It was a sunny early November afternoon in 1968.

I throttled down my road-worn 1956 Oldsmobile to a halt outside the Maywood Twp. Hall in Oak Park, our local precinct, and strode inside to vote.

Clerk Cornelius Stob, longtime township servant, area farmer and family friend, checked off my name and I headed to the booth.

It was my first election.

It was a big election, too. Minnesota’s Sen. Hubert Horacio Humphrey, having emerged from a disastrous, bloody, uncivil National Democratic Convention endorsement in Chicago five months prior, was facing off against Richard Nixon, the Republican from California.

I voted for HHH. I told myself I didn’t trust “Tricky Dick.”

But the Nation did, and elected Nixon by a hair’s margin to the Presidency, the first of two successful bids for him and the Nation’s top office. 

I didn’t vote for him the second time, either. Apparently, I didn’t trust him any more in 1972.

He was impeached from office from the Watergate Scandal the following summer.

I don’t remember if I voted for Gov. Jimmie Carter in his successful Presidential bid in 1976.

But I do know that was when my more Democrat voting ways ended.

My life had changed by 1980. I had started a family (the West Sherburne Tribune, serving Becker and Big Lake)) and the thinking came more to a position of ensuring productivity and the existence of a newborn business.

I have thought that way since - that the Republican platform of spending less and keeping government out of the way so businesses could thrive, employ people and produce services, was most important in our society.

I won’t bore detractors more of my self-serving thought processes relative to politics. At this point, it’s quite non-productive.

But, I will share a few thoughts about the most important families in my life - the Tribune and Citizen newspaper staffs - and my hopes for them and our futures.

I trust they come to the office each morning with smiles on their face and an energy to help us produce a good newspaper. That they have done.

I trust they are good citizens outside the office, that their families are their top priority - and they are helping make life better for them and their neighbors. They’re doing that, too.

I trust that if and when they leave their positions with us, they will remark that the newspaper job was one of their best-ever. I hope for that, too.

Because with these newspapers comes a bond a trust with our communities; a bond to inform and to serve, and to do that as unpolitically as possible.

We are privileged to be in these businesses. We are privileged to be part of a capitalism-first economic mindset that allows young people with a dream to set forth and pursue it, like me, back in November, 1978, when I started walking the streets of Big Lake and Becker, asking merchants if they would support their own local newspaper with advertising.

I am immensely appreciative of their response over the past 36 years.

I went into the voting booth Tuesday to vote forcandidates and issues which support those beliefs.

I noted for a government to support my “families” the best way I know.

I voted for a government, from local offices to those in Washington DC, which  I hope will turn more of its attention toward support for free enerprise and the power it can provide to keep us a world’s leader.

And I remembered the song, God Bless America for the hope this country continues to bring to us.

We should all remember that song.