Prior to my big career change toward IT, I spent two years in Indiana working as the sports editor for the Angola Herald-Republican, a twice-weekly newspaper serving the northeast corner of Indiana.
The paper was a totally local operation meaning we produced everything we published without the help of a wire service. And we did this with an editorial staff of five people. It was a pretty well-respected paper too. In the three state press association awards banquets I attended, we twice won the Blue Ribbon prize awarded to the best weekly newspaper in the state. And in 1997, I personally won two first-place awards including Best Sports Section, an award I’m very proud of because I put a lot of effort into putting out a professionally packaged section every issue.
I enjoyed my time in Indiana but I never really fit in. Angola was a cottage country community of about 30,000 people with pretty traditional family values. And as much as I’m a pretty conservative kind of guy, these people made me feel like I was the second coming of Stalin sometimes.
But boy, were they ever crazy about their sports. As a kid, I always enjoyed playing sports, and later, as a professional writer I enjoyed reporting about them too, but I’d hardly call myself a fanatic. I don’t live and die by any team and if I miss a score I don’t go ballistic. But Hoosiers, well, they’re crazy. So for me, after a while all the games started melting into the same story. One team loses. Another team wins. Only the names change. So I got a little bored about doing the same thing for the rest of my life . . .
Making monsters is Dr. Nutt’s specialty. Her best creations are the Yummy Mummy, the Boogie-Woogie Man, and her masterpiece, Dracula-la-la! who loves to sing Opera music. It’s music to Dr. Nutt’s ears, but the villagers don’t like the idea of singing vampires roaming around their town. When they storm her laboratory they are in for a pleasant surprise.
