Remarks
inductees prepared for delivery at induction luncheon for the
Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame, April 19, 2005
Six
people were inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame
in April: Bob Adams, Western Kentucky University's
director of student publications and former publisher of weekly
newspapers; Gene Clabes, former weekly publisher
and former Kentucky Press Association president;Lee Denney
of WOMI Radio in Owensboro; Bob Johnson and Bob
Schulman, both retired from The Courier-Journal and WHAS;
and the late Marguerite McLaughlin, University
of Kentucky. For
a list of the 136
inductees at 25 inductions,
click
here.
BOB
ADAMS: 'The future of journalism is bright'
First, I want to thank the committee who
make the selections. I'm honored to be included among such a distinguished
group of people. I'm especially honored because I never expected
to be standing here today.
After a session with college folks at the
January KPA meeting, Beth Barnes said she needed to speak with
me. I doubt if she has ever had anyone react like I did. I think
my first question was, “Are you sure?” Then, as I’m
prone to do when emotion overtakes me, I probably had to wipe
a bit of moisture from my eyes. My next request was for her to
send me something in writing -- just so I could be sure before
I told anyone else. I said something to Sherry West (Student Publications
bookkeeper who was at KPA) but told her not to tell anybody until
I could find out if it was really true. I did tell my wife and
my mother because I was sure they could keep a secret.
I didn’t hear anything else for about
three weeks – or more. Finally, I got an e-mail from Beth
that included the date of today’s luncheon. The note said
that if I couldn’t make it, we could do it next year. I
canceled my reporting class for today. I wasn’t going to
take a chance.
I want to introduce some special people
here today. My wife Sandy, son Andy and stepchildren - Chad, Justin,
Nicole, Tara and Clint Whittington. My brother Bill is here from
northwest Minnesota. My mother, who is in an assisted living facility
in Minnesota, could not be here. Two people watching from above
today, my father and an uncle who were responsible for the scheme
that got me to Western in the first place, are undoubtedly taking
a break from their storytelling in Heaven and are watching today
with pride.
The other thing Beth and the committee
didn’t realize was how many people were really being welcomed
into the Hall of Fame. The program says six. I beg to differ.
Would all of the people who have ties to Western please stand?
Without these people and the many others
who couldn’t be here today, I wouldn’t be here either.
I don’t dare start thanking people who have made this possible.
But I would be remiss if I didn’t mention at least two.
Dave Whitaker, a member of the Hall of Fame, was one of my mentors.
He changed the direction of journalism at Western, and his influence
on the College Heights Herald is still part of our culture.
The other person has kept me on task and
has kept me from making a lot of mistakes over the years. That’s
Jo Ann Thompson, a friend and my right hand for many of her 29
years at Western.
As I said, I can’t start to thank
all of the people who have made this possible. But I’d like
for Don Collins to stand and represent the former Herald staff
members. Don is an editor in the sports department at USA Today.
A few years ago, he and Jo Ann started a scholarship in my name
at Western and they have raised almost $20,000 to help students
with their education. Some of those scholarship recipients may
be here today.
I keep mentioning the importance of students
to my success. Only a few people really understand what a college
newspaper or yearbook adviser really does or the risks involved.
Chris Poore, a former Herald editor who is now the student media
director here at UK, understands. A college adviser is in a unique
situation. It’s the only job that I know of where you turn
over your reputation and future – in our case every semester
– to a group of 18- to 22-year-old students and hope (and
pray) that they will be successful. If they succeed, everybody
says you're doing a great job. If they fail, the perception is
that you did a lousy job. Thankfully, our students have weighed
heavily on the success side.
There’s a lot of concern about the
future of journalism. A revered writer in Detroit filed a story
about what was supposed to happen, not what happened. A freelance
writer reported in the Boston Globe on an event that was canceled.
A Los Angeles Times writer admitted mistake after mistake in a
recent story. Newspapers are losing readers who have decided they
can’t trust what they read.
Let me assure you that the future of journalism
is bright, if the students I work with every day are any example.
I think Chris would tell you the same thing.
This is all about students. I was thinking
over the weekend about today. One question I’m asked more
and more these days is “When are you going to retire?”
I actually went to a pre-retirement seminar last Saturday. The
answer is “I don’t know. The only thing I know for
sure is that retirement is closer today that it was 39 years ago
when I started at Western. One thing that concerns me is losing
contact with the wonderful students I’ve been blessed to
work with. If I had retired in 1993 after 27 years, I would not
know John Stamper or Kristina Goetz. Shannon Behnken or Ryan Clark.
