High school elective has led to a long, rewarding career

You just never know how the people you meet will have an impact on your life.

As Nebraska Community Newspaper Week begins, I’ve been scratching my head trying to pinpoint just how I got started in this crazy deadlinefilled business.

I’d say there are about half a dozen people who played a role in getting me started down the road to this 45year career as a journalist.

South Dakota State University professors Dick Lee, D.J. Cline, Bob Albers and Bill McCorkindale come to mind right away. Fellow journalism school students Dick Carlson, Dave Berglund, Todd Murphy, Steve Erpenbach and Dave Bordewyk all helped to reinforce my belief that despite the long hours and the lack of pay, journalism was the field for me.

I guess, though, Mrs. Olson really got it all rolling for me way back in fourth grade.

You see, I had no interest in writing at all until the fourth grade, when Mrs. Olson told us all to use our imaginations to write a short fiction story. Well, I let my imagination run wild and wrote a whopper of a story complete with a wild west horse chase and a shootout between outlaws. I guess I’d been watching too much Gunsmoke or something. Whatever the case, she ignited a fire in me that’s still burning strong today.

A few years later, Loila Hunking got me focused on how to use my creativity to inform people about what was going on in the world around us.

Honestly, I had no idea what I was getting into when, as a sophomore at Brandon Valley High School, I enrolled in Mrs. Hunking’s intro to journalism class.

It didn’t take long and I was hooked. I’ve been working for newspapers ever since. First, at my hometown newspaper, then on to South Dakota State University and the college newspaper, before heading to northern Minnesota for a brief stint. I returned to South Dakota as the sports editor of the Mitchell Daily Republic before moving back to Brookings to take over as the Brookings Daily Register sports editor, then managing editor.

After working for three large newspaper chains, I decided to become my own boss, which is why 31 years after leaving Brookings, I still sit behind this big mahogany desk at the corner of Broadway and Main streets in downtown Hartington.

Looking back at the journey that took me from Brandon Valley High School to the corner of Main and Broadway, I’d have to say I owe the most to Loila Hunking.

Mrs. Hunking not only taught me the inverted pyramid style of writing a news story, and the basic five W’s and H of journalistic story telling, but she also made sure I understood why it was so important to tell a particular news story.

A former state legislator, she made sure every journalism student understood the importance of ‘’looking out for the little guy.’’ And made sure we knew we shouldn’t just blindly believe in the status quo. She was also a huge proponent of Title IX, and made sure everyone sitting in her classroom understood the importance of gender equality.

We’d sit in that class long after the bell rang and debate the issues of the day and why she felt some of those issues weren’t being covered fairly or accurately by the daily newspapers.

Hunking also had a blunt style, which often times got her in trouble with constituents in her role as state representative and later Sioux Falls City Council member and Sioux Falls School Board member.

I took the lessons Mrs. Hunking drilled into my thick skull onto college with me. Once I’d moved into my Hanson Hall dorm as a freshman at SDSU, I headed to the student newspaper office and applied for a job. I practically lived at the Collegian newspaper office, starting out as a staff photographer before working my way to chief photographer, and then senior reporter. I took some time off from the Collegian to work next door as the editor of the college yearbook, but then right back to work for the paper after that.

In my final year in school, former Mobridge Tribune newspaper publisher Gene Chamberlain taught a seminar about community newspapers. I swear, that man taught me more in one semester than I’d learned in four years of college. He taught me not only what it took to become a good journalist, but what it took to become a good community newspaper publisher. In fact, Gene is the person who guided Peggy and me down to Nebraska to look at buying the Cedar County News in the first place.

And, here we are today, still editing copy, writing stories and fighting deadlines, 40-plus years removed from college. And still loving it.

Yeah, I owe a lot to the teachers and friends that guided and coached me into this challenging but everso rewarding career. I’ve tried my darndest to honor them by trying to teach others about journalism.

That’s why the Northeast Nebraska News Company has always had at least one, and sometimes several interns each summer.

We’re just trying to share our love of this profession with as many young minds as we can. After all, you never know when you’ll spark the imagination of one of these impressionable young kids and set them on a 40-plus year journey into one of the most rewarding careers out there.