Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist
Is it a business, or are you just unemployed?
"What do you know about the Mexican re-insurance market?"
It was the middle of September, 1993, and I heard that question as soon as I picked up my ringing office telephone even before I could announce, “Hello.” I recognized the voice of Mike Berman, an editor in New York with the daily business newspaper The Journal of Commerce. I laughed.
“How much and when is my deadline?” I answered his question with two questions of my own.
“Next Friday, 750 words and $300,” said Mike, an editor of few words borne from years of dealing with me. Despite our comfortable relationship, I had never met him in person, and I never would.
“So, what do I know about Mexico’s reinsurance market?” I continued. “Well, by Wednesday I will be expert enough to deliver your story a day before my deadline on Thursday.”
“I’ll put your contract in the mail,” said Mike. Then he hung up.
I found a blank page in a yellow legal pad and scribbled the subject at the top: “Mexican Reinsurance Market.” Below that line, I started listing potential general sources like “insurance associations” and “large corporate insurance companies.” Then I found another blank page and started writing questions. My first question: “What is reinsurance?” Then, “What is the size of the Mexican market today?” Then, “Why is the Mexican market of interest to anyone outside Mexico?” And on and on, I listed questions that I would need to ask of sources whenever I might find them.
Then, I used a paper clip to fasten those two legal pad pages together and placed them atop a stack of similarly fastened pages, each one representing a different pending story assignment from several different magazines or newspapers. I needed to maintain a list of written questions on each assignment because I never knew when a source I had contacted might return my call. I easily could be confused about the reason I had called in the first place when receiving a call the day after placing it. But I could always pull my question list from the stack, and it would appear this story was the only one in my life.
I knew I would find sources to talk, and I knew I would answer the questions. I knew I would write 750 words on this subject—even though the first question on my list betrayed my current level of ignorance on this subject: “What is reinsurance?” Both I and Mike Berman knew my ignorance of any peculiar subject would make no difference to the ultimate result.
Mike received my story on time. I received a $300 check from the JOC before the end of September. And, on October 21, 1993, my masterpiece appeared at the top of a section
page in that day’s JOC beneath the headline “US Firms Poised to Lead Rush Into Mexico Insurance Market” with my byline identifying the article as “Special to The Journal of Commerce.”
That article should be totally forgettable on its own. For me, however, I’ve often cited the episode as a good example of my life and career as a freelance journalist between 1980 and 1997—before the Internet changed everything about the business of freelance writing.
The $300 fee was part of $11,989 I collected in 1993 from the JOC, which contributed 20 percent of my total income for that year: $60,603 before expenses (worth about $116,000 in 2021). The JOC finished second to The National Law Journal, which topped my list at $15,443 for 26 percent. Third place went to Money magazine, adding $9,860 for 16 percent. Fourth was $5,172 or 9 percent from The Explorer, a monthly newspaper for the international oil industry published by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG). The rest of my 1993 income was divided among payments from thirteen different sources for smaller amounts.
My records show 1993 as the highest earning single year for my freelance career, which generated a total of $672,618 in payments between 1980 and 1995. But 1994 came close behind with $59,577. Of course, after deducting business expenses, my total net for those years figured out to just $377,661. Nevertheless, those amounts proved sufficient for me to support myself and my two young daughters while working from home.
Not that many people believed me. Introducing myself as a freelance writer in bars during that period usually triggered a snicker and a knowing glance. Reading minds, I knew they were thinking: “Drug dealer. How else can he make a living?”
Or, try explaining your freelance journalist job to a seven-year-old daughter when she asks, “What do you do?” Because she often watched TV detective shows with me, I tried to compare myself to Jim Rockford of The Rockford Files because Jim worked from home for a variety of clients performing unexplainable tasks. But that left her disappointed.
“Rockford? Why can’t you be Magnum? He has a better car.” Now that she’s in her forties, she probably still has no clear idea about what I did all those years or how I created a freelance journalism business I was able to sell in 1996 when I decided to return to a regular corporate job with health insurance benefits and more reasonable hours.