Caroline Lynch or Stephanie Gladney. Brian Moore or Jerry Brewer.
And the list goes on. I still have to deal with that issue.
The other question I’ve been asked
is what’s the hardest part of my job. It’s not staying
until the paper is put to bed at 1 or 2 a.m. twice a week. It’s
not facing an angry administrator who really didn’t want
his mistakes exposed on the front page of the Herald. Or the history
professor who didn’t want his DUI published. It’s
not being libeled by your own president who proposed having faculty
editors run the College Heights Herald. Thankfully, several people
here today helped keep that from happening.
The hardest part of my job is one I’ve
never done well. It’s saying goodbye to the students who
have become friends. It may be getting easier as I’ve gotten
older, but it’s still hard. When it gets easy, I will know
it’s time to turn this job over to someone else.
Until then, there’s still a lot to
do. One of my goals before I retire is helping Student Publications
raise enough money to get into a new Student Publications Building.
Our goal is to be there in two years. So there’s still unfinished
business.
I could go on for the rest of the afternoon,
but the people you’re going to hear from have impressive
resumes and have earned their day in the spotlight by their body
of work in journalism. My work has depended wholly on others.
I thank everybody who contributed. This is your day.
GENE
CLABES: 'My love affair with community journalism'
Thank you. It’s a distinct
honor to join my colleagues who are also being honored today and
those who have been honored before.
When I began traveling this winding path
some 42 years ago, as the 18-year-old sports editor of the Henderson
Gleaner, there were few who would have bet on me ending up here
and being honored in this very special way.
I began as an inexpensive, $50-a-week,
and immediately available answer to an employee shortage at the
Gleaner. But after a week on the job, I was convinced I had found
my life’s calling. Move over, Grantland Rice and Red Smith.
It was there that I began my love affair
with community journalism. Perhaps it was the reporting about
the lives of real people, in a real place with all the small town
social and economic problems that were emerging in the mid-1960s.
Maybe it was the pride of having my byline in the newspaper every
day and knowing that I had gained some measure of success in my
hometown.
As you might imagine, that false sense
of “having arrived” didn’t last long. Misspelled
names or misquotes have a way of bringing young reporters back
to earth. I landed quickly.
It’s always seemed to me that readers
take on a special ownership of their community newspapers. People
in small towns still talk about “our newspaper.” That
was the case in Henderson. Readers were quick to call in a news
tip or a subject for a photo. They were not shy about pointing
out misstatement of fact, misspelled names or typos.
Once Judy Jenkins, her name was Greenfield
back then, answered a call from a concerned reader about typos.
Judy, a reporter, who has become the quintessential community
columnist, responded, “Yes ma'am. We know about the typos.
We put them in to keep that 'hometown flavor'.”
A few months into my tenure the news editor
suffered a heart attack at his desk. I was thrust into laying
out Page One and writing headlines because no one else on the
staff had ever performed those tasks. What a heady experience
for an 18-year-old. I found myself putting out page one and the
sports page, learning on the job about news judgment and meeting
deadlines.
When I met Judy Grisham my second summer
at The Gleaner I was a second time smitten. She was a University
of Kentucky journalism student who had grown up less than a mile
from my home in Henderson. We had never met until that fateful
night at the Dairy Queen. Things would never be the same. From
that by chance meeting 38 years ago she became Judy Clabes and
the rest is still evolving. She’s fond of saying that I
wake up in a new world every day. Actually I am fast approaching
the point that I am just glad I wake up.
Our sons, Joe and Jake, are here today.
Despite my greatest fear that their mother was totally wrong about
them turning out to be responsible, productive, gainfully employed
citizens, I must say I am very proud of the young men and fathers
they have become. Joe and his wife Chris, who is also here today,
have given us a wonderful grandson, Drew. Jake and his wife, Tera,
who was unable to attend, have given us another very special grandson,
Ben.
I know it was fate that brought Judy and
me together on that summer night in 1964. From there were launched
two careers that were closely intertwined in journalism for most
of our 38 years together. We have often mused that it might not
have been as much fun, rewarding and sane had we both not had
the same interest.
Most of those years centered on community
journalism in some fashion. We began our post college days in
Evansville, Ind., where the newspapers had strong community ties.
