afternoon classes on Wednesday.

While I was home, I would take a look at dad's scrapbook. At first, he carefully clipped out every one of my by-lined stories and pasted them onto the empty pages. But dad was a big sports fans and, soon, I began to see pictures that he just found interesting and stories from other writers that grabbed his attention pasted into the book.

After a while, I found most of the clippings, mine and others, piled between the empty pages of the scrapbook.

Finally, I asked him about it one day. He replied: "I'm sorry, but you write too many god-damned stories."

So much for the scrapbook.

Before one of my trips to Madison, I saw that the great sprinter Jesse Owens was going to be speaking at a W Club meeting in Madison while I was there.

My dad ran track in junior high and high school in Cleveland before he had to drop out to help support his family. He often talked about racing against Jesse Owens and coming in second more than once. It was believable because he was still fast enough to run down the fastest kids in the neighborhood when he was challenged. But some people thought it was just a story.

I asked him if he would like to go see Jesse and he reluctantly said yes. I was a member of the W Club because I had lettered at Wisconsin as a football manager, so I was able to snag a couple of tickets.

Dad acted pretty shy about saying hello to his old rival and we stayed in our seats until after the speeches were over. As a group of people gathered around Jesse for autographs, I prodded dad to go up and say hello.

He shyly stood in line and, when it was his turn, he stuck out his hand and said, ``Mr. Owens, I don't know if you'll remember me. I'm Bill Harris."

By that time, Jesse was standing up with a big smile on his face. He grabbed my dad's hand in his and said, ``If it isn't the fastest white man I ever knew. Hello Willy!''

They stood and reminisced for several minutes and I was happy for dad and proud that I could make that moment happen. And there was never any more doubt about his credentials as an athlete.

As I walked into the sports department for my first day as an actual professional sports writer, Rick Talley, the paper's sports editor and columnist, called me into his office.

"I'm glad you're here,'' Rick said. "We've been a man short for a while and, on an eight-man staff with two newspapers to fill, that can be really tough. I know you don't have a lot of experience, but we're going to drop you into the mix as quickly as we can. We'll keep you busy.''

Those words were music to my ears. I could hardly wait to get started.

And then I sat and answered the phone for two days.

Of course, Rick and the rest of the staff were simply trying to orient me to the heavy demands of a small daily sports department by watching and listening. But I was champing at the bit to do something - anything - besides answer phones and watch everyone else work.

Finally, on the third day, assistant sports editor Phil Pash - who frankly scared the hell out of me - walked up and said, "Harris, we're putting you to work. There's a high school football game tonight at Boylen. Go cover it. When it's over, come back here to write and, remember, we need two stories - one for the Star and one for the Register-Republic. So you'd better have quotes and stats.''

I didn't even know where Boylen High School was. And I sure didn't know how to cover the game. I had watched hundreds of games, but taking notes was new to me. And it was raining. I found the stadium and went to the old wooden press box and looked around for someone to guide me. Nobody seemed very welcoming.

I asked the public address announcer if we would be getting statistics during or after the game and I got a blank stare and a shrug. Finally, someone said, "We always count on you guys to keep the stats.''

The game began and I tried to keep track of yardage and passing attempts by using the players' numbers. I certainly didn't know their names and I couldn't find a roster. But, first things first.

The field was muddy and, soon, the numbers on the jerseys were disappearing. To make matters worse, it began to get foggy and it was hard to see the other side of the field.

At the half, I toted up my numbers and finally found the Boylen athletic director, who gave me rosters from both teams. He also gave me a major tip: cover the game from the sidelines so you can actually see what's going on. He even gave me a piece of plastic to cover my soggy notebook.

I talked to both coaches after the game and got some so-so quotes that would be just enough.

Somehow, I got through it and got back to the newspaper office to write my story. The game wasn't very memorable, but seeing that byline in the paper the next morning was a real thrill. And I never got any complaints about the statistics I used, even if they were pretty much guesswork.

The next high school game I covered, I was prepared with a clipboard, paper, a plastic bag to cover it with in case of inclement weather and an assortent of pens and pencils and markers. From then on, I walked the sideline and kept what I believe to be very accurate statistics.

