The Letter That Started It All

 I've spent the past two days cleaning out my apartment and getting ready for the big move back to Dallas.

For those of you still unaware, I've been fortunate enough to land a copywriting/contributing editor position for a company and its two magazines in Dallas. It's a job that seemed to come solely as a stroke of luck (thank you, Journalism Gods!).

In the midst of it all, I ran across an old folder that contains nearly every piece of great journalism I've read and a lot of the stuff from my very early days. I found the letter that initially helped spark my interest into actually pursuing an education and career in the evil journalism field. It came from a former professor of mine, Bill Lodge, who had spent 26 years at The Dallas Morning News before he accepted a buyout package when The News was in a period of serious layoffs.

Bill was an adjunct professor at North Lake College for two years, I believe, before he moved to Louisiana for a job at The Baton Rouge Advocate. Even today, I fully credit him as the one who got me in this business. He remains one of my dearest friends and my strongest mentor to this day.

This is the email Bill sent me in the summer of 2007 right after I had completed my Intro to Mass Comm class that spring semester. I had planned on the spring semester being my last semester at North Lake and I was well on my way out the door to Sam Houston State where I figured I might follow the journalism path. I had an apartment ready to go and classes picked for the fall semester.

But Bill changed all that.


"Good Young People,

I hope to recruit each of you to my Journalism 2311 class this fall at North Lake College. This is a news-gathering and news-writing course, and I believe each of you would do well in it. I also believe you would enjoy the course because 90 percent of your grade would be eight articles you would write for the campus newspaper over the course of four months. You could write more if you wish, but the requirement is two per month. Often, these stories need not to be more than 350 words. If you wished, though, you would be allowed to write more than that in some cases.

In this course, you would learn how to write for a news publication, gather information, interview subjects, locate records. Some days, you would have classroom instruction. Other days, you would be free to work on your stories at the newspaper office, Room A-260. On several occasions, you would be visited in class by people who work for The Dallas Morning News, The Dallas Business Journal, and, I hope, area television stations and alternative weeklies.

You would know your editor for all of your campus news stories. That would be me. Three of you have taken my mass communications class. I know each of you would do well in Journalism 2311, which will be taught M-W-F from 1:30 p.m. to 2:20 p.m. Even if you decide not to begin a career in journalism, this course still would help you with writing in other disciplines.

A couple of you have extensive experience writing for college newspapers. I believe both of you would enjoy the course, learn much from talking with the professionals who visit our class and have fun with the stories you would write for the News-Register.

If you're planning a career in communications or simply looking for an interesting elective, I hope you'll consider this class. At  any rate, I wish you all good luck with whatever path you choose. I have enjoyed talking with each of you in the past."


I can't say what it was about the email that exactly made me decide to stay and cancel my plans for Sam Houston. It's definitely not the best pitch to get an out-the-door college student with other plans to remain at a community college for another year, but it worked.

I do think, though, that a big part of it was that it was so sincere and that Bill was genuinely writing that he wanted us to stay and help us get better, and it wasn't just a pitch so that he could have more numbers in his JOUR 2311 class––which I now know wasn't the case because the class ended up being a total of three people by the end of the semester.

If Bill hadn't sent that email, I would have transferred to Sam Houston and who knows how my career would have turned out. Maybe I would have still ended up in the same places with the same opportunities, but almost surely not. I'd almost be willing to bet that I'd still be stuck in a frustrating restaurant job, still in college, trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. But Bill prevented all that with his short, 358-word letter.

And for that I'll always be grateful.