TERRY MOSHER
The Plumber was here this morning fixing a leaky faucet and we talked a little bit while he quickly mended the problem. I hadn’t known he had an open heart procedure about 10 years ago. He said he immediately felt great and was up the next day and walking the hospital halls.
I confessed to him that I also had a major surgery and my recovery was nothing like his. It took me almost four months to bounce back from my May 13th trip to the hospital last year. I have not bounced back all the way. I’m about 60 percent of what I was, and chances are not good that I will get much past that 60 percent.
So now I’m 105 going on 120. I’m still able to get around and to write, which is therapeutic for me. I’ve been writing for over 45 years now and when I’m asked the work I do always reply that I have not worked since I became a writer.
That is supposed to be funny. But, really, I have not worked since Feb. 2, 1970 when I started as a sportswriter for the old Bremerton Sun. This is fun; it’s not work. I know what work is because I farmed as a young boy – bucking bales mostly – worked trimming trees in an orchard, picked and bagged potatoes and helped my father build a house (if pounding nails with a hammer and digging a foundation is helping build a house).
Once I got my degree from Western Washington I settled into white collar jobs – business manager, office manager, and office coordinator overseeing a bunch of truck drivers out in the sweaty oil fields of Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas.
I took a drastic pay cut to become a sportswriter, but it was worth it to get to watch games, including the Mariners for nearly 30 years and the Washington Huskies (football and basketball) for over almost 25 years.
It’s doubtful that anybody can do what I did in today’s world and just walk in off the street without any writing experience and become a member of the print media. Print jobs have been shrinking now for at least a decade and the jobs that are available are loaded with additional responsibility that includes Twitter, Facebook and blogging as well as video production.
What I find amusing is that sportswriters now are encouraged to also be regular guests or work as co-hosts on talk radio. When I was going at it at my peak we could not be part of another media, although to be honest I did extra work during the beginning of the dot. com. era with a budding dot.com. company in San Francisco, and I also wrote for a football magazine.
When I also wrote some stories for the Mariner Magazine, I got caught by my editor at the Bremerton Sun and was told in the future I had to get permission to write for it. Instead of doing that, I just quit writing for the magazine.
It’s been a fun ride. I don’t think I would take back much of what I have done for the last 45 years. There were long days and long nights, some of them that were consecutive for a week or more. The long hours were such that when I went on a family vacation for a couple weeks it would take me three to four days to come down from the high I was on from all the fun work and then the last three or four days of vacation I would have to jack myself up again to be mentally prepared for the long work hours.
I say work lightly. As I said before, writing is not work if you truly enjoy it. And that goes for any profession. If you really enjoy what you do, it’s not work. I have enjoyed nearly every moment.
There are times even now that I will be writing and not realize four or five or six hours have passed. You have no doubt heard book authors talk about getting involved in the characters they have created and lose track of time. Well, it’s the same with writing sports. I get lost in just about every story I do, no matter the importance. It could be a pee wee story or a story on Ken Griffey Jr. – they are all important to me as I write them. They are, in a sense, the biggest story in the world to me. Once they are done, however, and passed on to my editors, I move on to the next one without thinking back.
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of a job that I haven’t enjoyed. Even digging a ditch or a foundation, which I have done numerous times. Or sweating in a 100-degree hay loft packing bales of hay together as they come off an escalator.
That thought brings back a memory of working on a farm in Ferndale and the farm hands were throwing bales off the truck onto the escalator as fast as they could and I’m in the hay loft, sweat rolling down my arms and dust clogging up my nose making it hard to breathe as I’m trying to keep up. I remember more than once yelling to the farm hands to slow down, but they would just laugh and go at it even faster.
But, you know what? It was fun even in those conditions. There is always a reward at the end of a hard day, and to me it was a cool drink of water and a few splashes on my face. I know I would come home and linger for a long time in the bathtub, just soaking up the good feeling of washing away the grime and the dirt.
When I was finally clean again, the joy was over the top. I felt a sense of accomplishment of a job well done, and now I could relax and enjoy the moment while listening to some good music.