Over the years, I’ve also fielded numerous requests from other journalists for an explanation of the so-called business model that allowed me to live the glamorous life of a freelancer in the 1980s and 1990s while they slaved away in their cubicles taking abuse from their editors in the corporate environment. They also have enjoyed some of the side stories about my freelancing life, like the time I sued a Houston magazine editor in small claims court for overdue fees and had him served at his home during his Christmas party.
They also laugh when I compare myself with a prostitute, noting that a freelancer should never take himself more seriously than that. Think of Mike Berman with the Mexican reinsurance assignment. He didn’t want foreplay or chitchat. I provided a service worth $300, and the only reason he would ever call back would be to complain. If the phone rings after submitting a story, it’s almost a certainty the editor is not calling to congratulate you on sharing another masterpiece.
That’s not to say I failed to develop lasting relationships with many of my editors or their publications. The National Law Journal and Money, for example, brought me to New York on several occasions for their respective holiday parties in December because they considered me “family.” Fundamentally, however, I’ve advised freelancer wannabes to quickly accept their role as a journalism prostitute and lower expectations about congratulatory slaps on the back.
Since my financial numbers should clearly qualify me as one of the most successful freelance journalists of that pre-Internet period, I wanted to record my adventures as one in a post on this blog. Maybe it will interest no one besides other journalists. And, I’m sure my daughter will continue to wish I’d been closer to Magnum than Rockford. But at least this five-part post will provide an entertaining review of a vanishing breed while perhaps providing some fundamental truths about self-employment applicable to any kind of business—such as: Make each client feel like he is the only one you have.
Before I became one in August of 1980, I never considered freelance writing as a realistic goal. In fact, while working as a newspaper reporter from 1969 until August of 1980, I often joked that the title “freelance writer” was just a synonym for “unemployed.” People who introduced themselves as such were often just working up the courage to ask me for help in getting a real job. Even with the perspective of time, I don’t believe now that many people can survive as freelancers for a variety of reasons beyond their ability to research and write. Had Mike Berman visited me back in 1980 to predict I would still be supporting my family as a freelancer more than 15 years into the future, I would have dismissed him as a fantastical dream produced more likely by having eaten too much pizza than a time machine.
My introduction to freelancing came so haphazardly that I often mused to myself, “I can’t imagine I’ll still be surviving like this a year from now.” Thus, I lived for the next 16 years in abject terror of awakening one morning with no assignment from anyone and no money left in the bank. But that day never occurred.
That terror began in the midst of a family crisis so serious that overnight I became a single parent with custody of my two daughters, aged 5 and 2. I’ve described these events in my 2009 memoir, Luggage by Kroger, so I won’t repeat them here. They are a better story for another day.
For purposes of this post, however, I mention them only in marking the first turning point in my journalism career, which divides equally into three phases: newspaper reporter from 1969-1980, freelancer from 1980-1997 and trade press reporter from 1997-2012.
Suddenly facing the prospect of single parenthood in 1980, I realized I also needed to make some lifestyle changes I thought would benefit my daughters. Their mother was locked in a mental hospital following an emotional breakdown, and they had no one but me. I immediately quit my job as a newspaper reporter for The Houston Post without any idea how I would make a living in the future. But I realized I needed to focus on my daughters and recognized my unstable work schedule as too much of a distraction for rearranging my life.
Besides, I did have some money in a savings account left from sale of my house earlier that year following my divorce. And I really needed time off to take emotional stock of everything that had happened. In hindsight, I’ve often thought I could have made it work, juggling my newspaper job with single parenthood. If I had tried, money never would have been an issue. But my life would have been so different. In retrospect, I’m glad the way things unfolded in the years ahead.
So, there I sat terrified in my rented two-bedroom apartment near Houston’s Astrodome complex, worrying about my daughters and wondering how long my savings account could last. I realized I needed to project an aura of absolute confidence for their sake. I packed my fear away in the back of my head and got busy creating a new life based on the strengths I discovered buried in my resume.
My oldest, Erin, was just starting a public school kindergarten program for advanced children, traveling by bus each day across town. But my youngest, Shannon, was still in
a Montessori pre-school costing me about $240 per month. The good news: She no longer needed diapers. Despite the cost of Shannon's school, I was determined to keep things as stable for them as possible. And I definitely needed my daytime clear to look for some sort of paying job.