The only other time I covered a high school game from the press box was the first game I went to after getting married the next year. Judy went with me but she wasn't allowed in the press box. However, it was a mild day and the windows were open, so Judy sat in the last row of the grandstand and we newlyweds held hands through the open window when I wasn't taking notes.

She decided after that it was probably better for me to concentrate on my work and stayed home.

Two parts of the newspaper business that I had never really thought about or prepared for were headline writing and laying out the paper, both of which proved very stressful.

I've always prided myself on my vocabulary and I won spelling bees when I was young. But writing headlines never was my forte. Some people are naturals at it and can come up with witty or newsy headlines that fit perfectly in the space allotted.

My headlines were often dull and too long or too short. It just wasn't my thing, and Phil Pash never let me forget it.

"Geez! How tough is it to write a simple f...ing headline?" he would yell at me.

I was particularly anxious the first time I was told to do the page layout. Somehow, in all my Journalism for Majors classes at Wisconsin, I never took one on setting up the pages.

Finally, the dreaded day came - a Friday night with lots of high school football and previews of college games in our area.

I got the bright idea to look at the previous Friday's pages and try to copy the layout. It worked to a degree - until I realized at around midnight that I had no room for an important late game from the west coast, which I had forgotten about.

I scrambled to make it work and, somehow, I did. It was no prize winning effort, but I didn't get yelled at and I learned a valuable lesson: make notes on what you have to get into the paper that night.

Those were also the days of hot type, meaning I had to go down to the print shop a couple of times during the evening to check the layout, reading the type upside down and backwards. It was an acquired skill that I was never very good at. But the paper had some great people working in the back shop who walked me through the process without making me feel stupid.

Those first few weeks on the sports desk were like taking a graduate course. It was a lot of work, a lot of stress and anything less than an A was not acceptable.

The learning curve was precipitous but, even with the stress, I couldn't wait for the next lesson.

As scared as I was of Phil Pash, I learned to relish his criticism and seek out his tips. I learned more about the art of being a sports writer and editor in the year working under him in Rockford than I did in the rest of my career.

That was an exciting time and there was so much more to come.

From the moment I decided that the newspaper business was going to be my future, I was certain that future was going to be as a sports writer.

But a funny thing happened on the way to that dream. The Rockford papers hired me to work as a news reporter.

Nervously, I reported for work in the first week of September in 1967 in a coat and tie and prepared for anything they could throw at me. It was all new to me.

Within the first week, I had written and edited obituaries,  covered a city council hearing, written a feature on the abandoned train track system in Rockford and spent time simply observing a real, working newsroom. It was awesome.

Rockford, an industrial center, is the third-largest city in Illinois and is located just 15 miles south of the Wisconsin border. The Morning Star had a circulation of about 100,000, while the afternoon Register-Republic had a circulation of about 50,000. It was a great place to get started in my chosen career.

A combined reporting staff, we usually wrote two stories on each assignment, a different story for each paper, though using the same information. Each paper published six days _ the Morning Star Tuesday through Sunday and the Register-Republic Monday through Saturday.

Since I was the new guy, I became everybody's fill-in. Each day I would get my new assignment, depending on who was off that day.

A few weeks after I started, the police reporter took a weekend off. Suddenly, I was hanging out at the police station and the courts.  I even got to drive the newspaper's ``police car,'' which was a small station wagon with the company's name and logo printed in large letters on its side panels.

It was a pretty ordinary weekend, with lots of drunk and disorderly and minor crimes to report. That all changed on Saturday night, near our final deadline, as I was driving back to the office to exchange the company car for mine.

A police call came over the radio and the address was only a few blocks from where I was driving. I decided to check it out. I didn't know the police numbering system, so I didn't know what kind of situation it was. But I was young and dumb and enthusiastic, so there I was driving into the unknown.

It was a poor, mostly black neighborhood with neat lawns and well-kept houses. There was a crowd of maybe 20 people milling about on the lawns as I pulled up a couple of houses away from the address on the police radio.

