HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL: PART THREE

Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist

Stability with three core clients: Money, The Journal of Commerce and The National Law Journal

My association with Money magazine began shortly after my departure from Ampersand and the transition to an office in my apartment. It occurred unexpectedly when I received a phone call from an editor there inviting me to become the magazine’s first contract correspondent in a decision borne from an internal Time-Life empire political dispute with Time magazine. Besides the namesakes Time and Life, the company published a number of sister magazines such as Fortune, People, Discover and Money. Each of those publications relied on the various Time news bureaus for reporting services like those I had been providing to Time since 1981.

By 1983, however, Money had ridden the growth of the Baby Boomer population into a prominent position within the empire. Launched in 1972 as a personal finance magazine, Money thrived from providing information about investments, spending, saving and anything that might affect its readers’ pocketbooks. As the boomer population aged into its more productive middle years when it sought that kind of information with more interest, circulation increases drove a growth in advertising revenue that provided Money’s editors more muscle to flex inside the Time-Life shelter. But correspondents at the various Time bureaus refused to pay Money the proper respect. When assignments arrived from Money editors, the Time correspondents routinely ignored them or provided only cursory effort at finding interview subjects to answer the questions—except in Houston, where the Time correspondent had an ambitious stringer named Gary Taylor willing to tackle any reporting assignments requested from New York.

Thus, I already had been handling the Money assignments in Houston almost by default when Susan called in 1983 with her job offer. Fed up with the routine rejections by Time correspondents around the country, she said she wanted to use me as a demonstration to show that Money needed its own slate of contract correspondents. Under her terms, I would continue to accept assignments for Time as well. She had no need to poach the bureau’s busiest stringer. But she wanted me to agree to accept all assignments from her in addition to those from Time. She could not guarantee any monthly income figure, but assured me there would be regular work with payment on an hourly basis for reporting files, just like I’d been doing for Time. She would bypass the Time correspondent in Houston and send the Money assignments directly to me. It sounded like the perfect way to fill the vacancy created by the failure of Southwest Racquetball while joining a more prominent and reliable alternative.

While assignments for Time covered a wide range of subjects on a weekly basis, the monthly Money assignments focused most often on finding individuals willing to share their personal investment information in what the magazine described as “model portfolios.” A typical Money assignment, for example, might ask me to find a single woman with two children starting to build their educational investment portfolio. When I found her, I would write a profile including all the details of her finances. Then the magazine would recruit a panel of top financial advisors to review it and provide specific recommendations on investment options.

This typical Money cover from November 1984 promoted my analysis on the investment portfolio of Houston TV anchor Shara Fryer.

In the early 1980s, this type of assignment did not prove as difficult as it might sound. I began developing sources in the Houston financial planner community, contacting them for access to willing clients. The planners proved more than eager to assist because they could expect prominent attention if quoted in this magazine demonstrating their talents. I could always find individuals willing to share their details in exchange for free consultations with top planners or brokers. And I used my imagination to locate subjects outside the planning community, developing connections with all sorts of neighborhood organizations, school groups or anyone with access to a wide range of friends. Facebook would have been a perfect portal for recruiting regular folks to interview had it and the Internet been available back then.

In addition to the model portfolios, Money also had a wide variety of other assignments. The editors there believed that they could find a Money angle to any news event and they instructed me often to find financial experts in Houston to interview on a range of topics. A couple of times, Money assigned me to produce full freelance features that would include my byline. On one occasion, I researched and wrote an article on office football pools. Using the knowledge gained on that assignment, I even did a bit of recycling for a local magazine, giving it a version focused specifically on the Houston football pool activities.

On another assignment for a story titled “How to Divorce a Millionaire,” I interviewed several of Houston’s high-profile divorce lawyers asking the question: “What advice would you provide if a client approached in confidence with plans to divorce their millionaire spouse within the next six months?” One of them even connected me for interviews with a female client who actually had plotted out her six-month divorce strategy as directed, gathering all financial materials so she could ambush her husband at the courthouse.

