The guy in the middle hosts an annual picnic in the park at this time of year, where we three friends often meet up, and did yesterday. We got to know each other 21-plus years ago as reporters for the Daily/Sunday Gazette of Schenectady. I'm the one on the right, a generation older. The other two were single then, but are now married fathers -- as am I, though my children are long grown up. I spent most of my 21 Gazette years at the Opinion department and copy desk, moving on to reporting for the last few years as that and other papers hemorrhaged jobs. Or back to reporting, as I'd done the job for four years in the 1980s at the Glens Falls Post-Star, while also organizing and leading a labor union, part of The Newspaper Guild. None of us works for a newspaper now.
As mentioned here, the first draft of The Detective and Dorothy Day was written almost 40 years ago as a straight detective story in which Dorothy Day did not appear. I rewrote it in recent years to include her (whom I'd met at the Catholic Worker farm in the 1970s), while cutting and reshaping other stuff. The book was/is very much a product of newspaper experience, especially those first four years in Glens Falls, but also my later career as I kept finding out how the world works.
My wife Barbara, who took the photo, dubbed us the three amigos on Facebook. That's the name of a not-bad 1980s comedy, and a good deal less pretentious and stolen-valor-like than the lines which come to my mind about the reporters' trade, "we happy few, we band of brothers."
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