To help generate income while searching for a new line of employment, I managed to land a part-time job as a lunch waiter at a Houston seafood restaurant. I could spend my mornings with the classified ads, work a shift for anywhere from $50 to $100 in tips, and return home in time to greet Erin’s bus after retrieving Shannon from Montessori. For a couple of weeks, I even found the waiter job somewhat therapeutic while I pondered a new career path for my particular set of skills, as the actor Liam Neeson might say.
Located near the headquarters for the Houston Oilers professional football team, the restaurant often attracted celebrity clientele. I served lunch to future Hall of Famer Earl Campbell one day—he left no tip. Most interesting, however, were visits from the team’s cheerleading squad, the Derrick Dolls, who always tipped well. Those “lunch breaks” provided me with pocket change and time to examine my possibilities.
I quickly realized those possibilities might actually lead back to some kind of writing. I could be a walking cliché—the unemployed writer who earns a living as a waiter. But I discovered options while reviewing the newspaper’s classified ads under “Help Wanted” and recoiled in shock to see a section under “writers.” I thought, “The paper actually has enough advertisers looking for writers that it can provide a separate section for them?” Drafting an inventory of my professional experience, that section seemed right up my alley.
Of course, I believed I eventually could seek employment in public relations for any of Houston’s collection of large companies. I had colleagues who had left the newspaper world for higher pay in that field. Since I had little interest in writing spin for the corporate world, however, I decided instead to explore this new underground world I had discovered near the end of the alphabetical listings in the classifieds.
Immediately, I mailed resumes to three of those ads. And just as quickly, I received invitations to interview. Always intriguing, want-ads for writers offered spotty details. All three of these sought a writer for certain large but unspecified projects. And all of them led to a paycheck.
My first stop came at a small office in an old house in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood where I found the headquarters of a small graphics business named Ampersand Inc. Operated by a pair of women, Ampersand had succeeded as a small art shop for outsourcing pamphlet production for some of Houston’s larger corporations. The female entrepreneurs had invested in an early computerized printing system for producing everything from annual reports to marketing brochures for corporations eager to cut costs by outsourcing those tasks. Until then, the ladies had done none of the writing. Corporate information officers would write their own copy and deliver the manuscripts to Ampersand for layout and publication, adding photos and drawings as needed. Ampersand made a lot of money. But these ladies harbored larger ambitions, as they explained in my first interview. They wanted to publish journalistic magazines.
“When we received your resume, we became ecstatic,” said Joyce, who supervised the business side of Ampersand’s operations. Before Ampersand, Joyce had worked as a reporter for The Houston Chronicle.
This comment during my first freelance interview would always stick in my mind in the years to come as proof I had underestimated both my background and my value in the freelance marketplace—which I also had underestimated as a legitimate field of work. After all, I had researched and written thousands of articles in the past twelve years, someone had paid me to do it and obviously, according to Joyce, I had few competitors now offering that service for hire. Have Pen, Will Travel? I mused, recalling one of my favorite old television shows from the 1950s about a gunslinger with business cards that read “Have Gun, Will Travel.” Suddenly, this freelancing racket seemed cooler than I had imagined, and the primitive elements of a business model began to take shape in the back of my mind.
But the interview got even better. Once I explained that I had left The Houston Post to provide more time for my daughters, Joyce spotted the seeds of a successful symbiotic business relationship destined to last at least for another eighteen months. She needed an editor who could launch two magazines into production. She offered me $1,500 per month (equivalent to about $4,500 per month in 2021) and office space upstairs at Ampersand without any required hours. As long as I completed the deadlines on their dream magazine projects, she said, I could come and go as I pleased. And she promised to help facilitate my blossoming freelance career by allowing me to use Ampersand phones and equipment for other projects unrelated to its magazines.