Another time, Money sent me to spend a week in Mexico investigating whether Americans really could retire there on $300 per month. I discovered a colony of transplants from the U.S. and Canada living in Guadalajara in style, but complaining about access to medical care and devaluation of the peso. One had been forced to operate a secret illegal side-business making yogurt after losing half his retirement savings because he had placed it all in a Mexican bank account before devaluation.

Susan’s “experiment” with me as Money’s first contract correspondent proved successful enough that she had added freelancers in at least a dozen more cities around the country within a couple of years. The magazine listed all of our names in its masthead every month, so my name appeared in every edition of Money published between 1983 and 1996. And several times the magazine brought us all to New York City to join the staff in its annual Christmas holiday party. Susan considered us family.

The Journal of Commerce (JOC) emerged as a primary revenue source about two years later through another unexpected turn of events. In fact, I had been unaware of the JOC’s existence until I encountered the newspaper’s Gulf of Mexico correspondent, Joseph Bonney, while attending a conference in Houston to cover a speaker for a Washington D.C.-based newsletter as a freelancer. Seated beside him, we struck a conversation that concluded with his invitation to accept some assignments in Houston under supervision from his office in New Orleans.

Headquartered in New York, the JOC boasted a rich and prominent history as a daily newspaper dating all the way back to 1827 when founded by Samuel Morse, the inventor of the telegraph. I would learn that the JOC represented a classic example of entrepreneurial journalism, filling a niche in the business information world that few realized existed. As a publication, it was a beast with a global reach and an enormous appetite for copy, particularly from a growth region like Texas and the Mexican border.

The JOC began as a vehicle to fill the void in information for ocean shippers in New York City. Before they could move cargo overseas, those shipping agents had to learn which ships were arriving and leaving, destined where and when. Morse realized he could gather that information in a news product he could sell to the city’s growing community of shippers more cheaply than they could gather that information on their own. The heart of the JOC was a section called “Shipcards” where all the shipping lines could post their schedules. Moreover, he learned he could charge the shipping lines for placement in the Shipcards as advertising while selling that information as a subscription to the agents in the port. The JOC would earn money on both ends of its operation.

As the publication grew from those basic shipping roots, it also developed another revenue stream with all manner of advertising around the shipcards. It had room for news stories, too, that would add value to the newspaper with coverage of the people and businesses related to the shipping community. By the turn of the Twentieth Century, the JOC ranked as a more viable publication than The Wall Street Journal, which would become the nation’s pre-eminent business paper. Of course, a century later, the age of the Internet would destroy the JOC’s reason for existence. Who needs to buy a newspaper for shipcards when shipping schedules post in real time on a computer screen? When I needed the JOC, however, from 1985 through 1996, it ranked as the Bible of shipping, commerce and any sort of business related to or dependent on those fields.

Excited to join the team, I learned that the JOC needed me primarily to cover the Port of Houston, including the politics of the port’s governing body as well as the organized labor activities there. The JOC paid primarily by the published column inch in its news sections. But it also produced special sections several times each week, paying freelancers set article fees—usually $300—for stories like the one I mentioned in Part One about the Mexican market for reinsurance.

In Joe Bonney, I had hitched my wagon to a rising star. Within a couple of years, the JOC had promoted him to editor, moving him to New York and adding New Orleans to my area

of focus. From September of 1985 until June of 1996, my byline would appear 338 times in the JOC on articles covering a wide range of subjects. In 1990, for example, the JOC would provide 28 percent of my annual freelancing revenue--$16,815 of $57,031. 

Contrasting with the accidental nature of my connections to Money and the JOC, I secured my connection to The National Law Journal (NLJ) in 1986 through a concerted, targeted effort spawned by an analysis of what should have been my business strengths as a freelance journalist as well as my failure in 1985 to maximize one of those strengths. As a newspaper reporter from 1969 through 1980, I had spent the lion’s share of my time covering courts and legal affairs. As a freelancer, I had to consider my experience in legal affairs reporting to be a primary strength. Emphasizing that experience in 1983, I had added a publication called The Legal Times to my stable of clients after spotting a classified magazine ad from that weekly newspaper seeking a correspondent in Texas.