I got out of the car and, feeling very vulnerable and obvious, I walked up to the nearest person - an older man - and asked what was going on. He turned to me, a pistol in his right hand, and said in almost a whisper, "I shot her. I shot her dead."

At that moment, a number of police cars with sirens blaring and light flashing began arriving. I walked slowly toward the first car and, as what I assumed was a detective popped out of the unmarked vehicle, I said, "Hey, I think you should talk to that guy over there. And he has a gun."

Turns out the man's wife was sitting in the passenger side of a car at the curb, talking with a friend with the door open. The man, in the front door, hollered for her to come in and make him a drink. She waved him off a few times until he got his pistol and threatened to shoot her if she didn't come in. She waved him off again and the gun went off. By the worst luck imaginable, the bullet from that little .22 pistol hit the woman in the arm pit and ricocheted into her heart, killing her instantly.

The police were not happy with me being there before they were. But I managed to get some details and put a short story into the final edition moments before deadline. I got  a nice atta-boy from the bosses for that.

The man, in his 80s, wound up getting probation for manslaughter.

Life was good and interesting and I began to think about what news beat might be right for me. Then, one day as I arrived for work, I was summoned to the office of the managing editor. It was like being sent to the principal's office in school and I was wondering what I could have done wrong.

The ME sat me down and, with a frown, said, "I told you if we ever had an opening in sports I would let you know. Well, we're very happy with what you are doing and we think you have a lot of potential, but I keep my promises. If you want the sports job, it's yours."

My mind was racing. After a short hesitation, I said, "No, I think I'll stay on the news side for now."

We shook hands and I went off to work my shift, my mind in a fog. I slept little that night. The next afternoon, I came in early and asked to see the ME. As I walked into his office, he stood up, smiled and said, "I knew you'd be back. That sports job is all yours.''

And, suddenly, I was a sports writer _ the eighth man on an award-winning eight-man staff led by columnist and sports editor Rick Talley. I had been with the Rockford papers for just under two months and now I was starting all over again.

In the summer of 1966, I was approaching the last semester of my college career and doing a lot of thinking and worrying about my future.

The war in Vietnam was heating up and, after my graduation in January of  '67, I was going to be prime draft bait. Time was running short, but I began looking around for an Army Reserve or National Guard unit to join. So was everyone else of draft age.

I had begun to accept the fact that I would get that dreaded letter from my draft board and possibly end up slogging through Southeast Asian rice paddies with a helmet and a rifle, when I got an unexpected tip.

Arriving at my parents' home one afternoon after class, I found my sister Judy hanging out with one of her high school friends. I had gone to school with her brother and I asked how he was doing. She told me he had just finished his six months of active duty with the Army Reserve and was back home.

I said, "Lucky guy. I've been trying to find a Reserve unit to join."

That's when she got my heart pounding, saying, "He says his unit is losing a lot of guys who just finished their six years."

Turns out his Reserve unit was in Dodgeville, WI, about 40 miles from Madison. I was on the phone to the Reserve Center within minutes.

The civilian clerk said, "Yes, we have openings. And we have a meeting tonight, if you'd like to come and sign up."

I actually got a speeding ticket driving to the meeting.

Back then, you could tell the Army when you wanted to begin your active duty. I told them I wanted to go as soon after graduation as possible. My orders came through quickly and I found myself on a train headed to Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., two weeks after the cap and gown ceremony.

In the couple of months between enlisting and leaving for basic training, I was able to apply for newspaper jobs, telling them that I would be available no later than Sept. 1, 1967 and that my Reserve status meant one weekend meeting a month and a two-week summer camp for about five years.

I picked up a copy of Editor & Publisher and wrote letters to about 30 newspapers all over the country. I had written recommendations from Glenn Miller, the sports editor at the Wisconsin State Journal and also from the head of the UW journalism school, who happened to be my parents' neighbor. I got six interview requests.

I interviewed in Rockford, IL, Dubuque, IA and Green Bay, WI. They all offered a reporting position.