It was a place where good, responsible reporting could make a
difference. We learned from the late editor of the Memphis Commercial
Appeal, Michael Grehl, during his editorship of The Evansville
Press, a spunky afternoon newspaper.
From there, when Judy was promoted to become
the first woman editor of an E. W. Scripps Co. newspaper, we moved
to Northern Kentucky. Nepotism rules kept me out of the newsroom,
but my other vocational love, horses, occupied my time until,
with a group of northern Kentucky businessmen, I purchased the
Recorder Newspapers, a group of weeklies with papers in Boone,
Kenton and Campbell counties.
After three years of growing circulation
and developing content, the papers were sold to Community Newspapers
in Cincinnati. I stayed on for three years as we grew the three
products into 10 and increased circulation from about 5,000 to
50,000 throughout Northern Kentucky.
It was there, where the newspapers were
designed for focus on small communities, which Northern Kentucky
is filled with (more than 30), that the impact of small town community
journalism was driven home most profoundly. Those products gave
the towns a sense of community. They provided a format for issues
to be discussed on a very local level. We always had letters to
the editor which we passionately tried not to cut. And through
it all we learned that readers know more than we do.
Community and rural newspapers are a thread
that runs so true through this state, perhaps because coverage
by metropolitan newspapers is limited. Small newspapers serve
a vital role from the mountains to the vast grain farms of West
Kentucky. Sometimes the provide information we might be just as
well off not knowing.
My friend Ellen Gregory at Preston-Osborne
tells the story of an Eastern Kentucky weekly columnist who writes
the chicken dinner column for the newspaper. The columnist’s
husband mows the cemetery. This particular column ended by saying,
“You might have noticed that the cemetery grass wasn’t
cut this week. Fred had diarrhea.”
While community and rural journalism has
no corner on the market when it comes to characters, it has it
share. During my tenure as Kentucky Press Association president,
I remember the Rev. Larry Craig, a weekly editor from Western
Kentucky, giving his blessing at a noon meal, thanking God “for
not making us Hoosiers.”
In closing let me call your attention
to the work of the Institute of Rural Journalism and Community
Issues, and its interim director Al Cross. Al along with Al Smith,
Knight Rider and UK Journalism Director Beth Barnes have begun
framing the infrastructure for this important initiative that
will help strengthen community journalism in Appalachia. It is
efforts like this that will improve rural and community journalism
across Kentucky.
Finally, I am please to see that our friends
Nick and Nina Clooney are here. Nick is a member of the Hall of
Fame. Nick and Nina are usually at the right place at the right
time. However, as humorously revealed in his thrice weekly column
in the Cincinnati Post last Friday, he and Nina actually came
last Tuesday. Thanks for returning.
Also attending is former Gov. Brereton
Jones, who seems to always be at the right place at the right
time. His vision has led to the formation of the Kentucky Equine
Education Project, sorely needed organization devoted to educating
Kentuckians about the economic importance of the equine industry
in the Commonwealth. It’s my good fortune to serve as Equine
Director for KEEP and work closely with the governor. Also here
today is Claria Horn Shadwick, KEEP executive director, whose
responsibilities includes keeping me pointed in the right direction.
Thank you again for honoring me. I will
be eternally grateful for being included as a member of the Kentucky
Journalism Hall of Fame.
LEE
DENNEY: Went to a smaller town 'to make a difference in people's
lives'
This certainly debunks the
old saying about not being able to fool all of the people all
of the time. Actually, this is a very proud moment and a very
humbling one.
I am pleased my daughter
Leigh Ann, my grandson Adam, and my sister Dora are all here today.
When Leigh Ann was born, I was already working in radio and later
TV, and it wasn’t a big deal to her. She just figured everybody’s
daddy worked in broadcasting. But her little friends apparently
were more impressed. One day when she was maybe eight or nine
she asked me “Dad, are you somebody?” I don’t
remember what I said…but what I should have said was, ‘Yes,
dear, I am somebody. I am your father. That will always be the
greatest honor I’ll ever receive.’ This is certainly
one of my proudest moments. But at the top of the list by far
is being in the delivery room at Saint Mary’s Medical Center
in Evansville, Ind., for the birth of my grandson nearly 16 years
ago. I appreciate your sacrifice to be here, Adam, because I know
you had much rather be in school.