And the magazines? I suppressed a chuckle when Joyce shared their ideas. But I still knew I could produce and edit copy for them. At this stage, they had successfully published each title on an experimental basis as small monthly tabloid newspapers, buying some articles wherever possible with Joyce multi-tasking as an editor. Southwest Racquetball had been launched as a paper to promote the Houston racquetball clubs just taking hold in the city. And the Ampersand brain trust envisioned Houston HomeTrade Journal as a publication that would attract readers in the fast-growing gentrification remodeling marketplace reclaiming the city’s older residential communities. At first glance, these both seemed to hold potential. As tabloid newspapers, they cost little to produce, and I could envision many advertisers eager to reach the marketplace of possible readers in the nation’s fourth largest urban area.
But the ladies unexpectedly stunned me with a more elaborate plan for my services. They had decided to invest thousands of dollars transforming these cost-effective little tabloids into full color, glossy magazines. Moreover, they planned to expand distribution of the racquetball publication across the southwestern states using the mail to send boxes of the magazines to racquetball and health clubs from Houston to Phoenix for members to grab from the front desks after play.
Joyce envisioned a “Sports Illustrated for racquetball” with coverage of major tournaments and profiles of top southwestern players, plus articles about health and exercise. I even suggested a column called “Ask the Podiatrist” since foot injuries often sidelined players. I later recruited a doctor to answer questions from readers, like a “Dear Abby” for racquetballers.
Although they decided to limit distribution of the home improvement journal to the Houston area, a glossy version of that one posed hurdles, too. For starters, Houston already had one glossy home and garden magazine of long-standing, so Ampersand’s rival version faced serious competition. Also, the costs of color photography loomed as a barrier to entry in this market. I knew that readers of a home improvement glossy would want to be dazzled by the photos, and those would not come cheap.
Initially, a couple of cliches popped into my brain. Are they biting off more than they can chew? Are they trying to run before they walk? I even voiced my concerns loudly enough that they wanted assurances I would work hard on the editorial front to make these magazines succeed. Another cliché took center stage in my brain. Unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth, I agreed to collect my $1,500 per month and work my ass off to provide high quality editorial content. At the same time, I planned to work my ass off developing additional freelance writing contacts to provide alternate tracks when this Ampersand gravy train looked headed for a crash with the economic realities of the magazine marketplace, as I was certain it would someday in the future.
Joyce even helped get me started with that, referring me to one of her clients who managed creation of an in-house magazine for the employees of Houston’s largest bank. This client needed a freelance writer who could provide ideas for general interest stories to include in the monthly publication alongside news of promotions, birthday parties, updates on the dress codes and such. Beyond the $300 per article that this connection would provide, it also stimulated creation of a habit crucial to the next sixteen years as a freelancer: Maintenance of my Article Ideas Inventory.
The art of pitching article ideas to editors would prove as crucial to freelancing success before the Internet age as convincing editors to hire you for ideas they had developed on their own. The editor of this banking publication, for example, needed ideas as much as she needed a freelancer to produce a finished article. So, I continued with a process I had employed sporadically as a newspaper reporter. Every day I made a habit of writing down five new ideas for articles.
I had first heard about this process a few years before when reading a biography of the famous cartoonist Bill Mauldin, who never went to bed without first noting ideas for at least five new cartoons. At the end of each week, he reviewed his list. He said 60 percent of his ideas usually went into the trash. But usually he would find multiple ideas worth development in the week ahead.
For my idea inventory file, I relied on stimulation by everything from newspaper articles to television shows. Sometimes I would just ask myself an interesting question—like “What is life like for college football referees?”—and then jot that in my note pad. I also had kept an ideas journal as a newspaper reporter for those slow news days when stories had failed to fall into my lap.
In my first foray pitching at the bank publication, I pulled a couple of those unfinished newspaper ideas from an old notepad. For one, I suggested an article on collectors—Houstonians who maintain interesting and unusual collections as a hobby. A few years before, I had written a Houston Post article about a Houstonian who enjoyed a hobby of collecting historic political campaign buttons. So, I offered to build a larger story about collectors around him. Among the other unusual collections, I found an optometrist with a complete collection of glass eyeballs. (In 2019 I posted a copy of that article to this blog.)
I also pitched the idea of an article profiling a psychology professor at the University of Houston who had been an indispensable source for multiple articles at The Post. I had used Professor Richard Evans frequently as what I called a “Dr. Know-It-All” to explain
and analyze the motivations of people involved in certain news stories. We had even joked about his ability to sound authoritative and academic without having any direct research into the facts at hand. But Evans could usually provide comments citing arcane research reports or university experiments to bolster his observations.