The editor there offered to pay me a monthly retainer of $400 to guarantee my availability for assignments in Texas with payment for published articles deducted from that retainer. Basically, he paid me in advance for work that later would be calculated on an hourly basis of $12 per hour.  I quickly realized, however that the complex legal articles required more time than we had anticipated. But he needed to limit my monthly payments to $400. Instead of making bonus payments every month to cover the gap between my actual time and the $400 retainer I already had received, he added the excess payments into the budget for the following month. But he and his assistant editors continued to call me with requests for a wide range of stories, and I quickly reached a point where the paper owed me more than the total of my retainers for several months into the future.

Although I produced eight memorable articles for The Legal Times, including a lengthy 3,865-word profile of Austin’s entire legal community in 1984, relations with the staff grew strained as I refused to accept some assignments in an attempt to let the paper catch up on its payments. Rather than attempt to renegotiate my retainer with an editor who seemed satisfied with my work, I started cutting corners to spend less time on assignments for him. The inevitable showdown occurred in the summer of 1985 when he rejected my manuscript previewing what was destined to become one of the most significant trials in U.S. history between oil giant Texaco and Houston oil independent Pennzoil. I eventually would cover the result of that trial for Time a year later, earning one of its precious bylines. But my initial effort for The Legal Times clearly lacked the effort, and I realized the editor was correct. When he rejected my story, I terminated our agreement in July of 1985 in a letter explaining I just couldn’t provide the complex service he needed for $400 per month.

Despite the loss of $400 per month and the shot to my self-esteem for getting fired for the first time in my life, I managed to salvage some positives from that experience. I feared that the paper had been abusing my services by paying just $12 per hour even if that amount equals $40 per hour in 2021. I also realized the difficulties facing my negotiations in the future assessing offers for service. I concluded I needed to become more creative in formulating compensation schemes. I also had delivered eight strong legal articles to enhance my portfolio of work samples, including one about the creation of a new Houston law firm that I managed to recycle into a more general interest version for Houston City magazine in 1985 for a $1,500 fee.

With Time, Money, JOC and the AAPG Explorer as regular clients by the start of 1986, I decided to make another attempt to land a publication in the legal field. Reviewing a large reference book of magazines and newspapers, I discovered a brief profile of a weekly newspaper in New York called The National Law Journal (NLJ). I did not know it at the time, but the NLJ ranked as an extremely successful national publication associated with The New York Law Journal, which enjoyed unique status as the official daily paper of legal record for New York. Lawyers were required to advertise all lawsuits in the daily paper. As a result, one of the NLJ’s editors would later explain to me, The New York Law Journal represented a license to “print money.”  The publisher of the daily New York paper had launched NLJ as a national show horse for his stable of legal news. As a weekly newspaper, the NLJ appeared to fit my reporting talents perfectly.

After plotting my campaign, I mailed a proposal to the editor of the NLJ, inquiring about his interest in having a Texas correspondent. He called immediately to say he actually had been considering the addition of correspondents, particularly in Texas where he thought Dallas ranked as a more likely location. But he described himself as stumped about the most equitable way to compensate a freelancer for regular services.

“Funny you should ask,” I thought, then I proposed my plan. If the NLJ could pay me a monthly retainer of $275, I said, I could send a list of potential story ideas twice each month. Then he and the other editors could select from that list and assign articles based on the paper’s standard article fees: Front page features paid $700, inside news stories paid $100 to $200 depending on length, and shorter department articles paid as little as $25 to $50 each. Essentially, I explained, the NLJ would be paying me $275 each month to scout for news in Texas and feel confident the editors knew about every potential story in Texas. To myself, I thought: Can I really persuade a magazine to pay me just to pitch queries?  He pondered my proposal for about a day, then agreed to give it a try.

For starters, he also assigned me one of his ideas as my first NLJ front page feature, analyzing the impact of the oil patch bankruptcy boom on Houston’s bankruptcy bar. I had to laugh because I had produced a story on the same subject just two years earlier for The Legal Times and already had a lot of the basic information and legal contacts in my files.