My sister Dora has been more than a sibling
to me. She has been a lifelong friend. I can honestly say I cannot
remember the last time we exchanged cross words, but it had to
have been when we were still teenagers. I should have had that
kind of relationship with my ex-wives. In life, as in baseball
when you go 0 for 3, it’s been a bad day. I have had a bad
day when it came to relationships, due to some degree with my
lifelong fascination with my beloved and seductive mistress, the
news business.
Centertown, Ky., was a town of perhaps
500 people when I grew up there. There were 29 of us in my high
school graduating class. My father was a coal miner who managed
to send me to college in 1958. I enrolled in what was then Western
Kentucky State College, planning to be a high school English teacher.
I graduated from Western Kentucky University in 1992. Broadcasting
got in the way.
When I decided to make broadcasting my
life’s work. My father, a product of the depression and
to whom security was everything, proclaimed “Son, you will
never amount to a damn thing.” He may not have been too
far off target, but I did amount to “something” and
this proves it and I ain’t giving it back.
I started in radio as a disc jockey in
1961, but I eventually decided that spinning stacks of wax wasn’t
as satisfying as I thought it would be. I switched to television
news in Bowling Green as one half of a two-man news department.
From there I got the break of my life, being hired by WHAS-TV
in Louisville. Later I worked in Evansville twice, Jacksonville,
Dayton twice and San Diego, all in television news as an anchor
or executive producer. But nowhere did I learn as much and enjoy
a job as much as I did my two years at WHAS.
I like the fact I am joining this prestigious
circle with this particular group of individuals. I didn’t
know Ms. McLaughlin, but I know she played an important role in
the UK school of journalism. Bob Adams has a long history of outstanding
service to journalism at my alma mater. Gene Clabes was
working for an Evansville newspaper when I was an anchorman there
and our paths crossed often. Bob Johnson and Bob Schulman were
at WHAS-TV during my time there.
In that newsroom were Barney Arnold, Cawood
Ledford, Milton Metz, Phyllis Knight, Ken Rowland, Fred Wiche,
Glen Bastin, Bob Johnson and Bob Schulman -- all members of the
Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame. What a wonderful opportunity
for a green-as-grass kid from Ohio County to learn from pros.
All of these gentlemen and lady, along
with Mort Crim, Bob Morse, Hal Stopfel, David George, Bud Harbsmeier,
Wayne Perkey and others were so generous in sharing their knowledge
and their friendship.
From Bob Schulman I learned one man can
have an opinion and still respect the opinions of others. One
of the things I learned from Bob Johnson was that a person’s
ethics are more important than the story. Bob Johnson has no idea
how much I learned from him and he has no idea how much I respected
him then, and now.
When Bob wanted to get your attention,
or he especially enjoyed a witticism, he would throw a phone book
at you. Now in Centertown, the phone book was about this thick
… so the Louisville telephone book made quite an impression
on me.
I have tried to learn from everyone along
the way, and I have tried to pass along what I have learned to
the next generation, which in turn is sharing that passion and
knowledge to the newest wave of journalists. So, Bob, the things
you learned as a young man and taught to me are still being practiced
in newsrooms all over this country.
Twenty years ago I realized that I would
be happiest in a smaller-size market near my family and where
I could become involved in the community and make a difference
in people’s lives, including mine. I even ran for political
office about eight years ago, the Daviess County Fiscal Court.
I would have won, too, but one of the other candidates got more
votes. I like to think it had less to do with the voter’s
dislike for my politics, but rather their desire to keep me on
the air.
While I certainly enjoyed the excitement
of a big story in a big market, I have never regretted my decision
to make Owensboro my adopted home town.
I realized just how much I love this profession
after I moved back home to Owensboro when I realized it isn’t
the market size or the medium that determines success and happiness.
It is doing the best job you can where ever you are. Your listeners,
your viewers, your readers deserve nothing less.
As I near the end of my time at the podium
and my time in this profession, let me say it has been a rewarding
journey, these 44 years. I have lived on both coasts, and a lot
of great places in between. I have reported on a lot of interesting
people, both famous and infamous, as well as ordinary folks who
had done extraordinary things. I have worked with and worked for
some wonderfully talented and dedicated folks. Many have remained
close friends for decades.
I don’t know what kind of an English
teacher I would have made, but apparently I made the right career
choice for me because I still look forward to going to work every
morning. While my bank account doesn’t reflect it, I am
a wealthy man. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
BOB
JOHNSON: The importance of newspapers, and their owners
What I'm
about to say may sound quaint to those of you who grew up with
computers.
