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After 1,900-plus columns, a return to my roots
By MIKE HENDRICKSThe Kansas City Star
One benefit of writing an opinion column is the connection you build with readers. I hear from all sorts of folks, but mostly they fall into two camps.
There are those who agree with my point of view and therefore consider me something of a genius. Great minds and all that.
And then there are those who consider me an ignorant boob because they see things differently. It’s a nice balance. The slams, especially, keep you humble.
One of my favorites came some years ago from a Blue Springs man who took issue with observations I’d made about a radio talker. Me complaining about so and so, the letter writer said, “is kind of like a skunk complaining that a dead possum stinks.”
It made me laugh, so I framed it and for years it’s shared the same wall with a missive from yet another critic.
Instead of writing a letter, though, this guy went to the trouble of clipping out that day’s column and sending it to me.
It’s not like I needed another copy, but on it he’d scrawled a message with a black Sharpie:
“More liberal hogwash and sour grapes — live with it, loudmouth.”
We all have opinions. For the past 14½ years, I’ve given you my take on the news of the day. Hard telling the exact number of columns I’ve written. Somewhere between 1,900 and 2,000.
If you think that’s an awful lot of opinions for any one person to dish out, I’d agree with you. That’s especially so when you figure that each column contained one if not several nuggets from my gold mine of sparkling insight.
It’s way more opinions than I imagined I had in me at the start. Having spent the prior 19 years as a straight-news reporter, I was curious what the transition had been like for other reporters-turned-columnists.
So I asked Art Brisbane out to lunch. He was executive editor at the time, but in an earlier life he’d done two stints as a metro columnist.
Surely Art would have some helpful observations, and one of them stuck with me.
“There’ll be days,” Art said, “when you’ll open the newspaper to your own column and say to yourself, ‘Why can’t that blowhard just shut the hell up?’ ”
Yes, there have been days like that. Maybe not as many as some of you’ve had, but enough to know that the time would come when I’d welcome a change.
That’s one reason I’m eager to return to my roots. Another is I can write more in depth than this column format allows, so from now on look for my byline as a full-time reporter for The Star, covering local government on both sides of the state line.
Reporters aren’t supposed to insert opinions into news stories, and neither will I. When I feel like sharing my views, I’ll dole them out to my family, friends or the dog — if he’ll tolerate it.
I’ll still be covering the stories that matter to Kansas Citians. Let’s keep in touch.