My NLJ Debut Feature

To succeed with the NLJ, I realized I needed a more efficient means of scouting for legal news items. The paper covered all manner of legal news, from colorful lawsuit and court activity to inhouse gossip and politics at law firms. In addition, my focus area covered the entire state. That mission statement required a wider view of the state. So, I invested some money in additional subscriptions to publications within the state. Besides the two Houston dailies, I added subscriptions to the weekly business newspapers published in each of the five largest cities.

And I discovered a true fountain of news tips in a relatively new weekly publication called Texas Lawyer. Technically a rival for the NLJ, Texas Lawyer covered the same news territory with a focus only on Texas. It published stories with much greater detail than needed by the NLJ so I could always turn its stories into something unique without plagiarizing it. In those days before the Internet, the NLJ editors lacked real-time access to Texas Lawyer, but I’m sure they had a subscription and received their copy in the mail just like me. They never complained about my use of Texas Lawyer as a tip service as long as I developed the resulting stories on my own. Of course, Texas Lawyer was scooping me all the time, producing its in-depth articles several weeks before I could report a matching story. But even when I worked in daily newspapers, I had always believed I could respond to any scoop by writing a follow-up story with new and unique information.

Beyond the smidgen of in-depth articles published by Texas Lawyer, the standard news articles represented fair game. Court decisions or law firm mergers are events with the same details regardless of which reporter is reporting them. I considered Texas Lawyer to be an outstanding example of regional, industry-specific journalism and had great respect for its staffers, some of whom I had known from working with them in the Houston newspaper community a decade before. One of them joked on occasion that I probably couldn’t do my job at the NLJ if he wasn’t doing his for Texas Lawyer. I imagined him mumbling to himself: “It’s sketchy enough for Taylor to recycle his own stories, why does he have to recycle mine?” I accused him of exaggerating the threat. Had I been offered a staff position at Texas Lawyer in the 1980s, however, I likely would have accepted.

But the NLJ proved a match made in freelancer heaven for me. After faxing my initial list of story ideas to the NLJ’s desk, I received a call from an assignments editor named Anthony Paonita raving about the magic of having a dozen article suggestions just plop on his desk. He assigned several for me that first week and encouraged me to keep them coming. I would learn that Anthony, like most NLJ staffers, boasted a law degree but enjoyed journalism more than legal work. I also recognized quickly the need for accuracy, considering that lawyers comprised the majority of the NLJ’s reading audience and serious libel lawsuits loomed just one misquote away.

Just as with Money, the experiment with me at NLJ prompted it to duplicate my suggested compensation scheme, recruiting freelancers in various other cities from Miami to Chicago to supplement the production by the staff in New York and full-time correspondents in California. Within a couple of years, the paper was flying us all into New York annually for a staff meeting and party. During the decade from 1986 until 1996, the paper would carry my byline 705 times below headlines on a wide range of legal topics. A law professor in San Diego regularly used my front-page 1995 feature on the proliferation of fake evidence as a required reading assignment for her law students. I discovered I could earn a more efficient payment from the shorter $25 or $50 articles on humorous events. Employing the Rockford Rule, I could churn out those things in 30 minutes or less including the research, easily earning more than $25 per hour. In 1990 when the JOC generated 28 per cent of my income with $16,815, for example, the NLJ added 16 percent with $9,204—equivalent to about $18,000 in 2021.

If Time and Ampersand had represented a vegetable garden and chicken coop in 1981, by 1988 the combination of Money, JOC and NLJ had expanded my regular food sources into fields of corn and wheat with pigs and cattle always available. Around that agricultural bounty, I still could hunt big game from magazines and other publications as opportunities arose.

Rather than relying only on my three core contracts, I forced myself to keep three or four random magazine assignments circulating at all times, leaving me busy both mentally and physically. I continued to build my story ideas inventory files and practice my ability to pitch them as time would allow. This financial security prompted a new assessment about freelancing as a business. Where I once considered it synonymous with unemployment, I now saw the advantages.

