Jeff Genung allowed me to fulfill a dream.
Before I met him, I had published books. I had married the man of my dreams. I’d even had enough adventures to satisfy Harry Potter and Indiana Jones.
What I had not done, though, was become an intrepid journalist.
My heroes growing up were Brenda Star, Girl Reporter. Lois Lane, Girl Reporter. Clark Kent, Superman and Boy Reporter. Hell. I even envied Jimmy Olsen, and all he did was follow Clark and Lois around with a camera, get kidnapped, and fall off cliffs.
I had not done any of that. Yes. I’d seen my name in print. But not under a headline. Not as a newspaper columnist. Not as a GIRL REPORTER.
Enter Jeff.
In Jeff’s recent column about my books, he described our first meeting: “Shelly practically beat down my door with an idea for a column in her adopted hometown newspaper … I soon came to realize that Shelly isn’t the type of person who takes either ‘no’ or ‘maybe’ as an answer. I’m glad I said yes!”
I am even happier that he said yes, because I’ve had five years to work with this incredible man, watch him hire cub reporters, train them, and see their writing and reporting get better and better under his eagle eye.
The whole process reminded me of Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth, Miss Marple, taking girls from the orphanage to train as household servants. They arrived, bright-eyed and unskilled. Under her tutelage, they became capable and professional employees. Then, just when they achieved peak performance, they left for … different jobs? More money? To change careers?
It never dawned on me that one dreaded day I would be saying goodbye to the smartest, hardest working, most creative professional of them all.
The boss himself!
The first year that I wrote my column for Jeff, I was rewarded with a delicious clump of Christmas chocolate from The Evening Sun. The following year, the recession hit, newspapers were closing all over the country, and the economy was in ruins.
What next?
Well, what happened next was that the world righted itself on its axis (more or less), I went from a weekly column to a monthly column, and life went on.
