If anyone had asked me years ago what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer would have been a professional baseball player.

 

Even though I made it to the semi-pro level,  I realized in my late 20s my dream of making it to the Major Leagues wasn’t about to come true.

 

Never in my mind was there any thought of becoming a newspaper reporter. In fact, my verbal skills weren’t that good all through grammar school and high school.

 

I think part of the reason was growing up in a poor, diverse neighborhood in Jersey City where English was a second language for many of the families around me. There wasn’t much motivation to develop an extensive vocabulary with no one else to use it on.

 

So how did I become a writer for a newspaper?

 

It actually started after high school. Soon after graduation, I began working at a trucking company in shipping and receiving.

 

The job was physical but not very intellectually demanding. I felt I needed some mental stimulation, and I knew TV wasn’t the answer.

 

Then one day as I was sorting though some mail, I saw an offer to join a book club. There were dozens of selections covering just about any subject.

 

My first thought was ordering something sports-related. But as I thumbed through the catalog something else caught my eye - a novel called the The Wicker Man.

 

It was a mystery/suspense story about a British policeman who travels to a remote island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl.

 

I wasn’t really into reading novels, but the story seemed intriguing. Plus, I figured if I didn’t like it, I could just cancel my subscription.

 

I received the book in the mail a few days later and started reading it, hoping it would keep me interested.

 

It did. I read the whole novel in one day. 

 

I immediately looked through the second catalog that came with the book. I ordered two more novels. One was IQ 83 by Arthur Herzog. It was about a virus developed in a laboratory that gets loose and starts making everyone stupid. Then the scientist has to figure out a way to stop the virus as he slowly loses his own intelligence.

 

The other novel was a Sherlock Holmes adventure, the Seven Percent Solution, which later became a film.

 

Both books arrived a few days later. I read each book in a day.

 

I was hooked.

 

Over the next few years I was reading an average of one novel a week, never realizing that my intellectual entertainment was building my vocabulary and my grasp of the language.

 

I found out the impact it made a few years later when I decided to sign up for classes at college at age 32.

 

I hadn’t been in a classroom in 14 years, and I was nervous about how well I would do when I had to re-take the SAT test.

 

When the results came back, I was amazed. My math score was exactly the same as it was when I had taken the test in high school.

 

 

The only way it could have happed was by reading novels.

 

A few weeks later I got a letter in the mail, informing me I had been awarded a full corporate scholarship that would cover my tuition - but only if I took 12 credits a semester and carried a 3.0 grade point average.

 

That changed my plans about working full time and just taking a few night classes.

 

I arranged with my boss to work nights so I could enroll in college as a full time student.

 

When it was time to pick a major, I chose Media, hoping to specialize in film, video and computer animation.

 

As part of that major, I was required to take creative writing, advertizing, film criticism and short story writing. I did well in all my subjects and graduated with a 3.95 GPA.

 

After I graduated, I went to work writing and editing marketing material  for a company in New York.

 

Seven years later, I moved to Minnesota, where there was a writer/reporter position available at the West Sherburne Tribune.

 

As you can tell, I got the job.