The Washington Post, one of my "reach'' papers, also wrote back, offering to interview me for their scholastic (high school sports) editor. But the letter said that it was not a steppingstone position. They wanted somebody to take the job and keep it. I said, "Thanks, but no thanks."

In the end, I took the job with the Rockford Morning Star and Register-Republic. It was a very good family-owned newspaper and located just 60 miles from Madison, where my family still lived and where Judy, now my fiance, was still going to school.

I had never been away from home on my own, not even sleep-away camp. It was terrifying lying in a berth on the overnight train from Chicago to Fort Leonard Wood, wondering what it would be like and how I would handle the rigors upcoming.

The first two weeks of basic training were just as bad as I feared. We were the objects of scorn and ridicule, pushed hard physically and mentally. Worse, I was unlucky and drew KP two times in the first week, 12 hard hours at a crack. At least I didn't have to peel potatoes or wash garbage cans. I cleaned tables and chairs and washed and waxed the mess hall floor over and over for those two days.

In order to eat, you had to swing across a set of overhead bars - like on a kids' playground. I had trouble figuring out the secret (momentum) and had raw and bloody hands after the first few days. And I got my ears burned by the scary drill sergeant each time I fell off.

I wrote to Judy a few times during the first couple of weeks and, apparently, I sounded so wimpy in those letters that she wondered if she should really marry me. Worse, one of her old boyfriends, who had been wounded in Vietnam and, who my sisters said, was much better looking than me, came home and asked her to drop me and marry him.

Thankfully, she turned him down. And, by the third week of basic, I was getting into the training and the letters turned positive.

Among the enlisted men in my training company, I was the only college graduate. I was also, at 24, the oldest enlisted man in the company. A few of the guys in my unit were ninth-grade dropouts. My peers called me "Pop," NCOs and officers soon began treating me like a person instead of a recruit, making me acting corporal and giving me more and more responsibility for my unit. My company commander, who loved the fact that I could type, even tried to talk me into becoming an officer.

It was an eye-opener, the first time in my life I realized I could be a leader. It was very heady stuff.

After graduation from basic, I remained at Leonard Wood for Engineer School _ my unit in Dodgeville was an engineer company. It was like a regular school week and we had weekends off. I asked Judy to come for a visit and, much to my amazement, her parents allowed her to come.

I was having trouble finding a place for her to stay until I mentioned it to my company commander, a very kind Captain. He arranged for a room in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, right across from my barracks. It was much nicer than any motel room in the area, and a lot cheaper.
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When Judy arrived, I met her at the bus stop and we began walking toward the BOQ. I was carrying a suitcase in one hand and a duffel in the other when the base commander's car drove past. I saw the flag with the one star on it (signifying he was a one-star general) and I panicked. Instead of dropping a bag and saluting or simply walking on without saluting, I tried to salute with the hand carrying the suitcase, nearly knocking my glasses off. We made eye contact and my last view of the general was of a man howling with laughter as they drove out of sight.

The rest of the weekend went much better, although my ``buddies'' tried hard to talk Judy out of marrying me and running away with them.

The rest of my schooling went fast and, after being released from active duty at the beginning of August, I was confident, in the best physical shape of my life and ready to tackle my new job.

It was time to get started on my career.

This blog entry isn't about my career, though the events certainly had a major bearing on my future. So I hope you will bear with me.

Since I grew up in Madison, WI, there was never much doubt that I would attend the University of Wisconsin. But my college career, excited as I was about it, got off to a pretty rocky start.

Between working for the State Journal, being a manager for UW football, playing in a folk trio, discovering State Street's beer bars (it was legal to drink beer at 18 back then) and suddenly finding out girls would actually go out on dates with me, I had a memory failure. I forgot to go to classes or study.

By the end of the first semester, I was on academic probation. It didn't wake me up, so UW sent me packing at the end of my freshman year with the news that I was free to reapply after sitting out a semester. I was embarrassed and angry at myself, though it turned out to be one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I continued to work for the State Journal at night, got a day job at an Army-Navy store run by one of my dad's friends, then a mall clothing store and waited restlessly to restart my college career. Finally, I sent in the application and got a letter back from a dean, scheduling an interview on campus. He was not very encouraging.

