Starting next week, I will return to reporting news from Floyd County’s courts and other entities. I will also shoot photos of athletic events of high school sports for The Floyd Press. I have been on sabbatical for more than two years, starting with a minor stroke, then various illnesses and, most recently, a heart problem that resulted in a wireless pacemaker in the lower cavity of my heart.

I decided, 67 years ago, at age 11, that I wanted to be a newspaperman, taking photos and covering news. I had sold my first news photo, a clandestine shot of a nighttime meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in a field not far from Farmville in Prince Edward County. The county’s racist school board and supervisors shut down the public schools to avoid integration and opened an all-white private school.

Ben Bowers, the then-editor of The Farmville Herald, told me that the owners would not publish the photo but he sent it and an essay I had written about the racism in county to The Richmond News-Leader did publish the photo and the story.

Our family left Prince Edward Couny and moved back to the family home of my step-father near Willis. Pete Hallman, owner and editor of The Floyd Press, looked over my photos and the clipping from The Richmond paper and hired me as a full time reporter and photographer while I was still in high school from 1962-65. It was my first real newspaper job.

After graduation, I joined the staff of The Roanoke Times as a 17-year-old full-time reporter. I was lucky enough to win some state writing awards from The Virginia Press Association before leaving The Times to take a reporting, photojournalism and columnist position with The Alton Evening Telegraph, an afternoon daily on the Illinois side of the St. Louis Metro area. The paper gave me an opportunity to learn more about my chosen profession, covering the Mississippi River Festival during its decade-long run on the campus of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville (SIUE).

My column focused on events, prejudices, problems and life in and around the river town of Alton. It won two state Illinois Associated Press awards. Chicago Daily News columnist Mike Royko, who became a mentor and good friend, like to say that it was our job columnists to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, advice that originally came from another Chicago newspaper icon: Finley Peter Dunne.

The festival was a summer home for the St. Louis Symphony along with popular music acts like The Eagles, The Who, Gordon Lightfoot, Tina Turner, Three Dog Night, Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie and Credence Clearwater Revival and others. It gave me a chance to meet, interview and photograph them.

My 12 years with The Telegraph were fascinating and interesting days as a newspaperman. I covered many fascinating stores, including one when SIUE chancellor John Rendleman, acting as executor of the estate of state official Paul Powell, found more than $800,000 in cash stuffed in shoe boxes in his hotel room in Springfield after Powell died. A photo of a homeless dead veteran at the base of a memorial won a state award. So did some images from the Mississippi River Festival.

I developed a weekend entertainment magazine for The Telegraph that included photo features from the River Festival, interviews with entertainers and reviews of concerts and movies.

A couple of years turned into seven. My position with Findley later led to a chief of staff position with another Congressman, then a “special assistant to the ranking member” position on the Science and Technology Committee before leaving Capitol Hill for five years as Vice President for Poliltical Programs for the National Association of Realtors before returning to journalism as a contract photojournalist for several publications, includingThe Washington Post, The New York Times and, Agence France (AFP), the French wire service.

The Telegraph staff included several young, energetic reporters and photographers. Several remain friends and we keep in touch after more than 40 years ago. The photo above came from Russ Smith, one of the photographers and who later developed and ran a popular night spot in Alton. He is on the right, below the man the mustache (Walt Sharp), who later became editor of the paper. I left The Telegraph in 1981 to join the staff of then-Congressman Paul Findley (Illinois) in what I planned to be a two-to-three year sabbitcal and a way to learn more about how Congress and our government and used that knowledge to better write about it.

Many assignments put me in trouble locations, covering the 9/11 terrorism attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, the Middle East and other hot spots. After returning from Afghanistan in 2002, I was offered an embed with the troops for the invasion of Iraq but turned it down because wife Amy said she “had a bad feeling about it.” I had learned long ago that her “bad feelings were warnings that should not be ignored. The photojournalist who replaced me in that embed died after the Hummer he was riding in swerved to avoid an IED explosive and crashed. A network correspondent, younger than me, was walking to a tent for a cup of coffee when he collapsed and died, victim of a blood clot developed from sitting in a cramped position in another Hummer.

My mother in Floyd County was ill and we left Washington after 23 years and moved to the county where I went to high school in the 1960s. I was, technically, retired but Wanda Combs, then the editor of The Floyd Press, asked me to take photos of a FCHS football game. That brought other assignments and I became a contractor for the paper in 2005 where a key part of the start of my journalism career began.

It appears the circle is about to complete.