E doesn’t like to be talked about online, and doesn’t like to be included in photos posted online, so I’ll keep this short:
Today was graduation day at WWU. My youngest child is now a college grad.
I could not possibly be more proud. Nor more emotional.
What a morning this was.
After a long and winding road, my oldest child is now a college graduate!!
Cari and I braved unusually hot weather in Ellensburg*, but let’s be real — we wouldn’t have missed this for the world. Sean made some bad choices early in his college career, so this took much longer than it should have. But these past couple years at CWU, he really put in the effort and it paid off.
(*E still has a week left at WWU so couldn’t join us.)
It was suuuuper hot. Toward the end of the ceremony, I started to feel like I might pass out. Cari and I decided to leave and cool off after hearing Sean’s name called, then we reconnected and celebrated with him after it was over.
What an emotional day it was. Sooooo emotional and so proud of him finally finishing and getting his college degree!!!
This photo is a snapshot of what hope and dreams looks like … or looked like … back around 1989 or 1990.
That’s me on the left and my Pepperdine sportscasting partner, Kent Justice, on the right, at a men’s basketball game. I really have no clue when and where the photo was taken, but I have a sneaking suspicion it’s from March 1989 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. That’s the night Pepperdine beat New Mexico St. in the first round of the NIT tournament. Kent and I somehow got the Communications Dept. to a) let us travel to New Mexico to broadcast the game on campus radio KMBU-FM, and b) pay our expenses!
We were both full of high hopes and dreams for lengthy careers in sportscasting. For me, the dream lasted about 7-8 more years. I got out of TV and radio sports in 1997 after being told by news directors in two bigger cities that I was their #1 sports anchor candidate, but they couldn’t hire me because I was a white male … and they were under orders to hire a female/minority. Seeing the writing on the wall, I got out of the business altogether, taught myself how to build and market websites online and the rest is history.
Kent, IIRC, has been in and out of the TV industry just a bit, but has settled in Jacksonville for some time now, and is currently the political reporter and weekend news anchor at WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Fla. We spoke a few months ago and he’s happy and doing well.
That makes two of us.
Life doesn’t always lead where you hope or think you’ll go, but that doesn’t mean you won’t end up somewhere great.
T is finished with high school. Well, not quite. She has one teacher who’s taking advantage of the bizarre pandemic-created schedule that has schoolwork continuing through June 9. So my daughter has a few more days of schoolwork even though she graduated today, June 5.
No, she’s not shown on the photo above — that’s the Hanford HS Choir singing the national anthem near the beginning of the festivities. T doesn’t like her name or photo being posted online, and we’ve always agreed with and respected her wish for privacy. But that photo above shows you what graduation was like. All virtual/remote, and we watched it on TV in our living room.
Sure, it was weird in a few ways … like our graduate not needing to wear her cap and gown during the ceremony, for starters. But TBH, we were all impressed at how well the whole ceremony went down. It was well thought out and there were no glitches at all. And it was pretty cool to see General Jim Mattis involved (he lives here), along with Foo Fighters’ bassist Nate Mendel (he’s an alumnus).
But enough of all that. In this house, the day was all about T. She graduated with honors, and you bet I was proud to see “Honor Student” on the screen when her name was called during the listing of the grads. But the thing is, as proud as I am that she graduated with honors, I’m even more proud of how she did it:
She worked her ass off until the very end, even though she didn’t have to.
Her grades have always been good. Never once in her elementary or high school life have we had to worry about that. So as the second half of this year began, she surely could’ve coasted along and still passed easily.
But she didn’t.
When the pandemic hit and schoolwork moved online, it was pretty difficult at first because no one knew what they were doing — especially the school and teachers. She was frustrated in the beginning, and she could’ve shut down and said “screw this.”
But she didn’t.
At some point, online learning was such a struggle that the schools announced that students’ grades would not be allowed to dip below what they were on March 17 — the date that home schooling began. My understanding is that if you were passing then, you’d pass the class as long as you finished the attendance and coursework requirements. She could’ve gone into autodrive and been satisfied with her March 17 grades.
But she didn’t and wasn’t. In fact, she worked hard enough to raise her grades before graduation.
If ever a student had an excuse to get a serious case of senioritis, it was T and it was these last two months of her senior year. She’d already committed to a college for the fall, so it’s not like she really needed to impress anyone at the next level. Graduation was pretty much a guarantee under any circumstances. But she kept working. And working. And improving her grades. And improving herself.
T … I can’t begin to put into words how proud I am of you for that. I’m so proud to be your dad.
Now go kick ass at college, and kick ass again in whatever career path you take. And don’t ever quit. Hard work will always win. Always.
Nevermind that it’s the summer of 2017 right now. Close your eyes and transport yourself back to 1984-85. Think of what you heard on local radio stations and saw on MTV.
You might eventually think of Bryan Adams, whose Reckless album came out in late 1984 and spawned hit after hit after hit after hit. In the Philadelphia area where I grew up, Bryan Adams was played what seemed like constantly on multiple radio stations. And I was a fan.
I took my best girl down to the Spectrum in Philadelphia to see Adams’ concert on October 5, 1985. (Actually, I think we had broken up by this time but remained friends. Either way, it doesn’t matter.)
I have no recollection of writing a concert review for my high school newspaper, but apparently that’s exactly what I did. An old friend recently sent me scans from the January 1986 edition of The Flame. I already posted one of the two articles with my byline from that issue, so here’s the second: my Bryan Adams Philadelphia concert review.
#goodtimes
(You can click to read a larger version of the first image if you need to.)
Thanks again for sending these along, Joe.
An old friend emailed me not long ago — a guy named Joe Madgey that I knew in high school but hadn’t heard from since high school. (For those of you who don’t know me too well, high school was a loooooooong time ago.) He had Googled my name and found this blog and used it to get in touch. It was great to hear from him.
Joe described himself as a “pack rat” and told me that he’d been going through old stuff he had saved, and found a copy of The Flame, the newspaper that we produced at our high school, Holy Ghost Preparatory School. He scanned and sent it along because there were two articles in it that I’d written. One was a review of a Bryan Adams concert that I’ll share in another post soon. But first I’ll share the article I wrote after 14 of us took a senior class trip up to Harlem, NYC.
I remember the trip vaguely now. But re-reading the article brought back a bunch of memories that I’d long since forgotten. I lived pretty comfortably in the Philadelphia suburbs, so seeing some of the poorer areas of Harlem was very eye-opening to 17-year-old me.
(You can click for the larger versions of each image if you need to.)
It’s not the first article I ever had published in the HS paper, but it’s pretty close to the start of my writing/journalism career — and probably the oldest piece of my own writing I’ll ever find. Unless, of course, Joe keeps digging through his old stuff and finds more!
Thanks for passing this along, Joe.