My unfinished, typed novel sat next to me on the desk in my bedroom in Farmington Hills, MI. It was 1979 and I was 11 years old. I didn’t need a publisher to finish my book. I needed a new ink ribbon for my Tom Thumb typewriter.

The book was going to be a masterpiece. It would be better than anything that those amateurs Ernest Hemingway or H.G. Wells could write. The title of my book? It was simple: The Earth, Moon, Planets, and Stars. The book would be out of this world….Ha! See what I did there?

In the age of the typewriter, if you didn’t have an ink ribbon, it was crippling. Needless to say, I never bought a new ribbon and my unfinished science novel remains unfinished to this day in my basement.

But what came out from that experience is something that will never go away: My passion for writing.

Ever since then, I wanted to be a writer. Most of all, I wanted to be a journalist and write for newspapers. I wanted to be Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein from the Washington Post, uncover the next Watergate scandal, and win a Pulitzer Prize.

A big hurdle remained. I wasn’t even in high school yet! I would have to create a path to get there. Through grade school and high school I wrote about something just about every day in spiral notebooks (today that would be called “journaling,” but I don’t think that word existed back then). In high school I worked for the student newspaper The Catalyst at Farmington Harrison High School and in my senior year I became entertainment editor for Garden City High School’s newspaper Cougar Tracks.

When it came to college, I knew I would go into Journalism. The question was, which university in Michigan had the best program. I got accepted at both Michigan State University and Eastern Michigan University. Michigan State had the award-winning State News, but there was a requirement at the time that freshman students couldn’t be on the staff. I wanted to write NOW!

Eastern Michigan University it was. A few weeks before my first semester of college began, I set up a meeting with Chris Kozlowski –AKA Koz — Editor-in-Chief at The Eastern Echo. The Echo, which published 3 days a week, was the award-winning independent student newspaper of Eastern Michigan University. The newspaper began publishing in 1881. Since the 1970s, the Echo has won 13 Pacemaker awards for best college newspaper from the Associated Collegiate Press, plus numerous other awards from the Michigan Press Association. It has always ranked as one of the best collegiate newspapers in the U.S.

I drove to the campus from my home in Garden City, MI. At 18-years-old, my heart raced as I walked quickly a quarter mile from an EMU campus parking lot to the Eastern Echo Newsroom. I went down a few stairs in the building and turned right where I walked through an open door into the Newsroom. It was buzzing with student news reporters, editors, photographers, and production staff all getting the next day’s newspaper ready. Walking further into the newsroom, I got my first glimpse of the infamous Koz — the Editor-in-Chief — coming out of his office dancing, singing, and snapping his fingers on beat to Kool and the Gang’s hit song Misled, which was playing on a radio.

How freaking cool. It doesn’t get any better than that for the first impression of a real Newsroom.

Koz and I talked for 20 minutes in his office getting to know each other, he took me around and introduced me to the staff. Koz was a senior, Sports Editor Doug Hill was a sophomore, graphics editor Anthony Fisher was a senior, photographer Scott Bebout was a senior, Features Editor Janet Asaro was a senior, News Editor Barrie Barber was a sophomore, Managing Editor Catherine Chytry was a junior. These were some of the best college journalists in the U.S. all in one room and I would be working alongside them.

Koz gave me the opportunities to succeed and he believed in me, even though I was a lowly hyper freshman with way too much energy. But I could write, I was eager to learn, and I wanted to be the best damn reporter in the business. Within a month on staff, Koz promoted me to Echo Staff Writer and named me as the staff’s police reporter where I would scour the campus police reports four days a week and write the “Police Blotter,” which was probably the most-read section of the newspaper.

Between regular news stories and the Police Blotter, I was writing about 100 inches of editorial copy every week…and I was taking 5 classes. This was my dream. My journalism career was going well.

Two months after I started at the Echo, we learned that our newspaper won a Pacemarker award for being the top collegiate newspaper in our circulation category in the nation from the Associated Collegiate Press. Our sophomore and upperclassmen staff would go to Washington D.C. Nov. 6-9, 1986, for a collegiate journalism conference and collect our award. Shortly after we learned about our award, Koz and Student Media Director Rita Abent pulled me aside and said they wanted me to go. Mr. Varcie was going to Washington!

This was the trip of a lifetime for a college freshman only 90 days into his collegiate journalism career. What a whirlwind it was attending educational session after session on topics about journalism being led by some of the nation’s top journalists of the time. After the sessions one day, some of us on the Echo staff went on tours of the newsrooms at USA Today and The Washington Post.

I attended one conference session with my News Editor Barrie Barber that featured U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett talking about higher education funding for public universities. We sat in the second row. I scribbled notes on page after page in detail in my Reporter’s Notebook. After he was done talking, he asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand and the United States of America’s Education Secretary called on me! I asked my question, he answered it…and then I asked him a follow-up question! My God, this only happens in Hollywood.

That afternoon, Koz asked me to write an article about Bennett’s speech. It was 2 pm, the sessions for that day were done, and everyone on the staff was going to DC to explore…. Everyone except me, that is, because I had to write the story. I wrote the article in an hour in a conference room at the Washington D.C. Hyatt Regency, then went to explore DC on my own for a couple hours.

That night, our staff boarded a Northwest Airlines flight back to Detroit where we edited my article. I typed the story a couple hours later in our newsroom in Ypsilanti, MI. The production team went to work putting the next day’s newspaper together, including my news story.

I sat in the newsroom drinking a beer at about midnight with some of the staff. Koz came up to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “Tommy,” he said, smiling. “Your Bennett story is going to be the lead story in tomorrow’s paper. Congratulations.”

It was the first lead news story I ever had in my young journalism career.

I continued working at the Echo until the second semester of my sophomore year when I began working at my first professional newspaper — while still taking classes full-time at Eastern. Associated Newspapers, a group of six weekly newspapers serving western Wayne County, MI, was my next stepping stone in my journalism career. Managing Editor Ray Day took a chance on a energetic, budding college journalist and brought me on for an internship. The internship quickly turned into a full-time job, even though I was taking 15 credit hours each semester.

Every day, I loved walking into the Newsroom at the Eastern Echo. It was my second home and got my journalism career started. I’d see the newspaper everywhere on campus in newspaper bins and my byline was there in every issue. It gave me goosebumps early on.

I didn’t want to leave my colleagues and friends at the Echo, but I knew it was time to move on and up in my young career. The Associated Newspapers wouldn’t be my last newspaper job either. I would work at 3 more newspapers in my career and write enough articles to fill about 30 full-length novels.

I had excellent role models as my editors over the years in Ray Day, Matt Valley with the Milford Times and South Lyon Herald, Bob Unger with the Jacksonville Journal-Courier, and Gary Woronchak with the Dearborn Press and Guide.

I have dozens of stories to tell about my journalism career, but those are for my next blogs. In my years on the news beats, I covered U.S. presidents, governors, went on drug busts with police, covered the Illinois farming industry, plane crashes, car crashes, and I just about died while standing atop a levee covering the Flood of the Century at the Mississippi River. Stay tuned to part 2 of The News Reporter.