Vol. 92: Roads I didn’t take

My career choices, and yours

       The late college football coach Jerry Berndt once enjoyed a reputation for turning losers into winners. At DePauw University in the ’70s, he took a team that had won five games in four previous seasons and produced the school’s best record in nearly 30 years. In the early 1980s, at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania— which hadn’t won an Ivy League championship since 1959— he produced four consecutive Ivy champion teams.

       Unfortunately, thereafter Berndt’s magic touch largely vanished. Over the next seven seasons, as head coach at Rice and Temple, he produced just one winning team and lost more than two-thirds of his games. In later years, Berndt occasionally remarked, “Leaving Penn was the worst career choice I ever made.”

       I disagreed. “For a writer,” I suggested to him, “there’s no such thing as a bad career choice.” By this I meant: Even disasters can provide valuable learning experiences, not to mention fodder for your next article or book.

       (The New Yorker film critic David Denby built a side career out of his failures. His 2004 memoir American Sucker described in dismal self-flagellating detail how his personal greed and envy led him to squander a six-figure inheritance on an ill-advised attempt to make a million dollars in the stock market within one year.)

       So I’ve never regretted my past career choices. But I do sometimes ponder what might have happened had I chosen the alternative path. For example:

Forsaking the Knight chain

       1. Akron (O.) vs. Portland (Ind.). As a Penn undergrad, I sought a sports writing job. But few major newspapers hired beginners. Instead, you were expected to start out on a small daily and work your way up from there.

        By graduation in 1964, I had narrowed my choices down to two very different papers: the Beacon-Journal in Akron, Ohio, the original flagship of the respected Knight chain; and the Commercial Review in Portland, Ind., a rural county-seat town of barely 7,000 souls. To the astonishment of the Beacon-Journal’s publisher, I chose the Portland paper— largely because I was impressed by the wisdom and courage of its publisher, Hugh Ronald, and by my feeling that I could make a difference there. Indeed, within a year I was promoted from sports editor to news editor, and a year later to editor. In Akron, by contrast, I feared (perhaps wrongly), that I’d be stuck on the sports desk forever. On the other hand, the Knight chain might have offered me diverse opportunities at other Knight papers (the Philadelphia Inquirer among them). On the other hand, the mighty Knight chain ceased to exist in 2006. So— no regrets here.

       2. Editor vs. publisher. In my fourth year in Portland, my publisher. Hugh Ronald, decided to move on to a new career as a vice president at his alma mater, Earlham College. To my astonishment, Hugh offered me his job as publisher, despite my lack of business experience. I was flattered but also panicked by the prospect: Did I, a dedicated journalist, really want to spend my days coping with advertisers, circulation drivers, suppliers, employees, stockholders, and accountants? So, I politely declined.

       Years later, having launched several publications of my own, I sometimes reflected that I should have taken Hugh’s offer. A few years as publisher of the Commercial Review would have provided the sort of hands-on business experience I could have put to good use elsewhere. But at the end of the day, running a business wasn’t my ambition, even had I been good at it— which I never really was, not in 1968 nor any time thereafter.

       3. Chicago vs. Washington. In the spring of 1970, when I was working in Chicago for the Wall Street Journal, I was interviewed for a job as an editorial writer at the Washington Star. I fantasized that I might pump some fresh air into its stodgy pages while simultaneously gaining a foothold in the nation’s capital. Over lunch with its editor and editorial page editor, it became clear that they were merely looking for someone to articulate their (mostly conservative) views. We mutually agreed that I was the wrong man for that job. The Star, a fixture in Washington since 1852, closed in 1981. Again, no regrets about a path not taken.

Quitting the Journal

       4. The Wall Street Journal vs. Chicago Journalism Review. Following Chicago’s infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention—at which police officers clubbed and tear-gassed antiwar demonstrators as well as reporters covering the mayhem— a group of young Chicago reporters launched the monthly Chicago Journalism Review, the first of some 20 local journalism reviews published by working reporters to critique their own papers. At the time, I was newly (and happily) arrived at the Wall Street Journal’s Chicago bureau, but the concept of a journalism review as an alternative to conventional mainstream journalism appealed to me. I began submitting parodies of local newspaper columnists to CJR. And when CJR seemed in danger of folding in the summer of 1970, I made the radical decision to quit the Journal (circulation: 1 million) to help save CJR (circulation: 10,000). I never raised much money to support CJR or myself— fund-raising just wasn’t (and still isn’t) in my DNA. But that two-year interval planted the seeds of my long and rewarding career as a freelance magazine writer, a film critic, an author, and a pioneer of the alternative media movement. As Havelock Ellis put it, the by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.

