Why I left the best job ever

 

At a Las Vegas restaurant, I stared at a scantily dressed waitress when she brought us lunch. “You’re going to like it here,” said the Associated Press correspondent that I was about to replace.

 

I did like it. I thought it would be the best job I would ever have. I was right!

From 1968 to 1970, long before the AP bureau grew to five reporters, I was the only one. In fact, I was the only one writing for out-of-town media other than the rival UPI correspondent.

 

Opening night for Frank Sinatra? Of course, I went. Elvis Presley’s debut? Got to see that. A real live elephant playing a jumbo slot machine? Sure, get a picture! Another nuclear test? I sat at the bar at the city’s tallest hotel and called the L.A. bureau. “It went off,” I said as I felt some shaking. And I had another drink.

 

I used to drool over the clippings I got from the Las Vegas News Bureau: Hundreds of newspapers had run my articles about a showgirls’ strike, Howard Hughes scooping up another hotel or Lana Turner’s wedding.

 

I covered lots of fights including one of George Foreman’s first and Sonny Liston’s last. At ringside, you didn’t dare wear a white shirt if one fighter bled a lot. I even asked Muhammad Ali a question at a press conference.

I interviewed dozens of famous people: Dionne Warwick, Ramsey Lewis, Little Richard, Dizzy Dean, Hoagy Carmichael and Jose Feliciano. When Feliciano got in trouble for a bouncy national anthem in the World Series, he told an AP reporter, “Say hello to Mike Doan for me.”

 

So why am I not still there? I really got restless in that historical moment as the world seemed to be falling apart. When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, all I did was get gamblers’ reaction. The Vietnam War was in full blast, but I was writing about roulette and blackjack.

 

The demands of Nevada radio stations and newspapers were overwhelming. I did not want to write another article about an arraignment of some mobster accused of dumping a body in the desert. I didn’t want to set up my teletype machine in the convention center again for another statewide election.

There was no AP repairman within 280 miles. If a radio station’s machine broke down, I had to interrupt my news writing and remove it and put it on a bus for Los Angeles.

 

So, when an opening came for my hometown of San Francisco, I took it. Now I could get back to real journalism: students rioting, the Black Panthers, Indians occupying Alcatraz. Back to real life!

 

Like Going One-on-One with LeBron James

Buy now? Sell now? What do you do when the stock market is like a roller coaster ride?

The motto at the Kiplinger Editors, where I was a writer for 16 years, was “Buy good stocks and hold on to them.” I try to go along with that despite temptations to jump into the latest trend or dump everything when the market is shaky. Of course, the trick is finding out which stocks are good.

I’ve seen friends become day traders, sitting at a computer buying and selling stocks, thinking they can outsmart the market by following their latest whim. “Microsoft is hot. Think I’ll get in.” Or:  “I have a hunch that Toys.com will make it big.” If the stock has become popular, you are already too late. Many day traders were wiped out.

The trouble is, you are betting against people who have done real research: the experts at mutual funds or hedge funds who can really crunch numbers and even visit the companies they invest in. Why do you think you are wiser than them? Would you go one-on-one with LeBron James in basketball?

I remember buying stock in Mortgage Investors of Washington in 1971, thinking that Washington, D.C. real estate would take off. Well, that was right, but the company was poorly managed and tanked. My $15 per share investment turned into $3.50. I also thought “Annie” would be a big hit musical movie and placed my money on Columbia Pictures. I was right about the movie too, but the stock didn’t follow it.

So since then, I have put money into mutual funds or other instruments invested by others. I don’t know what they bought—don’t want to know. Usually, they are hedged enough with bonds or other instruments, where I don’t suffer big losses in a market downturn or leave me euphoric in a boom. At this stage of life, I am not trying to suddenly get rich.

My broker once had me invested in the stocks in the Dow-Jones Average of 30 of the biggest companies.  I got uncomfortable. “Conrail? ? General Motors? I don’t want those dinosaurs. Get me some new companies.” But many new companies don’t survive.

My broker tried to talk me out of dropping this investment, but it didn’t work.  I saved his note for some odd reason. What a mistake! The Dow has risen 2,500% in that time.

If I had it to do over, I would have put money in a fund that followed the Dow-Jones averages, or another that rides with the market.  Would I do that today? Well, no, at this stage in life I can’t risk the volatility.

At last. Now it can be told

 For years, I kept a dark secret, carefully hidden from public view. I was embarrassed to let the world know:

I was going to church.

 

Really? It’s no secret now. When you are 83 years old, with the grim reaper breathing down your neck, of course you go to church!

 

I am covering all bets now by being involved in three, yes three, churches: Mt. Carmel PresbyterianChurch in Turbeville, First Baptist Church in South Boston and Dumbarton United Methodist Church in Washington, D.C.

 

So, what happened? As a young adult, I didn’t go much but I found comfort in church as 21-year-oldreporter in Dover, Del. I even sang in the choir. My beliefs didn’t run very deep, but I liked a place where loving people set aside their weekday struggles to ponder the meaning of life. What and who is God?

 

No one I worked with knew I went there. I mean, it isn’t cool to go to church, especially as a journalist. Looking for scandal, you certainly believe in original sin, but not much in salvation. You are cynically uncovering the misdeeds of bad people and thrilled when you can say: “Gotcha!!” 

 

After I left Dover, a church member outed me to my former boss, who laughed out loud when he told me about it over the phone. He even put it in the history book he wrote about the newspaper!

 

I did go to church a few times in Las Vegas, but it was Sin City—not appropriate! Going to Glide Methodist Church in San Francisco was considered cool though—a defiant black pastor with a rock ‘n’ roll band.