Old friends from The Houston Post constantly worried aloud about losing their one job and source of income if rumors of that paper’s demise proved true—as it eventually would in 1995. In contrast, however, I would need five or six of my client publications to fail simultaneously before seriously affecting my earnings. I realized I enjoyed more security from a variety of employers than my old colleagues had from their sole source of income. In fact, I would grow a bit nervous upon noticing that any one of my publications represented more than 25 per cent of my income.

But I felt like I was running on an endless treadmill. I had four or five part-time jobs that equaled a couple of full-time positions. Luckily, I was still young enough to handle the pressure, and my personal life had taken a turn toward more stability as well.

That turn began emotionally for me after my ex-wife had relocated to central Texas in late 1981. Until then, she had shared a lot of the responsibilities for parenting despite my control of custody. With her gone, however, I had them all the time and had to adjust. I began thinking about more domestic permanence for us. The following year I had moved us out of the city and into the Southwest Houston suburbs. By 1983 I was expecting to have both girls attending the same Vanguard magnet school for the next school year with Erin in third grade and Shannon in first, traveling by bus every day. I wanted to keep them as busy as possible with activities that would stimulate friendships and growth.

In February of 1983, Erin came home with a flyer about joining a girls fastpitch softball league in our neighborhood. So, I signed her up at Southwest Houston Girls Softball

Mr. Ladybug with Shannon and Erin in 1985.

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Association (SWHGSA) in Bayland Park, where she joined the roster of the Ladybugs—a team for ages 7-9. A new team created to meet the demands of an expanding population, the Ladybugs were coached by a pair of young women in their twenties, who quickly realized they had volunteered for more trouble than they anticipated. They had underestimated the aberrant psychology of little league parents. Some day I will write a separate article about my years involved with fastpitch softball for girls and women and perhaps entitle it “Blood Along the Baseline.”

Coaching in 1990.

For this article, however, I only need note that I became intricately involved with SWHGSA to a point where I even served one year as president and spent the next twelve years coaching girls as they aged through high school. Besides keeping us busy in the neighborhood, the softball league also provided the opportunity for my next long-term domestic relationship when I recruited one of the single mothers with a daughter on the Ladybugs to serve as their team mother in 1984, after I had become the coach. Before the end of that season, we had decided to rent a house together so her two daughters and mine could have a better living environment.

“Taylor will do anything to get a pitcher,” cracked one of my rival coaches when he heard about our new arrangement. Of course, we found a house near the park and set about to create our own little version of “The Brady Bunch.” Two years later we would buy a house in the area. Even with the four girls grown up and gone by 1995, we continued our arrangement through the present time.

Beyond the impact on my family, the relocation of my freelance business into a house provided significant benefits for stability. Moving August of 1986 into a house where I would live until 2013, I sequestered the dining room and adjoining living room for office space. I installed my desk, computer, fax and printer in the dining room and filled the living room wall-to-wall with four-drawer filing cabinets to hold my ever-growing morgue of magazine and newspaper clippings. By this time, I had my stable of regular clients in place with Money, JOC, NLJ and the AAPG Explorer.

But I also supplemented that income stream with assignments from a wide variety of additional publications, some of which became fairly regular as well, even if they did not last throughout my freelancing career to 1996. My records list annual freelance revenues for the rest of that decade as $54,210 in 1987, $50,116 in 1988 and $47,732 in 1989.

Among the various publications, two stand out in particular as regular contributors; Southwest Airlines’ Spirit in-flight magazine and the two city magazines for Houston in this period, Houston City and Houston Metropolitan. From 1984 into 1988, Spirit had assigned me to produce a monthly column summarizing all significant business news in the southwestern United States. Since magazine production lagged copy submission by about two months, this feature made absolutely no sense to me. Everything in my columns had occurred more than two months earlier than passengers could read about it. I assumed the editor just wanted to present her magazine as some sort of official publication of record for the Southwest region.