"Only one of 10 students who are readmitted make it to graduation," he said. I boldly replied: "I'm the one." He said, "We'll see." But he accepted my application.

I won't tell you I suddenly became a great student, but I worked hard, got off probation and made it to graduation - though it took me a little longer than most.

After my last final exam, I was walking down Bascom Hill, the main thoroughfare on campus, when I thought about that interview. I veered off to South Hall, near the bottom of the hill, walked in and said to the receptionist, ``I'd like to see the dean.'' She was leery, especially since this was during the Vietnam War and the era of protests and sit-ins. But I told her he had let me back onto campus and that I just wanted to thank him and let him know I was graduating.

She got a big smile on her face and walked into the dean's office. Moments later, he came rushing out ahead of her and gave me a two-fisted handshake, saying, ``No one has ever come back to tell me they made it. Thank you.''

Flunking out, which stretched my time at UW to about 5 1/2 years, taught me a valuable lesson about putting in the work to find success. It also gave me the opportunity to meet my future wife.

Judy Rosée was born in Chicago and raised in suburban Skokie, IL. She almost went to the University of Illinois, but wound up, thankfully, in Madison. Our paths would likely never have crossed if not for two things: my horrible freshman academic year and Judy's constant curiosity about everything.

She was living in a dormitory on campus, where she ate breakfast in the cafeteria. Each school day, she would sneak two pieces of bread and some peanut butter out to make a sandwich for lunch. Then she would find a quiet place to study and eat between classes.

For a while, that quiet place was an empty classroom in North Hall on Bascom Hill. But, at the end of the first semester of her sophomore year, she found a lot of very big guys walking into the classroom as she arrived for her daily ritual. It was a physical education class for coaching majors on football analysis and strategy taught by Art "Dynie" Mansfield, the UW baseball coach and former assistant football coach.

Dynie, who was a wonderful guy and a bit of a character, shooed Judy out of the classroom and she found a chair just outside the open door. Being Judy, she couldn't help but listen to the conversation going on inside the room. At the end of that first class, she walked in and asked Dynie some questions about what he had been teaching.

"If you're listening to my class, you'd better be in the room," he told her. From that day on, she found herself auditing a class on a sport she knew absolutely nothing about. There were daily questions, which Dynie answered patiently and with a smile. Eventually, he told her it was time for some practical experience and sent her off to watch spring football practice.

By that time, I was the head football manager and had a lot of responsibility. Still, I couldn't help but notice this cute girl standing on the sidelines all by herself. I decided she must be one of the player's girlfriends. But, by the third day, I realized she hadn't made contact with anyone on the team.

I was playing catch before the next practice and told one of the other managers to toss the ball to me near the young lady. I caught the ball, bumped into her _ not part of the plan _ and said, "Hi.'' Very suave! NOT!

She was even more cute up close. I nervously struck up a conversation and, though I could see she was a bit uncomfortable, I eventually pushed my luck and asked her if she was busy on Saturday night? She said no and I had a date and, though I didn't know it yet, a future.

Later, she said that, being a very honest person, she grudgingly admitted she wasn't busy on Saturday night, fearing that I was a jock and not really her type. Had I phrased the question differently, asking her if she wanted to go out with me, she told me she would have said no.

Sometimes, you just get lucky.

We went out that weekend. It was shortly before a friend's birthday party and my unabashed pals asked her if she was coming to the party with me. Embarrassed, I had to tell her I already had a date with a girl from Milwaukee who I had been seeing for a while.

The next day I called the other girl, who was just a casual friend, and broke our date, telling her, ``I think I just met the girl I'm going to marry.''

Judy went with me to the party and we've been together ever since, about to celebrate our 52nd anniversary.

Some things are meant to be.

I knew from the time I was eight years old that I was going to be a writer. I don't really know where the idea came from. Most kids wanted to be a policeman, or fireman, or super hero, or a pro athlete. I knew I wanted to write. And eventually becoming a sports writer was inevitable, too, though I didn't know it at the time.