I've got a thing about newspapers. The first thing I do each morning
is to retrieve The Courier-Journal from the front steps. I enjoy
reading newspapers. I like the feel of a newspaper in my hands,
and there are stacks of partially read newspapers, mainly the
single copies of The New York Times that I buy several times a
week, hidden around the house. For those of you who think I must
be mired hopelessly in the age of hot type, I also read the Washington
Post's daily report on politics via e-mail, a point I would have
made even if Len Downie weren't here with us today.
I'd like to say a few words about how this came about and how
it got me into the business.
I'm old enough to have clear memories of the day Pearl Harbor
was attacked in 1941. I didn't understand what had happened that
Sunday, a few weeks past my sixth birthday, but from the reaction
of the adults, I knew it was something terrible.
Over the next few years, as I learned to read, I started looking
at the headlines, the maps and the photograms in the newspaper
that came to the house. That paper was the Chicago Daily News
and through its pages I began to understand the war.
At best, I have vague memories of the war years but I clearly
recall the final months: FDR's death, the bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki and finally, the war's end.
I kept reading my paper. Simple reports in elementary school were
cribbed from page-one headlines. The more decks in the head, the
more detail in my reports.
I also got a taste of homegrown politics. When an uncle ran for
office in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, the lace tablecloth came
off my grandmother's dining room table, the women in the family
addressed envelopes in the perfect handwriting that seemed to
come with a parochial school education and the kids -- I was one
of them -- would drop in an emery board and add a stamp.
Mass mailing, 1940s style.
I listened to the Truman-Dewey election returns on radio in 1948
and saw Eisenhower campaign for his first term as president at
the DuPage County Courthouse in Wheaton in 1952. That fall, I
started reporting high school sports for a suburban weekly. I
was 16 and the job paid 10 bucks a week.
In 1956, the Democrats came to Chicago to nominate Adlai Stevenson
for a second time. Passes to the convention at the International
Amphitheater were not hard to get -- security was not much of
a worry back then -- and I got to see some of the proceedings
at what seemed to be a very great
distance.
Four years later, the Republicans were in Chicago to nominate
Nixon for his run against JFK. Barry Goldwater made his famous
speech challenging conservatives to take back their party -- which
they surely did -- and Herbert Hoover, vilified as president for
his ineffectual handling of the Great Depression and ultimately
rehabilitated by President Truman, made his last appearance on
the national stage. I covered the convention as a reporter for
WHAS Radio.
I had come to Louisville for what I was certain would be a short
stay. But I liked the job, enjoyed the town -- a good pace to
raise as family, as they say -- and gradually came to know the
state: a beautiful, intriguing place full of contradictions and
heartbreak.
There was something special about the job that I didn't grassp
immediately. Longtime Louisville residents helped define it for
me. I was lucky, they would say, to be working for the Binghams
-- not for the stations or later, for the newspaper -- but for
the family. That was the heart of it: a long,
satisfying career at a family operation that defined the was news
was covered in the region and laid out a progressive agenda that
helped drag Kentucky out of stagnation.
In April, 1978, I finally got my first newspaper job as a city
desk reporter at The Courier-Journal. I was 42 and had been in
town for nearly 20 years. That same year, my newspaper, the Daily
News, folded, but I was now at home at The Courier-Journal.
The following year, the Courier sent me out as political writer,
a statewide beat that came with great latitude to develop sources
and produce stories. David Hawpe, then the M.E., gave me simple
orders which I will quote verbatim: "Scorched earth."
The newspaper's state staff was filled with strong, experienced
reporters, and the editors back in Louisville held the reins lightly.
There was nothing better than to head out in the state for a week
or reporting. In 1980, Willie Nelson was on the radio singing
"On The Road Again" and I sang along with him.
Frequently, I'd end up in Lexington with other reporters on Al
Smith's "Comment On Kentucky." We'd review the news
of week, then continue the discussion over dinner just down the
road at the Merrick Inn -- a hell of a way to end the week.
I spent nine years on the beat before handing it off to Al Cross.
He did it for 16 years. Unbelievable.
Today, no one covers politics statewide for The Courier-Journal,
there has been no one in the Lexington [news] bureau for two and
one-half years and it's tough to hear the anguish of veteran reporters
who must deal with the top-down agendas imposed by supervising
editors imported from small outposts in the corporate chain.
