How I bagged a career: the accidental journalist (2024)

Some people go into their careers with full intention, such as brother Brent Charnley, who declared at 15 that he wanted to make wine and indeed, followed through with a vineyard and winery on Lopez Island in the San Juans.

Others might declare they want to be a pilot, firefighter, welder or teacher. Many search for a while — “I’m not sure yet what I want to be when I grow up ... ,” I remember saying, my voice trailing off.

Initially, a dewy-eyed me expected to follow in the footsteps ofesteemedpaternaljournalism professor grandfather Mitch Charnley, his son, Blair Charnley, my metro news reporter/editor uncle and my maternal grandaunt journalist Ruth Axtell Hussey Burnet.

So in my early 20s, I sold shoes, worked two state legislative sessions, construction and pea harvest.

At first, I romanticized clothing buyers, but realized in short order it was about as stressful as a person could bear. So no. No jetting off to fashion markets in exotic places for me. No ordering garments and accessories for a department store chain eight months ahead and then stewing over whether the items would actually be delivered to support the store advertisem*nts.

The failure of such meant the chain could be held legally liable for false advertising.

That burden weighed heavily on the two nonstop cigarette-smoking buyers I shared an office with, probably in their 40s or 50s at the time, grey-faced and worn, looked about 30 years older from worry.

I dreamed in high school of following in Mitch’s footsteps. Nothing against my Roosevelt High School journalism teacher but he was so deadly dull that I bowed out of his class in the first week.

Nope, this isn’t a career path for me after all, I thought.

Seven years later I fortuitously spotted a classified ad for an opening at the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin. Better still, it was in the newsdepartment.Mitch had been a cub reporter at the Walla Walla Bulletin in the summer of 1920 while a journalism student at the University of Washington. Cool.

Becoming a news clerk was an accident of occupation. I needed a job. I had no idea it would be such a great fit and that I would love my colleagues and the joy of nearly 45 years covering the Walla Walla Valley.

The job interview went well until I had to show I could type at a decent speed. The personnel manager in May 1979 liked me well enough to yield her office and IBM Selectric for about 20 minutes so I could bump up my typed words per minute and shave down the typos. It worked — the practice took me from a rusty 20 wpm with errors to about 45 wpm.

Plunking out “The quick brown fox jumps over a lazy dog” paid off in eighth-grade typing class at Eckstein Junior High in Seattle.

That U-B position launched me into the basic journalistic milieu of who, what, when, where, why, days, dates, times, places with street addresses, name spellings and verifying everything.Everything.

Almost immediately, mentor and News Editor Louise Meade launched me into obituary writing, an area of news coverage I always appreciated because each person’s life is unique, often fascinating.

I strive for accuracy.No one likes the mortification of having corrections appear after running an error in a story.

During my 28-year news clerk watch I wrote thousands of obits about the community’s infants, children, peers, elders and veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam wars.

I often wished we knew about these people while they were still living because they had so many amazing experiences and stories to tell.

“I can write that,” I said with more confidence than I felt and lobbied my way into a community column in 1989 as the previous writer neared retirement. I have often written fun features and arts stories and mostly reported good news —the award winners, club officers, scholastic achievers, degree earners, fundraisers and beneficiaries, travelers and adventurers.

In almost every case I believe that if someone feels their information is important enough to contact the paper then I’ll find an angle to get it in print.

This includes the unusual: the fellow who dug up a potato in his garden that resembled 37th U.S. President Richard Milhouse Nixon’s hangdog face. Or the woman whose dogwood tree bloomed twice in one spring.

The news is always changing, which keeps the work compelling. Even when writing formula-type stories (like a follow to a meeting) the challenge to keep it fresh is to find a different way to tell it every time.

Accidentally lucking into this line of work turned out to be the best career I could ever ask for.