I grew up with a father who had been a good athlete and loved just about every sport. He took my brother Rich - two years younger - and me to all kinds of games. I vaguely remember being taken to a Cleveland Indians-New York Yankees doubleheader in the fall of 1948, when I was five. I don't remember the games, but I do have vivid memories of what seemed like millions of legs around me. That was obviously from walking up and down the huge ramps at old Cleveland Municipal Stadium with the crowd swarming around us.

There were football and basketball games and wrestling matches at West High in Madison, WI., where we moved when I was seven. There were football and basketball and baseball - yes, they still played baseball then - at the University of Wisconsin. We watched the UW hockey club team play at the ice rink at the Oscar Mayer meat packing plant before it became an intercollegiate team sport at the school. We even went to collegiate boxing matches at the UW before a tragic death ended that sport at the university.

And then there were the Friday night fights on TV. My dad loved boxing and he was crazy about Sugar Ray Robinson and Ezzard Charles. Who knew I would eventually get to write about and spend time with boxing greats like Muhammed Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard.

Of course, being huge baseball fans - dad briefly played in the minor leagues until he broke his ankle - there were trips to Milwaukee for Braves games and even occasional forays into Chicago to see the Cubs or White Sox.

Dad even let me skip school to watch the World Series with him on TV in 1956, and we were rewarded with seeing the New York Yankees' Don Larsen's perfect game against the Brooklyn Dodgers.

My best friend in junior high, Ralph Farmer, turned me into a St. Louis Cardinals fan. His dad worked for a Budweiser distributor and Ralph was a lifelong Cardinals fan. I remember playing catch in his driveway as the sun went down, straining to see the ball in the weak glow of a porch light and listening to Cardinal games on KMOX, being broadcast on his mom's car radio. Stan ``The Man'' (Musial) was our man.

It's funny, though, even as I told anybody that asked what I was going to be when I grew up that I was going to be a writer, I didn't really do any writing until I was in junior high. Until then, I was an avid reader, though. Chip Hilton, the Hardy Boys, Bronc Burnett, Sherlock Holmes and anything by Charles Dickens. I ate them up.

Finally, in eighth grade, I sat down and wrote a story about a cowboy rescuing a girl from a group of rustlers. I wrote it in longhand on a lined tablet and eventually showed it to Jack Reynoldson, my homeroom teacher, who also taught us English and Math at Cherokee Junior High. God bless that man, who I always considered the best teacher I ever had (he also moved with our class up to ninth grade and later was superintendent of schools in Madison). I'm sure the writing was awful, but he told me it was a good story, encouraged me to keep writing and show him my work any time.

There were occasional tries at writing after that, though they never went anywhere. But the first time I got paid to write was in the summer of 1961, between my high school graduation and starting classes at UW-Madison. I saw an ad in the Wisconsin State Journal for someone to write about City of Madison recreational softball games. I applied and, amazingly, got hired.

The job entailed driving to the downtown offices of the State Journal and Capital Times at about 10 p.m. on weekdays, picking up the box scores of that evening's games from a cardboard box in the lobby, deciphering the usually messy and often-beer-stained writing and putting out a short results story that appeared, unbylined, in both the morning and afternoon papers the next day.

It gave me the chance to sit in the newsroom of the State Journal, feeling like a real journalist for the first time. It was truly a labor of love, and it led to the State Journal hiring me during my freshman year in college as a part-timer in the sports department.

It was the first time I got to be around real journalists, and it was an eye-opener. Phones ringing constantly, deadlines to deal with, stories to write and edit. It was all very exciting.

By that time, I was also working as a manager for the UW football team. On the Saturdays when there was a home game, I would work the game and then head straight for the newspaper office, where it was my pre-computer-age job to put together the national scores. I would rip the scores off the AP and UPI wires as they came in, then alphabetize the scores by region - all done on a typewriter with lots of cut and paste (actually using a scissors and real paste). It was challenging, especially waiting for the west coast scores to come in sometime after 1 a.m.

It was the first step in what became the career that I dreamed of, even before I knew exactly what I wanted it to be.