       The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, got along just fine without me— or least it did until 2007, when its impatient controlling stockholders passed it into the grubby hands of Rupert Murdoch. In retrospect, I’m grateful I got out with my reputation intact.

The lure of ‘Sneak Previews’

       5. Ebert or Rottenberg? In the early ’70s, Chicago’s classical music radio station was acquired by Chicago’s public TV station, which expanded the radio station’s monthly program guide into Chicago Magazine. In my desperate financial straits, I persuaded the editor to add a new section of film reviews, written by me. Within a few years—by which time I had moved East to Philadelphia Magazine— this column was appearing in a dozen city magazines around the U.S.

       Then in 1975, Chicago’s public TV station came up with a nifty idea: a TV program that would review movies. As Chicago Magazine’s film critic, I was the logical host for such a show. But I was unwilling to move back to Chicago, so WTTW came up with an even better idea: A weekly program co-hosted by the rival film critics of Chicago’s two morning dailies: Roger Ebert of the Sun-Times and Gene Siskel of the Tribune. The dramatic conflict generated by their love-hate relationship boosted their “Sneak Previews” show into broad nationwide syndication. In the bargain, Ebert became my generation’s best known film critic, and probably the most trusted.

       So, do I sometimes dream that, had I stayed in Chicago, I could have been Roger Ebert? Sure. But am I sorry? No— because I couldn’t have been Roger Ebert.

       As a film critic but also a journalist, I struggled to maintain my grip on reality. Ebert— my exact contemporary (we were born eight days apart)— chose a different path, using the movies to create his own alternative reality. Ebert was willing and even happy to devote his life to movies; I wasn’t. I moved in other directions without regret— only admiration for my erstwhile ’60s compatriot.

       6. Print vs. radio. In the summer of 1977, while I was free-lancing in Philadelphia, I was offered a job as head of a new investigative reporting unit to be created at WCAU, then an all-news AM radio station in Philadelphia, owned and operated by the CBS Network. Bob Sherman, the station’s general manager, offered me a $50,000 salary— a generous sum at the time— despite my lack of experience in radio or investigative reporting. Sherman seemed vague about the specifics of the job, for what I later learned was good reason: The investigate unit had been mandated by his bosses at CBS, who had provided him a sizable grant to implement it.

       In my ignorance of this background, I suggested that Sherman could make better use of my talents by paying me just $25,000 to work half-time, in which case WCAU would benefit from the cross-pollination of my other gigs. But Sherman was adamant: I must take the full-time job or not at all. Finally, Sherman threw up his hands in exasperation.

       “Look,” he said, “everybody dreams of quitting the rat race and collecting shells on a beach. Here’s your chance to collect shells and get paid $50,000 a year!”

       I withdrew from consideration a few days later. Sherman, for his part, left WCAU in 1979 for the New York station WNBC, where he successfully developed radio’s boisterous and profane “shock jock” genre (Howard Stern and Don Imus were his protégés). Not exactly the scene for an earnest print journalist like yours truly.

Patience pays off

       7. Monthly or quarterly? In the mid-1990s I was offered a job as editor of Family Business, a monthly magazine launched a few years earlier. The magazine dealt with three of my specialties: wealth, family, dynasties, and genealogy. But the job would have required me to move from Philadelphia to Great Barrington, Mass. So I turned it down. But just a few years later, Family Business relocated its office to Philadelphia— just a few blocks from my own personal office— and downsized from a monthly into a quarterly. Again, I was offered the editor’s job. And this time the offer— essentially a part-time freelance gig— was easy to accept. I edited Family Business for four years and continued to write its editor’s column for another five years after I left. In this case, I got to eat my cake and have it, too.

       Moral: Good things come to those who wait.

       Postscript: Much like the above-mentioned football coach Jerry Berndt, my own college football coach, John Stiegman, was associated with only one losing team in his entire career as a player and coach before he came to Penn in 1960. Yet in his five years at Penn, Stiegman’s teams won just 12 games while losing 33— the worst record ever recorded by a Penn football coach. Years later, I asked Stiegman the inevitable question: In retrospect, didn’t he sometimes wish he’d never set foot on the Penn campus?

       But of course, I knew what he would say, and he said it: “You never look back. You have to accept responsibility. You expect to run into hard times, and when they come, you make adjustments. That’s part of a coach’s life.” Part of a journalist’s life, too, I would add.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com