When journeying to Pittsburgh in November 1980 to spend Thanksgiving weekend with my then-girlfriend, a trip that included meeting her parents, I came armed with something I thought was pretty spectacular: My first published story in the Lexington Herald-Leader.
It was a review of a Don McLean concert at the University of Kentucky Center for the Arts, a sprawling new performance facility just over a year old. It would be renamed the Singletary Center for the Arts in 1987. I displayed the printed story to my girlfriend’s family as though it were an Olympic medal.
My girlfriend beamed. Her mother beamed. Her father, his face as immobile as a sphinx, took a few moments to read the whole piece. His verdict: “This is journalism?”
For me, it certainly was and would remain so with the paper for the next 45-and-a-half years. It would become an adventure of unimaginable artistic discovery, an education that expanded what I initially viewed as a simple fascination for music into a boundless appreciation of human culture and expression…