The Twelve Days of Gheorghemas: Day Three

On the third day of Gheorghemas, Big Gheorghe gave to me:

Three(+) Decades of Love's Labor
Two Things You're Needing
And a Fat Guy in a Sweet T

We asked the G:TB Research Staff to review the previous years of Gheorghemas celebrations to see if we'd ever before had a guest post during this most sacred of seasons. They didn't answer, because they're like the rest of us, lazy and distracted, and probably half in the bag. So we'll just go on memory. Honorary Gheorghie Dave Fairbank grabs the conch to reminisce and celebrate a life's work.

If I interpret this site correctly, Gheorghemas is a celebration of gratitude and goofballery, two cornerstones of my adult life. My blessings are abundant and landed me among people and places that supported and challenged me, and often were much fun to be around.

A young Dave Fairbank

I was a sportswriter for 33 years, the last 30 at the newspaper in Newport News, Va. The job allowed me to Peter Pan my way through adulthood, writing about games and athletes and coaches. I still kind of marvel that such jobs exist. Don’t get me wrong. Sports moves the needle like few other pursuits. It rarely disappoints and provides thrills and drama and countless stories. I saw an inordinate amount of talent come through Hampton Roads, much of it in the formative stages because the area has no major league sports. I was fortunate to be able to call my own exit, increasingly rare in a profession where people are being thrown overboard like it’s Pirates of the Caribbean.

The fact that I became a sportswriter at all was a kind of happy accident. I can pretty much assure you that it wouldn’t have happened today, given the path I followed. I graduated from the University of Maryland in 1980 with a liberal arts degree, which is every bit as marketable as you might imagine, and no idea what I wanted to do. I had never written for a school paper, had never taken a journalism class. To this day, I have no idea what they teach in J-School. Well, that’s not exactly accurate; I have an idea what they teach, but I know zero specifics about methods and training.

I banged around at odd jobs out of school. I substitute taught, at a time when subs were more babysitters than teachers. I parked cars at a couple of local racetracks. My dad took pity on me for a time at the company he helped run, a small home heating oil and gas outfit, where I was the AMC Pacer of salesmen. Mostly, I watched friends jump into the working world, taking jobs that looked like slow death. I even halfway considered law school, but was so serious about it that I went to a Parliament Funkadelic show the night before the LSAT. I so badly tanked the test the next morning that I don’t even think I bothered to look at my scores.

One constant was that I read newspapers – the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, and the hometown paper, the Capital in Annapolis, Md. I did a little traveling while in college and just afterward, and I read local papers everywhere I went. I was struck by the crappy storytelling in many small-town papers. Fueled by a combination of ignorance and arrogance, I began to think: I can do that. I reached out to local papers and asked if I could write for them. Let’s see some of your work, editors said, and what credentials do you have? Problem was, I had none.

I had just about given up when I reached out to a tiny, weekly paper in southern Maryland with a sports department that consisted of one woman, who also did a couple of other jobs at the paper. She said, sure, I can use the help. And because it was a weekly and my deadline was a couple of days early, there was time for her to fix whatever I botched. She assigned me to write about local high school athletes and teams. She mostly liked what I wrote and paid me the princely sum of 50 cents per column inch.

Also a young Dave Fairbank

Armed with a handful of clips, I drove to the Washington Post one mid-week morning, figuring to ask someone in the sports department to read my stuff and to offer suggestions. No appointment, no idea who to talk to or even who might be in the office. In other words, an absurdly stupid idea. Yet for some reason, the security guard allowed me upstairs, and somebody in the newsroom pointed me toward the sports department. The only people in the department I saw that morning were former outdoors columnist and sailing writer Angus Phillips and a very young John Feinstein. I saw Phillips first, introduced myself, told him that I needed some guidance about whether I could do the job, and asked if he could help. He couldn’t have been more gracious. He called to Feinstein to come over and read some. Feinstein protested at first and said, “Angus, I’m a terrible editor. I won’t be any help.” But Phillips insisted, saying something to the effect of, look, this kid has driven all the way here and wants to know if he might have a future in this business; the least we can do is read his stuff. They were both very encouraging. Their primary criticism was that I was too wordy and needed to be more concise. They asked how much I made. I told them. They were aghast. “Fifty cents an inch?!? Forget what we just said. Write longer.” Years later, I told Feinstein that story and that he had helped motivate me. He didn’t remember, but was amused and basically apologized for helping steer me toward such a dismal career path.

Anyway, those first stories landed me a job freelancing for the Annapolis paper, which I did for about a year. The two younger guys in the sports department at the time had both worked at a small daily in Cambridge, Md., for the longtime sports editor there. They recommended me, and he hired me. My first full-time newspaper job, in 1982, paid $10,000 a year. I couldn’t have been happier. I sent resumes and clips to larger papers within a couple hundred-mile radius, eventually getting a call from the former sports editor in Newport News.

I had some vague notion of living the rootless life of many newspaper folk – moving up and on every few years for different and better assignments, more pay. But it didn’t work out that way. People knew me and respected my work, or at least faked it well. When subjects and sources return phone calls and make time to talk to you, that’s pretty much all you can ask for as a journalist. As my parents aged, I was fortunate enough to be able to see them regularly, which wouldn’t have been the case were I halfway across the country. I met my wife, built relationships both personal and professional. The money was never great, but I never felt like I wanted for anything. Truth be told, between wage freezes, minuscule pay raises and inflation, I probably took pay cuts for the last 10 years of my full-time working life. I wouldn’t have traded a minute of it.

Since I’ve jumped off the daily journalism hamster wheel, life is a little different. There are times I miss being an Enemy of the People, but so be it. I’m grateful for the life I lived so far and for what’s to come, whatever it may be.