I researched these columns by subscribing to the weekly city business journals across the area, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Denver. And I collected $300 per month plus telephone expenses to provide a summary. Added to the fees for feature articles in 1986, Spirit ranked as my most important client that year with 17 percent of my income, just barely beating JOC with 16 percent and Money with 15 percent from a total of $36,512 (or about $92,142 equivalent in 2021). A new Spirit editor in 1988 decided he didn’t need this feature any more and terminated my contract. I responded by immediately canceling my subscriptions to most of the weekly business newspapers I had been reading just to produce the column and wondering how I could make up the missing $300/month.

The previous editor answered that question a year later, calling to introduce herself as the new editor for Houston Metropolitan and recruit me for another monthly business column for her at that magazine. Instead of summarizing old news, however, she wanted me to provide original reporting. I could write about anything in the business sector without a query for $500 per month.

“Of all the nerve,” I laughed: “You want original reporting?”

Besides recycling wherever feasible, I actually did produce a lot of original magazine reporting in those years. In addition to the column for Metropolitan, I sold her some of my most interesting feature ideas. One in particular I had wanted to do for some time about what I called “windfall psychology.” I wanted to locate several individuals who had suddenly received a large sum of money and find out how it affected them. That feature ran in Metropolitan’s December 1991 editions under the title: “Be Careful of What You Wish For.” I republished that article as a blog post in 2019.

In a bid to expand my opportunities with national publications, I joined the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA)—a well-respected organization that required applicants to qualify for membership while also paying annual dues of $160. The ASJA published an annual membership directory listing freelancers available for assignments by geography and areas of expertise. I stood out as one of the few freelancers available in Houston boasting expertise in many subject areas from business and general interest to sports and legal affairs.

With overlapping assignments from so many different publications, explaining my business to outsiders proved a bit like presenting a jigsaw puzzle. On one resume in 1996, I divided my historical client list into three groups: contract assignments; books; and, publications with occasional assignments and byline credits. Beyond my work for the regular contract publications already discussed, here is a quick look at the publications that provided extra income between 1981 and 1996:

The New York Times, USA Today, Newsday, Fortune, Compute, Wireless Week, Guest Informant, Discover, Vacations, PC Today, NG Magazine, Healthweek, International Business, Cuisine, Genetic Engineering News, Computerland, On Patrol, Business Month, Institutional Investor, Plants Sites & Parks, Southern Living and The Houston Press.

Next in Part Four: Beyond magazines to books and PR.

HAVE PEN, WILL TRAVEL: PART TWO

Memoirs of a Freelance Journalist

From Unemployment Scrambling to Credible Magazine Freelancing 

 Although my schedule seemed busy as I entered 1981, my first complete year of freelancing would add new levels of understanding and opportunity. I had ambitions beyond editing a racquetball magazine and stringing for Time. I wanted to produce actual magazine articles for pay. And my early successes in that pursuit would introduce me to several fundamental freelancing concepts destined to secure my business model: Recycling, compensation strategies and clip files.

In my office at Ampersand in 1981.

Recycling refers simply to the process of selling the same basic story to multiple publications. While that might sound almost fraudulent in the age of the Internet, recycling ranked as a cornerstone of freelancing in the 1980s, and standard writer’s contracts accounted for the possibility. In those days, freelancers usually sold only the right for first North American publication. Rights to the research and the article reverted to me, for example, after a magazine had published it. Some contractual exceptions included so-called “work-for-hire”—as when Time paid me by the hour for research or Ampersand paid $1,500 per month for a general job description of editorial services like a part-time employee.

Editors, of course, preferred to have the most exclusive rights possible, but they had little leverage on the standard contracts purchasing what they called “First North American Serial Rights.” If one found an exact copy of an article in a rival publication, he likely could decline to buy anything else from that freelancer again. In those days, however, editors lacked the access to other publications available today. Nevertheless, a smart freelancer would at least work to rewrite an article sold to different publications, emphasizing an angle separate from the theme of the initial publication.

Recycling proved a cost-effective business strategy because research comprises the lion’s share of the time involved in completing any article—at least 80 percent or more for someone who can write acceptable first-draft manuscripts. And I was that guy—a master of the first-draft. The basic facts of a recycled article remain the same, with only the need for a bit of updating on occasion.

