Why I Give Thanks

Four days before I graduated from Ripon College, I drove down Tower Road in Waupaca and walked into the offices of WDUX Radio.

I sat down with Morgan Marti, the station manager, and told him I was looking for my first job in the “real world” and thought I might be able to help WDUX.

“That depends,” Marti said with an enigmatic smile. “What can you do?”

I talked about my experience as program director for the student radio station at Ripon and my love for music and —

“Nope, we don’t need another disc jockey,” he said. “What else you got?”

His interest perked up when I said I had also spent a little time as editor of the student newspaper at the other end of the second floor of the student union. It seems WDUX needed a news director.

And so, the following Monday, May 19, 1975, I started my career as a community journalist instead of driving back to New Jersey with my parents to face an uncertain future.

After my four years at Ripon, I already knew that I’d rather make Wisconsin my home, and so among the multitude of reasons I have to give thanks, that chance visit to the Waupaca radio station is at the top of the list.

I’m grateful that for the most part, I’ve been able to stay employed telling stories and keeping my communities informed about what was happening around the town and county. I even got to be a disc jockey after all at times during my 22 years in radio.

I give thanks that after stumbling around for almost a quarter century, I found a life partner who spent more than 25 years sharing love and stability until she passed away last June. I miss her every day, but I’m so grateful for the time Red and I had.

I’m grateful for having grown up in a family with parents who loved each other and two brothers as lifetime friends. I’m tickled to see a new version of that family in Son of Red, the beautiful woman he married and their three young sons.

I had just met Red when I transitioned to newspapers in 1997, and she was with me when I first saw the building that housed the Door County Advocate in Sturgeon Bay in 2002. I’d been offered the editor-in-chief position but wasn’t sure I really wanted to leave the Green Bay News-Chronicle.

A bronze replica of the Advocate’s first front page hung outside the front door, and as I admired Vol. 1, No. 1, I noticed that it was published March 22, 1862. The paper and I shared the same birthday, a few years apart.

“Maybe that’s your sign to take the job,” Red said, and the decision was made. I give thanks for the opportunity to be part of that legendary newspaper’s history for more than a decade.

I had expected to retire from the Advocate when I turned 70, but the corporation had other plans and decided a twice-weekly newspaper didn’t need a full-time editor, a few months shy of my 64th birthday. I am grateful that the Oconto County Times Herald and NEW Media called a short time later.

I’m a little surprised to still be at work more than seven years later. It will be eight years and change on May 19, 2025, when I plan to put in my last day on the job. I’d been trying to find a time to retire for awhile, and when I passed my 49th anniversary last May, I figured, “What the heck? Let’s make it an even 50 years and call it a career.”

Lord willing, I’ll be able to spend more time with my beloved golden retrievers, Dejah and Summer, bring the gardens closer to the beauty that Red created here, and finish those Great American Novels I’ve been tinkering with in my spare time.

Hopefully my successor will give Oconto County the thing I regret not being able to give — a community newspaper editor who lives in the community. Red and I built a home in Door County near the shores of Green Bay in 2012, and I have been loathe to leave it.

But in a perfect world, the person who reports on the doings of a community should be a part of that population. I look forward to seeing what the next editor can accomplish commuting from a home somewhere in Oconto County.

It’s been a challenge finding that person. Maybe it will be someone who walks into the office next May, four days before they graduate, and offers to help.

“That depends,” I imagine myself saying. “What can you do?”

Warren Bluhm is news editor for NEW Media and author of the novella “Dejah & Summer in the Time of Magic,” which is scheduled for release Dec. 3.