Greetings, and thank you for visiting my site.
It is a vanity project and a writing closet, a treasure chest for news, views and reviews.
More prosaically, it provides a store house for my writing. Some of it is quirky – poems, sayings and asides. There are movie and book reviews, profiles and other articles from my past and present sojourn as a journalist. Plus my new book — The Dream Machine: A Novel of Future Past!
I’ve been writing for a long time, since the 1970s when I was a reporter for the Lerner Newspapers. In my second year on staff I won a Chicago Newspaper Guild award for best feature story of the year, “Senior Suicide: An Avoidable Tragedy?” After six years at Lerner I moved to the copy desk of the Milwaukee Sentinel and then to the Chicago Sun-Times, one of the largest daily newspapers in the country. At the Sun-Times I edited marquee columnists such as Roger Simon, Irv Kupcinet and the legendary Mike Royko. I continued to write the occasional article about music, as well as feature articles, one from the set of Sesame Street, another recounting my Peace Corps experience joining the highly obscure and secret Snake Society in remotest upcountry Liberia.
When I received my MBA in 1982, I detoured into corporate life, working at several Fortune 500 companies as writer and editor, managing executive and employee communications, speechwriting and media relations. At the same time I continued to freelance articles, for example, “Saturdays With Milton,” about studying viola with the late Milton Preves of the Chicago Symphony, which ran in The Strad Magazine.
I retired from the business world in 2010, after 28 years, and am back where I started, community journalism, working at the Evanston Roundtable, doing the most challenging and rewarding job I can imagine: editing stories and writing to edify, electrify and entertain. Since 2019 my RoundTable columns have annually won awards from the Northern Illinois News Association.
As novelist Russell Banks tells writers, “You are never better than when you are writing.” Writing at its best requires writers to be as good as they can be. That’s what I love about it.
Stories from every phase of my career are available here. I hope you enjoy them. Please pull up a figurative chair, make yourself comfortable and stay awhile.
View my complete resume. Read my book.
