Sixty years ago, on 1966 June 29, I typed up the earliest known edition of my first newspaper. I covered family news, a seaman's strike in Britain, a coup in Argentina and the selection of Governor Spiro Agnew as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate. Just a few years later a chance encounter led me to submit a story about a rock concert to a weekly paper. They paid $5 a story. The highlights of my time with the Belleville Times including having the mayor elect kicking me out of his campaign headquarters on election night (he hated the paper, I was 16 so I doubt he knew who I was), conducting a long interview with the new, out of town, director of education who made wildly optimistic predictions about future enrolment levels and being the editor of the paper for the last issue it published. I also helped put out a student newspaper in high school and got threatened with a libel suit by the principal over one article. Even as a student, I knew there was not much point in suing me so it was not much of a threat. In the years that followed I published articles in three different newspaper at university and dreamed of getting something in a "big paper". I didn't do much for many years and then the Timmins Daily Press decided to start a monthly paper for the James Bay Coast. I was primarily interested in photography but supposed I could write too. One of the first stories I covered was an emergency exercise. I took a picture of a bunch of students dressed as victims and suddenly remembered that I was expected to get all of their names. No wonder I preferred photography but I got them. It only lasted a few years but I got a lot of pictures and stories printed. One month they paid me $350 but mostly a lot less. I got a few calls from other papers asking for photos. I lived in Moosonee so there were not a lot of reporters on the ground in the area. The Globe and Mail asked me for a few things including photographs of the oldest survivor of residential school, Marguerite Wabano, and the Toronto Star used me to cover the first Cree language opera, Pimooteewin by Thomson Highway, when it came to Moosonee in 2009. I had a few pictures and stories in the Timmins Daily Press; I suppose it was a lot cheaper to use me than to fly someone up. I think 2013 was the last time I had something published in a newspaper. Some of my pictures from Moosonee and area got used in various school textbooks; at $50 or $250 a shot that was easy money from pictures I had already taken. My focus these days is on enjoying retirement and photography but I had a good time during my brief forays into journalism. I learned a few things: to conquer my fear of approaching older and more important people, the importance of getting the correct spelling of people's names and to be aware of the hidden issues that people didn't talk about. Of course I met some great and a couple of not so great people. On the whole I am reasonably glad that I didn't pick journalism as a career. I suppose that I would have found it stressful especially when I got involved in "controversial" stories where there were influential people who did not want to see things become public. Of course, that is really journalism is all about at a serious level, anything else is just public relations. For me it was a hobby, a chance to write about generally positive things and to see my name in print once in a while. I had a full time job that was stressful enough.