My first true magazine article emerged as an example of recycling, and there would be several more in 1981. My opportunity arose, once again, in an unexpected way. In October of 1980, I had been interviewed by Dallas freelance writer Hugh Aynesworth for a story he was writing on assignment for Westward, the Sunday magazine of the Dallas Times-Herald newspaper. A veteran of Texas journalists, Hugh became an inspiration to me as a freelancer when he arrived at my apartment in a coat and tie to interview me about a newsworthy adventure in my life from earlier in the year, one that would become the subject for my memoir written in 2009. His Westward article in 1981 would be the first real magazine article on my personal escapade beyond the standard newspaper articles chronicling the events as they occurred in Houston. Hugh explained that the Times-Herald had decided to enhance its Sunday magazine by boosting its freelance budget and recruiting writers who could provide interesting articles from anywhere in the state. 

This interview marked the first time I had encountered a credible professional journalist actually working as a freelancer. Sixteen years my senior, Hugh already ranked as a legendary Texas newsman from his work at The Dallas Morning News where he had covered the Kennedy assassination. Later in the 1980s he would continue to attract attention for books and other journalistic endeavors including research about serial killers Ted Bundy and Henry Lee Lucas. While he interviewed me about my case in 1980, I interviewed him about the craft of freelancing and asked if he thought Westward might assign anything to me despite my pending appearance as a primary source for his article. He referred me to the editor, Mark Ivancic, who encouraged me to submit some article ideas.

I responded with my first formal freelance queries, listing topics from my ideas inventory and summarizing my expectation for what each finished story might include. Mark immediately assigned me to research and write my idea about lost treasure—an updating of a lengthy feature I already had written once while at The Houston Post in 1976. Inspiration for the 1976 version of “True Treasure Tales” had come while browsing a magazine stand and noticing a group of magazines designed to attract treasure seekers. Their articles included famous tales of lost treasures, such as Arizona’s Lost Dutchman gold mine.

Several of these magazines identified their editor as John “Long John” Latham with editorial offices in nearby Conroe, Texas. So, I interviewed Latham and wrote a Post feature about Latham’s five best true treasure tales—the treasures he believed real enough to pursue if he wanted to invest time and money in a search. The Post had published my feature March 4, 1976, across half-a-page under the headline: “Publishers find rich gold tales in Texas, Southwest.”  

Now, in 1980, I called Latham again to make sure he was still alive and to see if any of his favorite treasure mysteries had been solved. Using most of the information I had gathered for The Post five years earlier, I wrote my new version for Westward, which published it in March of 1981 under the title “A TROVE OF TALL TALES OF LOST FORTUNE AND GREED” and paid me $750 for my first legitimate magazine byline. In the true spirit of recycling, of course, I was not finished with Latham yet. I was destined to sell his story yet again in 1983 for $1,000 to the editor of the Muse Airlines Monthly under the title “TALES OF HIDDEN TREASURE: John Latham built a publishing firm on rumors of gold, silver and other treasures hidden in the Southwest, Or, so the story goes.” You can read a full copy of the Muse version in my blog post from 2019.

Ironically, I achieved my own byline in Westward before Hugh’s article about me appeared in June of 1981. And I added another in August with publication of an article assigned specifically by Ivancic, profiling the East Texas town of Sour Lake and its sad history of overreach during the first days of the oil industry at the turn of the century.

Thus, by agreeing to an interview with Hugh Aynesworth in 1980, I had stumbled into another opportunity destined to provide regular income for the next three years, until the Times-Herald decided to cancel inhouse publication of a Sunday magazine and killed Westward. But not before I had recycled some other works, including that article I had done for Ampersand’s banking publication about the professor who appeared to be an expert on anything. My Westward version ran in June of 1982 under the title: “CALL HIM DR. KNOW-IT-ALL.”

Recycling, of course, works both ways, and I would manage to rewrite some original Westward articles for other publications later in the decade. One was a profile of legendary high school football coach Gordon Wood and another was an article about regular citizens who had become heroes by risking their own lives to save a stranger in danger. Another notable story updated and recycled something I had written at The Post years before, profiling several female prison inmates who had given birth while incarcerated.