My new editor at the banking publication flashed a green light on both ideas and they became the first real freelance articles in my career. Joyce even earned a fee for taking color photos of Dr. Know-It-All. I began to feel like a real entrepreneur—pitching ideas and getting paid.
But the bonanza from Ampersand proved just the first positive result from the three classified ads I had found at the start. I learned quickly that Houston held a bumper crop of publishing wannabes in need of my skills.
Second stop was the office of a wealthy real estate developer with an unusual assignment. He had made a bet with a rival developer that he could create a successful publishing company out of nothing. He had developed a list of topics for development into 15-page pamphlets he called “Best Bulletins” after the name of his newly incorporated enterprise, Best Publishing. He planned to advertise these bulletins for $3 apiece by mail order using classified ads in publications like The National Enquirer. Examples of his topics ran the gamut from “How to Get a Government Job” to “Sex, Single Parents and Happiness.”
Since I had experience with divorces as a two-time loser and no experience yet with sex as a single parent, I picked the topic titled “Divorce—How To Handle It” and began interviewing lawyers and psychiatrists to complete that pamphlet, which he published in 1981 after paying me a $300 fee when I met his deadline before the end of 1980. But he would never call with another assignment, so I concluded he failed to sell these bulletins. I didn’t pester him, however, because by then I had more work than I could handle.
My third stop resulted in a deal to write a book about an iconic Houstonian named Marvin Zindler. My interview from this ad for a writer led me to a photocopying shop in a Houston strip center where I met an older couple who further convinced me I possessed a more salable skill than I had realized. Before even interviewing me for their opportunity, they thanked me for answering their ad and said they didn’t know what they would do without me, based on my background and my previous experiences as a reporter already acquainted with Zindler. This couple had somehow convinced Zindler to join them in a book venture about his life story, which included his famous adventure seven years earlier in closing down what had become known as the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas—the historic Chicken Ranch brothel in La Grange, Texas.
Their deal with Zindler had occurred while Hollywood was preparing to release a movie version of a Broadway play based on Zindler’s 1973 crusade against the brothel as a flamboyant television reporter for Houston’s ABC-affiliate. They believed a book about Zindler could benefit from promotions on the movie, which became a big hit starring Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton. Although they never would be unable to publish the book, I would eventually publish it in 2012 on my own, and have included an explanation of the publishing venture in that book, I, the People: How Marvin Zindler Busted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for anyone who wants more details. For the purpose of this blog post, however, suffice it to say they paid me an advance of $1,000 to begin my research and writing on that book project in 1980.
So, thanks to the classified ads, my budding freelance business suddenly had multiple clients who could keep me busy on a full-time basis. That’s when I became even busier, adding another client destined to provide me with paying assignments for years to come and enhanced credibility in the freelance marketplace.
This new client would prove to be probably the most prominent of all, with my opportunity arising from a chance meeting with an old friend on a street in downtown Houston. We had worked together for many years at The Houston Post, but he was moving out of town. After a bit of chitchat, he asked me if I would consider succeeding him as a local stringer for Time magazine, where he had been moonlighting for a while. Time, of course, was the flagship of the Time-Life publishing empire, and I had been a regular reader since high school.
Although Time employed a full-time correspondent in Houston, the region generated too many potential news stories for one reporter to handle alone. Like his counterparts in other cities across the globe, the Houston correspondent supervised a small network of local reporters—called stringers—to provide the extra coverage on events as required from week to week. So, I dropped off a resume and received a call right away from Bob. Not only would I collect regular assignments and paychecks from Time for the next 15 years, but that connection also would prompt additional freelance work, including my appointment in 1983 as the first contract freelance correspondent for Time’s sister publication Money magazine.
Stringing for a colossus like Time involved a different writing process that requires an explanation. But my background offered the Time-Life empire a perfect servant for its needs in Houston. Instead of generating ideas for magazine feature stories, all I had to do for Time was answer the bell for gathering information. The only “writers” for Time-Life magazines worked at headquarters in New York City. Editors dispatched assignments to bureaus around the world directing them to reply under deadline with written files of information, rough drafts answering the questions listed in these queries. Correspondents and stringers would respond from their respective locations with files for the actual article writers to read.
