My Path to Journalism

Journalism is the most delightful of careers — but I never planned to be a journalist.

If you had asked me when I was young what I was going to do with my life, journalism wouldn’t have made the list. Still, looking back now, it’s clear that writing and storytelling kept tapping me on the shoulder, even when I tried very hard to ignore it.

One of the earliest signs came in seventh grade. My English teacher gave me two grades on the same assignment: a D in grammar and an A in content. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of that. Now I understand it perfectly. I had ideas and stories, but struggled with the mechanics. That tension has followed me my entire career.

Around that same time, I wrote a sketch for the school talent show. Then, in ninth grade, I received a letter from something called Project Talent. I misunderstood what it was. I thought it was a national talent opportunity, something important enough that I shouldn’t miss it.

Project Talent was scheduled for the same day as the school talent show, and I chose Project Talent.

It turned out not to be a performance opportunity at all, but an all-day aptitude test. No audience. No stage. Just hours of filling in forms. I missed the school talent show, and I’ve regretted that decision ever since. 

Instead of heading toward writing or the arts, I took my father’s advice and went to a technical high school and then on to engineering school. Writing wasn’t valued much there, and comedy even less. Most of my teachers cared deeply about equations and not at all about expression.

Even so, I couldn’t stop creating. I started a small publication at the engineering school called The Engine Ear. I also auditioned for the theater company. I had no exposure to singing, so I became a dancer instead.

After school, I spent about fifteen years working as an engineer, a job I truly disliked. I then spent another fifteen years as a project manager and engineering manager, which suited me much better. During that time, I was laid off roughly every three years. I finally decided to go off on my own.

During that post-engineering period, my life settled into three parallel lines of work. One was working as a bodywork practitioner and movement therapist. Another was working as a freelancer in engineering publishing, writing, and digital photography. The third was working as a whitewater rafting guide.

The rafting turned out to be unexpectedly important. Guiding people down the Lehigh River and getting to know the other guides was a powerful way to learn. And many of the stories I heard were connected to the nearby town in Pennsylvania, Jim Thorpe.

Jim Thorpe, formerly known as Mauch Chunk, was once the center of the anthracite coal industry and a key site of the American industrial revolution. Coal mining flourished there. Canals and railroads were built to move the coal. That coal was combined with nearby iron ore to produce iron products in Bethlehem, which soon grew into the steel industry.

I wanted to understand that history better. I began researching and made friends with the owner of the Mauch Chunk Museum. I looked for a current, readable book on the subject and couldn’t find one. So I wrote it myself. Not long after, I moved to Jim Thorpe.

My entry into journalism happened almost by accident. One cold winter day around the year 2000, I was hiking near a waterfall in Glen Onoko Park when I encountered several people ice climbing the frozen falls. I talked with them, took photographs, and submitted those photos to the local newspaper, the Times News.

The editor liked the photos and asked if I could write a story to go with them. That’s how I became a freelance journalist.

In 2003, journalism and politics collided for me in a serious way. President George W. Bush announced that the United States was justified in invading Iraq because weapons of mass destruction were supposedly being manufactured there. I didn’t believe that was true and wrote an editorial arguing that United Nations inspections showed otherwise.

The paper ran the piece. The next day, the publisher told me I had lied and that I would never be permitted to write another editorial. That moment clarified something important for me about journalism: truth is often welcomed only as long as it doesn’t challenge power.

In response, I started my own online publication, Jim Thorpe Today, which later expanded into Carbon County Magazine. At the same time, I continued freelancing for the Times News. Over fifteen years, I published roughly 2,000 stories and more than 10,000 photographs.

During that period, the newspaper invested heavily in a massive web press, three stories high and capable of printing an entire New York Times continuously. But within a few years, online journalism undercut the demand for print newspapers. The press became unprofitable, and layoffs followed. I watched the decline of print journalism from the inside.

Eventually, family pulled me west. I have three daughters, all living in Northern California, and for several years I escaped Pennsylvania winters by spending time here. During one visit to Capitola, I decided to try freelancing for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The editor told me to bring him a story.

The next morning, recorder and camera in hand, I went for a walk. I heard machinery from the cliffs overlooking Monterey Bay and found a bulldozer tearing down an old wooden building dating back to 1909. It had once been used to watch ships entering the harbor and was in the process of being recommended for historic designation. The property owner was demolishing it before that could happen.

I contacted the paper. They approved my photos. When no reporter was available, they asked me to write the story. I was back to reporting.

After moving permanently to California in 2015, I repurposed Carbon County Magazine into California Update.

Looking back, I can see that journalism was never a straight-line career for me. Engineering taught me structure. Massage and movement taught me how to listen. Raft guiding taught me how to read people. Freelancing taught me resilience.

Journalism became the place where all of those skills came together, not as a pursuit of fame or opinion, but as a way of bearing witness to ordinary people living extraordinary lives, often just beyond the edge of our attention.

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Examples from my Pennsylvania stories


Love makes the whirligig go round

What’s a whirligig? Any spinning toy is a whirligig—but the Crossins make a particular type of whirligig.
Their whirligigs are designed as novelty lawn ornaments or weather vanes. The basic model has a rudder to align the body with the wind and a propeller that turns a drive shaft. From that point on, the design is only limited by their skill, creativity and most of all, their sense of humor.

At the Pocono Garlic Festival, Garlic is King.

Over 15,000 garlic lovers amassed in Stroudsburg on Saturday to celebrate the herb that people love and deer hate. And celebrate they did with foods from garlicky bruschetta to garlic ice cream called Dracula’s Curse.

A Man held a key to one of 54 nuclear-tipped ICBMs.
Talk about stressful jobs! Twenty-five years ago, Bob Stevenson of Jim Thorpe completed his tour as a Crew Commander of an underground nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missile complex. He held one of the keys to launch a nuclear-tipped Titan II ICBM and was in the position to respond to or to start a nuclear war.

The Sweetness of Pennsylvania
A cool Sunday morning begs for a stack of hot cakes drizzled with warm maple syrup. Pennsylvania’s maple trees have been providing their sweet syrup for hundreds of years. At the Monroe County Environmental Center, you can watch maple trees being sugared while learning about the history of our traditional sweet treat.

The Molly Maguire Myth
A recent acquisition by the Mauch Chunk Museum of a first edition of the 1877 book “The Molly Maguires and The Detectives” by Allan Pinkerton—autographed by James McParlin, renews the question of, were the Molly Maguires a band of unlawful insurgents or a myth created to allow a greedy railroad boss to take over independent mines and put an end to a developing labor movement.

Up Where We Belong
This is the story of Terry and Maria Jose Bono—how they learned to paraglide, fell in love, and married in the skies above Little Gap near the Blue Mountain Ski Resort in Carbon County, Pennsylvania.

Granddad of Antarctic Weathermen
“Don’t miss the sunset in Antarctica,” said Frank Sebelin of Jim Thorpe. “It is incredible and lasts for days. But it only comes once a year.”

~ Al Zagofsky