A postscript: A funny thing happened to me after I gave up the
political beat. Dammned if they didn't make me an editor.
Thank you all.
BOB
SCHULMAN: Let's have more reporting on media meetings
Along with earnest thanks, let me voice
my pleasure that this is not also a posthumous recognition.
I also want to express my relief to the
Hall of Fame selectors for overlooking the fact that I am also
not a native Kentuckian. Had I been, I would have missed what
took me into the news business.
Growing up in New York City’s Bronx,
I remember how my Romanian-born, electrical-engineer dad had an
arrangement with his colleagues where he worked downtown. Each
of them would give dad his copy of their newspaper to go with
dad’s New York Times. Each night he would walk from the
subway bringing me a copy of the world, the sun, the Daily News,
the Mirror, the Graphic, the Herald Tribune, the Telegram. How
could i have ended up any differently?
Fact is, my arrival in Kentucky in 1968
gave me the opportunity for an intriguing journalistic discovery.
I was aware of the Bingham tradition, of
course. But having earlier pursued newspaper, magazine and TV
reporting in St. Louis, Chicago and Seattle -- presumably big-time
stuff — it was a surprise to find Kentucky print and, yes,
broadcast news, steps above what I had known in some of those
other places — steps above in ethics, in standards and in
that much discussed journalistic drive — that fire in the
belly.
I saw also that gutsiness, along with accuracy
and fairness levels, had spread widely across the commonwealth.
Eventually, in a change that dispelled
the feeling that big-chain ownership always spells a downturn
in quality, Knight-Ridder ownership of the Herald-Leader lifted
that paper into Grade A ranks. As for Gannett, the Courier-Journal
may not be nationally what it was under the Binghams, but frequent
solid reporting and investigative series , together with strenuous
efforts for real fairness and balance on its op-ed pages, show
The C-J still has plenty of what deserves respect.
To be sure, all this high-quality talk
is still relative. Celebrity-mindedness, and too much pandering
to what the news customers want, seems to me to pollute the Kentucky
media well.
Currently, with basketball accurately counted
a Kentucky religion, putting sports news on page one ahead of
Iraq or state budget woes constitutes violation of the separation
of church and state!
All too many of our top TV stations so
automatically lead with routine crime news that it appears that
Kentucky is gripped by a continuous crime wave. Viewers are subjected
to endless repeats of old video, and to newscast teasers about
upcoming stories that don’t promptly show (like interruptive
foreplay). And then there are those young, on-air stars who unwittingly
mangle the language and think news in depth consists of rip and
read and being ‘live’.
Still, strong encouragement comes from
the recent years’ experiences I and other Kentucky journalists
have had working with lawyers and the state courts to clarify
mutual misunderstandings.
From the smallest Kentucky newspapers to
the largest, and from TV and radio news ranks, reporters and news
editors and directors have given many intensive, free-wheeling
hours to meet with judges and lawyers for candid conversation
about how to improve.
How many of you here know about that? How
much of the public is aware that, in these sessions, many of our
top news people are showing a conscientiousness that the Limbaughs
and Coulters and O’Reillys of the world deny ever happens?
How many know the self-searching concerns
about public disenchantment with the media that were aired all
through this past year at national press and broadcast meetings,
including one in Kentucky?
The problem is a weird journalistic tradition
that passes up general reporting of what goes on in sessions in
which news people are involved. This habit of downplaying or ignoring
news that has media looking at themselves is a nationwide ailment.
Eliminate this habit -- begin general reporting,
for example, of what is being said that’s newsworthy on
this UK journalism day — and we may begin to make a dent
in the worrisome public distrust of all of us in the media. We
must do more, much more, to let our audiences know how often we
agonize about how we play our role.
Nowadays, when people ask me if I’m
retired, I answer ‘No, I am unemployed.’ I don’t
understand how anyone can ‘retire’ from the exciting
and fulfilling exercise of curiosity and fact-finding that have
motivated Kentucky journalists.
In Wildcat country, I cannot resist noting
that while curiosity (and lucky baskets) may have killed some
cats, the kind of curiosity that sniffs out news and pursues threats
to the public interest is one that justifies our devotion. May
those of us lucky enough to be in this profession or craft or
business (or whatever you want to call it) long continue that
kind of pursuit!
Again, thank you.