Primarily, these writers wanted quotes from experts and witnesses to insert in their news stories. They placed no limit on the length of a file because they paid stringers an hourly rate of $12 back then—worth about $40 in 2021. I would maintain a written time log on my work interviewing sources as well as writing the file. Then I would submit the log each month for payment.
I realized quickly that Time in the 1980s did not care how many hours a stringer spent collecting information and compiling a file. Later I would often hear the running joke in the system that if Time HQ wanted details for a story on homelessness, for example, the editors hoped stringers would somehow succeed in interviewing every homeless person in America. I could submit a 10,000-word, 20-page file and earn hearty congratulations if one sentence from that file appeared in a completed Time magazine article.
But I had been doing this kind of work for more than a decade. I knew how to gather information and write first drafts understandable enough for a re-write reporter to use in a polished story. For many years as a courthouse reporter for newspapers, I had done exactly that verbally by telephone explaining events to a re-write desk collecting information from other reporters to combine in a single story. Moreover, I offered Time the luxury of availability. I wasn’t moonlighting while working at a newspaper. I was eager for daytime assignments and never had to refuse a query.
In addition, on the in-house political front, I posed no threat to the bureau chief as someone shooting for their job. I eventually would work for several chiefs during the next 15 years, and their personal ambitions in the Time-Life empire would prove helpful to me. A few years later, one in particular snapped immediately to my value in his bid to rise in the corporation. Because I could handle any kind of story, he started assigning me almost all the queries coming to Houston. This strategy gave him the time to work exclusively on the so-called big stories that would enhance his reputation within the empire while taking weeks to report—like the cover piece he compiled on the vaunted Texas Medical Center. At one point during this chief’s tenure, the Time-Life bureau secretary confided to me that New York had complained about me doing all the work for the bureau and wondered why they were paying him a big salary. But my checks always arrived on time and never bounced, so I was pleased to become as much of a fixture in the next 15 years for every arriving bureau chief as the office space, the desk and the secretary.
I don’t recall any specific Time assignments from those salad days of 1980 and 1981, but one example from 1985 may help illustrate the process. Stringers rarely received bylines, but occasionally the magazine would list their names as contributors on large stories. I received one of these tag lines for my contribution to a story on immigration reform under the headline “Finding Niches in a New Land.” The initial query from New York had requested a file from Houston with comments from immigration experts about the immigration law reform debate and examples of immigrants who had started new lives there. Identical queries had gone to bureaus in other big cities as well. Time’s finished article included a brief profile of a Vietnamese fisherman I interviewed in Houston as well as comments from a veteran immigration lawyer about the difficulties of passing immigration reform legislation. In those days before e-mail, I wrote my 20-page file on an electric typewriter and sent it to New York by hand-delivery to the Western Union office in downtown Houston, probably arriving there in the middle of the night with my two daughters asleep in the back seat of my 1980 Ford Bronco.
As a budding entrepreneur, I appeared off to a good start in the last half of 1980. I had contracts for regular work on several jobs. I even had a new business card identifying me as the Managing Editor of Southwest Racquetball. I felt so comfortable with my new business that I ordered another set of cards identifying me as a Freelance Journalist available for “Reporting-Editing-Writing-Consulting-Research.”
But my personal life remained in a bit of turmoil. My daughters contracted chicken pox in November, forcing us to quarantine for a couple of weeks. Their mother earned discharge from the hospital, however, and returned to her job, leaving her available to share our parental responsibilities and keep our daughters about half the time.
Meanwhile, my mother in St. Louis was dying of brain cancer—destined to die by March in 1981. I had secured a court order naming me the custodial parent for my two daughters and their mother had not contested it—yet. Despite her issues, she seemed capable of caring for our daughters and accepted my role as the parent in charge. I wanted visitation and other decisions to be as amicable as possible, hoping to avoid any confrontation that might trigger court action.
