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.