An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day.
What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?
By the time I got to Northwestern University in 1930, I was a football bum more interested in being an All-Star player and signing on with a pro team than going after a newspaper job.
I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.
My freshman year at Harrison High School, I saw a journalism class where students were putting out a weekly newspaper. It touched a responsive chord in me.
As a kid, I'd get up at 3 in the morning during school vacations to help my father on his bakery-truck route. He didn't get a vacation from that schedule.
My father, a bakery-truck driver, was the epitome of the work ethic that probably kept me knocking out columns six days a week for a rough total of 12,600 over 50 years.
Chicago, with its big newspapers and major broadcasting stations, couldn't have been a better city to start a journalism career.
I've never wanted to do anything but be a newspaperman ever since I was 13.
'At Random' ran on Saturday nights for as long as the conversation was still lively. Sometimes, I'd finish way after midnight, then hop a plane for whatever city I was working a football game that Sunday.
