The last time I was named editor of anything, I think I started an introductory column with “I” and ended it with “at,” saying at the time I believed I’d earned the right to do such a thing even though my high school English teacher at A.L. Brown, Mr. Rodgers, would have at least frowned on the ending.

Starting a column with that particular letter also was an unwritten no-no I heard about later on from some Wall Street Journal types who said you couldn’t do such unless you’d gone through a particularly bad personal injury that no one wants to suffer and were then brave enough to write about it. I tried googling that advice once and came up with nothing, so it may have been more of tall tale than gospel truth anyway. Needless to say, it’s been quite awhile since I took the helm of the Phoenix student newsweekly at UNC. And looking back, what a ride it’s been.

My girlfriend in those days, wife of 30-some years now, learned an early lesson from one horrible experience of me promising I’d meet her somewhere down on  Franklin Street at an appointed hour, then promptly forgot that promise as the time crunch arrived for putting out an edition of the paper. When I finally realized my mistake, the next day or so, you can imagine the trouble I was in. But I survived — barely — and we survived, and look at us now.

We’ve called Salisbury home since 1993 and raised The Three Screaming Goodnights, as the band of kids was supposed to be called. But unfortunately, I couldn’t instill the love of performing music in any of them no matter what I tried. They did take the parental advice of becoming anything they wanted to be in the world except a newspaper person or teacher, since their parents had tried those and decided the offspring needed to do something a little more profitable, shall we say. So far so good on that end, and though I hated to be gone for the first few days after former editor Josh Bergeron moved on, we had already planned a rare trip out west to see our oldest son, who recently settled in Seattle. So I started writing this just before hopping on a plane and left the Post in capable hands of the writers and others who work hard everyday to compile the best news report possible, keeping the website humming constantly with updates as often as something happens and putting it all together in print or electronic editions.

We’ll try our best to continue on and keep people informed of all that goes on around Rowan County, and try to keep you mildly entertained as best we can too. Don’t think that’s possible? Check out the Mook’s Place cartoon by Mark Brincefield and see if you don’t chuckle, or at least feel for that poor man with gas pains.

 

Paris Goodnight is interim editor of the Post, where he first started working in in 1993.