The difficult part of being a sportswriter is working against a set deadline. I dreaded Friday night football games, especially at North Kitsap, because by the time I got back to the office in Bremerton to write I might have just 30 minutes to meet the deadline. Trying writing a game story and putting together the statistics in 30 minutes. It’s not only hard to do, but you are seldom satisfied with the hurried result. There seems to be always a “oh, no” moment when you realize after the story has gone to press that you forgot something. But it is what it is, and there is not much you can do about it.
Whether it’s being a writer or just because I have gotten old, I have a greater sense now of things and people who don’t get the necessary public exposure I feel they should. And I’m talking about things or people in the past.
We just lost, for example, two people – George Ogg and George Strong – who maybe did not get the public attention they should have. Although, I did do a story on Strong some years ago. He was a lovable person who suffered through World War II and the famous Battle of the Bulge, being a prisoner of war, and had a remarkable memory of those terrible times.
Ogg, I believe, went to Olympic College and Washington State. He was a key player on the Bremerton High School football team that won the 1947 mythical state championship. He also was a good catcher who played some semi-pro baseball and for almost a decade caught in fastpitch softball, which at the time was big in Bremerton.
I love to do stories on people who have largely been forgotten by time. Again, maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because I have great memories from my youth and have lost a lot of the friends I had back then, and I feel sad that they don’t get to be remembered, except by me in most cases.
It’s fun to bring back into focus those people who have left us, like Ted Tappe, Les Eathorne and Ken Wills. Now I have a person who wants me to write about the 1949 Bremerton football team that went unbeaten. I may give that a whirl.
There are also stories on Pat Dunn and Kurt Vestman I’m thinking about. Both of those guys graduated from Bainbridge and went on to play college football.
The one story I don’t believe I ever will do is the one on Bryan Hinkle. I can’t seem to locate him and when I did locate him years ago he never returned my phone calls.
Hinkle, you might remember, played football at Central Kitsap, graduating in 1976. He then played football at Oregon and for 12 seasons (1982-93) in the NFL as a starting linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I don’t know how much longer I can continue doing what I love to do – write. As long as the Kitsap Sun will have me, I will continue to write a Wednesday sports column for it, and do an occasionally feature story. That is where my love is.
When I write, I do so from home on the third level of our house overlooking Phinney Bay and the Bremerton Yacht Club. We have had a wonderful winter with warmer weather and more sunshine than usual. I can look out a big bay window here in my lofty perch and see bald Eagles, crows, seagulls and all kinds of birds flying around. The eagles are something else. When there is a strong breeze they will soar in big circles higher and higher and higher. Sometimes the crows chase them, but they can’t go as high as the eagles, who outsmart them by going higher.
Then there are the two fat raccoons – ma and pa – who rumble through our backyard. I even saw a fresh water otter come into the backyard one day, looking for some easy food.
In short, it’s wonderful up here. I have the music on, usually listening to Cajun or Creole music from Louisiana as I write. Man, the stories I get to hear from musicians from the Website American Routes. Some of them are unbelievable, and most of the musicians are so humble it’s amazing.
One guy told how he got to New Orleans and started his music career. He lived in poverty as a youngster and was warned by his mother not to go to New Orleans because of the nefarious things that could happen to him there.
But one day he gathered the little things he had in a small bag and waited along the railroad tracks for a train he could jump aboard. He made one box car and knew better to take the train all the way to its destination because security would capture him.
So he jumped off the train, skinning himself up pretty badly and also losing his precious few clothes. But New Orleans was nothing like his mother warned, and he went on to become legendary in the city for his music.
That reminds me of me, just a bit. I hitchhiked across the country when I was just 17. It wasn’t my first adventure, but it was an eye-opener for the kind of people I caught rides with.
I’m still into adventures, only now they are adventures in writing. I may not have as much energy as I had before surgery, but I still have the passion for writing. So I will continue on until like sportswriter Royal Brougham they carry me out of my perch feet first.
Brougham, 84, suffered a fatal heart attack on Oct. 30, 1978 while in the press box at the Kingdome watching an NFL football game between the Seahawks and Denver.
Seahawks lost.
So did the great Northwest when the legendary Brougham died.
But we are into winning here. Hopefully, you will like what I produce.
Be well pal.
Be careful out there
Have a great day.
You are loved.