 

In Washington, I found Dumbarton during a dark spot in my career when I had no one to turn to. I can’t say I was “born again,” but I found welcoming people in a kind of family away from my California hometown.

 

Of course, I didn’t tell my drinking buddies or fellow journalists about this highly subversive habit.  Meanwhile, I was churning out church publicity, the modern form of evangelism.

 

My secret interest became useful at U.S. News & World Report, where few on the staff knew anything about religion. I wrote about inclusive language in churches, television evangelists and the 200thanniversary of the Methodist Church in the U.S. in 1984.

 

The magazine called on maybe a dozen staff members to collaborate on a story, “the religious left fights back against Jerry Falwell and the right.” All I had to do was get out my church directory and call six or seven members of this left-leaning church who were active in the movement.

“We couldn’t have done this story without you,” my boss told me.

 

Since judgment day has not come yet, what tangible benefits have I gotten from my flirtation with the afterlife? Well, the main one came in 1981, when I was assigned with two others to help serve at Dumbarton’s coffee hour. “Who is this Pickett Craddock, on the list?” I asked a woman friend. “Oh, she’s a single woman, Mike. You ought to get to know her,” she said, pointing her finger at my nose.

Well, I did, and we are still together. I did better finding a woman at church than in a singles bar. I got one who shares my values.

 

And to this day Pickett still brings snacks and sometimes signature dishes from the bed & breakfast to Mt. Carmel on Sundays. (Hm, maybe I should help her.)

 

Why did’t I save more copies?

Imagine my shock when I found out last week that copies of Orbit Video magazine, which I managed, are now being sold online for $40 to $49 apiece.

Why didn’t I save more from the stacks of copies before it went under in 1989? (And why didn’t I save my old baseball cards?) I have one copy left, but I want to keep it.

Rare magazines often become collector’s items for some odd reason. Maybe we should have produced more of them.

It all started when my boss, the owner of Satellite Orbit magazine, decided to diversify with a monthly periodical that had reviews and features about movie stars. National Enquirer had just pulled the plug on the only other videotape magazine out there. But we figured we were smarter and could be successful by selling them directly at video stores.

We got tons of VHS tapes, reviewing from 50 to 100 new releases every month. One lady had the joy of reviewing maybe 30 of them, one per day. We took the rest of them home to look at. Unfortunately, most of them were utterly dreadful. There was a surplus of horror and gore films that were tough to watch.

We also had a videogame section. A 22-year-old guy was in charge of the reviews, a job that many teenage boys would have adored. I liked playing electronic golf games.

We added all kinds of features to the magazine. One of my biggest-ever challenges as an editor was handling a horoscope column. The writer was bored with simple lists of the month’s outlook for Leos and Sagittarius and wanted to write feature articles about astrology instead. No, thank you.

Our readership never took off. Research showed that customers at video stores were rarely happy. Theycouldn’t find the movie they wanted and were in no mood to buy a magazine. Just candy!

We found that our biggest fans were not Joe Sixpack butvideophiles--movie crazed people who would watch them endlessly all day.

Finally, after about 11 months, publication stopped. No more free movies and video games. We ended up with a negative circulation! How is that possible? We counted people as subscribers as soon as they signed up. But when they failed to pay, we had to dock them from the count, thus a negative circulation.

So, we stuck with Satellite Orbit, the viewing guide for people with large dishes. But we could see the writing on the wall: The TV networks started scrambling their satellite signals, making people pay for the shows they saw. And small dishes were hitting the market with online viewing guides that made paper guides unnecessary.

Now I have to pay for streaming movies. Yes, life is hard!

 

-0-

Don’t miss “Fiddler on the Roof” by the Clarksville Community Players this weekend. On opening night last Friday, I thought the group put on one of its best performances ever. The singing, dancing and acting were terrific. Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.

What do I do next? I can’t decide

Sometimes I think I have too many choices.

Back in the Stone Age, when I grew up, there were three TV channels. I could watch a soap opera or a stupid game show or Superman. Well, that was easy! Superman!

For music, I would hear a song on the radio and possibly buy the record album. It cost a lot of money, so I would listen to it over and over until I was sick of it. Then I would buy another.

Books weren’t cheap either. If I didn’t find anything I liked in the library, I would buy something. “Peyton Place”. Remember that? I should feel guilty admitting that It had a few words of profanity in its hundreds of pages?  Or “Battle Cry,” another long but exciting book.

Today, I just can’t make up my mind. A tech mogul understated it when he boasted of 500 channels of TV in the future.  With streaming, cable and traditional TV, you can choose among thousands of shows. You can see high school football games in Nebraska, soccer in Spain and college gymnastics from Michigan. You can spend all day just deciding what to watch.

Now you don’t have to sit through a whole three-hour game and the commercials. You can go to YouTube and get the whole game trimmed down to two minutes. Instead of reading a book, you can download a podcast featuring an interview with the author. And you can pick out just about any song you want on YouTube, probably including a video of the performers.

So, is this any good for your brains? A new book, “The Siren’s Call” by Chris Hayes, says that we have lost the ability to focus. We are so bombarded by stimuli that we can’t turn our attention to one thing at a time.

I rarely read newspaper stories all the way through anymore, but I forced myself to read a review of the book and was given it as a gift and read it (well, listened to it on Audible.) If that is too much, you can go to ChatGPT or another AI platform and ask for a 500-word or 3,000-word summary. And without paying for it!

There are birds singing in the trees. Sorry, but I am busy scrolling through my Facebook feed. Your spouse wants your attention? After this podcast ends!

Am I going to change anything? Well, no. My wife thinks I live in “the cloud” anyway. I actually welcome all of these choices.

But please don’t ask me to spend five minutes hearing your funny story. Can you boil it down to 30 seconds so I can get back to commercial-free reruns of “Breaking Bad?”