I enjoyed creating a frugal but cozy life for us in the two-bedroom apartment I had rented. Erin was doing well in Vanguard kindergarten, already learning multiplication tables. Many nights included helping with her homework. The pressures of single fatherhood most vividly emerged in my efforts to buy school clothes for her. She accepted the clothes I picked, then confided later that other children had ridiculed her. Although devastated, I learned I needed to take more care about the girlie things that seemed unimportant to me. More importantly, however, I noticed that she realized she had to become more assertive for herself. She never let me pick her clothes again, and throughout her life she’s always been one of the best dressed young ladies in her group. And, we had started working together to make a better life for the three of us, forming a partnership that would withstand the challenges of the years ahead. I was learning a lot about so much more than my writing.
Not yet three years old, Shannon appeared unfazed by the turmoil in her young life. But she did teach me some things. When we first set up the new apartment, for example, I turned on the TV and asked her to pick something. But Shannon lost me when she started screaming “Spider-man.” I couldn’t find Spider-man anywhere in the newspaper guide. Erin started laughing and said, “It’s a character on The Electric Company.” Oh, that show. I found it just as Spidie popped onto the screen. Shannon sat on the floor and focused on the show. I clearly had a lot to learn.
Besides juggling my business launch with the challenges of single parenthood and the threat of a legal custody quagmire, I also was trying to navigate the opportunities emerging in adult relationships. I had a serious girlfriend earlier in the year who now wanted to help. And, two weeks after I had resigned from the newspaper, I received a phone call from a woman who worked as a teller where I banked. I vaguely remembered her as an attractive blonde I barely knew. She noted that she hadn’t seen me depositing my Post paycheck in a while and admitted researching my change of address. She wondered if I was having “problems.” Rather than express irritation at being stalked by my bank teller, I gave her an update. She offered to provide “comfort” if I needed it. Thus began an on-and-off relationship destined to continue for three or four years.
Another opportunity arose when I left my brief employment as a lunch waiter at the seafood restaurant. While there I had become friends with the lunchtime bar maid, a twenty-something college student curious about journalism. With my ex-wife scheduled to keep our daughters one night, I invited the bar maid to dinner at a pub. Rather than leading to a serious relationship, however, our date would prove to be a milestone turning point in my outlook toward multi-tasking parenthood with freelance writing. Back at her apartment after dinner, I awoke about three in the morning to the sound of her washing machine in operation. She said she couldn’t sleep, so decided to do some laundry before morning. Spooked about the image of an unfamiliar female wandering around while I slept, I excused myself and left.
But I found a more disturbing development upon the return to my apartment. My ex-wife called to tell me that Erin had been harassed by a strange man while walking the two blocks from her bus stop to the church near my apartment providing after school daycare. Sensing an edge in our custody debate, she had called the police and filed a report. Then she scolded me for being “out of touch,” demanding I consider other educational options. But I devised my own solution. I approached the single woman who lived in the apartment above us and offered to pay her nine-year-old son five dollars per week to walk Erin from the bus stop to the daycare. He enjoyed the money and seemed to revel in his new role as a security detail for my daughter.
At the same time, I realized I needed to become less cavalier about my bachelorhood. I could only juggle so many balls at once, and girlfriends seemed to be the most expendable. So, when my most serious former girlfriend called me one night from a bar asking again to help with my children, I told her I just needed to concentrate on fatherhood and freelancing for a while. She said she understood.
Realizing the girls had to be uncertain and frightened about their lives, I vowed to provide as much stability as possible while fumbling around with the launch of a freelance business. One question kept running through my mind: Can I really make this work?
I would finish 1980 with freelance earnings of only $3,700 (worth $12,000 in 2021) while developing that initial client base in the last four months of the year. My tax records show I had made $18,825 from The Houston Post before leaving in August. Thus, I would have made $32,271 had I stayed there for the year versus $22,525 for The Post plus freelance in 1980. Freelancing for the whole year in 1981, I would generate $19,687 in fees and increase that income the next year to $31,102.
Annual income from freelancing would never fall below $33,000 during the next 15 years of my freelancing career, as I refined my business model based on the opportunities I had seen emerge in the beginning. I find it instructive to note that $33,000 in 1985 would be worth about $84,000 in 2021.
Next in Part Two: From Unemployment to Credible Magazine Writing