Another example of recycling provided my second legitimate magazine byline with the April 1981 publication of a story about two Houston racquetball stars in a fledgling magazine called Texas Sports. I had discovered Texas Sports during one of my regular expeditions to browse the publications at a newsstand, an activity I pursued to scout opportunities rather than reading material. Although I had never worked as a sports writer during my newspaper career, sports always had been a subject of great interest to me. I had played sports all my life and in college had been elected athletic chairman for my dormitory, a position requiring me to organize the dorm’s participation in all kinds of intramural sports contests.

Embracing my desire to add sports to my portfolio of freelancing subjects, I fired off several queries to the editor, and he replied immediately with a list of assignments. Drawing on my experiences covering the Houston racquetball scene for Southwest Racquetball magazine, I immediately drafted an article about two young players I’d covered for my part-time job as editor there, effectively recycling a lot of material already in hand. I followed with an article published in June profiling the trainer for the Houston Astros, expanding on some comments he had made to sports writers at The Houston Post about his ultra-modern training techniques.

A more ambitious assignment concerned my suggestion to identify the ten best high school football coaches in Texas for the magazine’s fall edition. In my query I explained a scheme to contact a list of the nation’s top college coaches and interview them anonymously about their views of Texas high school coaches. The magazine loved that idea, but I had no way to be sure I could persuade the college coaches to share their opinions. I was pleasantly surprised to find them eager to provide lists based on their experiences recruiting players from Texas. I added interviews with them about the importance of solid high school coaching and tips about the qualities they sought in recruits, so their programs received attention in the article without disclosure of their selections.

My top coaches article ran in the August 1981 edition of Texas Sports and included brief profiles of each high school coach with interviews about their techniques. In the process, this article introduced me to a legendary Texas coaching figure named Gordon Wood, who surprisingly ranked as the coach with the most wins at any level in the country. Wood had been named number one on every survey form returned by my college coaching sources. I immediately recognized Wood as a subject for wider circulation and contacted Ivancic at Westward to pitch him on a larger story about the coach.

The magazine paid my travel expenses to spend a weekend in Brownwood, Texas, attending a practice and a game with Wood and the Brownwood High Lions. Westward published my story on Wood in November of 1981, and I kept my notes so I could recycle Gordon Wood several more times in the years ahead for other general interest magazines.

Texas Sports became another regular source of income with assignments that included coverage of the tryouts for the Oilers’ Derrick Dolls cheerleading squad (August 1981), a story about the famous Astrodome baseball scoreboard (October 1981) and profiles of prominent Astros Art Howe (April 1982) and Jose Cruz (June 1982). Although the magazine failed to last very long, I ranked as a frequent contributor and thoroughly enjoyed the assignments.

I recall interviewing Cruz in a dugout at the Dome during a practice when he saved me from a foul ball I didn’t see. I telephoned Howe’s little league coach in Pennsylvania to collect some anecdotes on his early development. I also used the assignments to stimulate my imagination for the generation of other ideas I might pitch to publications in the future.

Looking back on these publication dates 40 years later, I’m astounded to see how busy I must have been, juggling the magazine stories with assignments from Time and monthly publication of Southwest Racquetball amidst the hectic life of a single dad supervising daughters aged six and three. Of course, I was just 34 years old at that time, but I still wonder: How did I do it all? Reflecting on these events at the age of 74 provides a boost to my self-esteem I guess I had taken for granted over the years.

Clearly fear and responsibility ranked as primary motivation for all the hustle. When I recall the pressures of my chaotic private life during those months, I also can see that the work schedule likely emerged as the refuge I needed to maintain my sanity through a year climaxed with a five-day child custody jury trial in September.

My mother died of cancer on March 14, 1981, at the age of 62 in my parents’ home in St. Louis, Missouri, some 1,200 miles away from me in Houston. My 59-year-old father would follow her to the grave three years later, also from cancer. Her death in the midst of all the changes in my life had minimal emotional impact on me. We had never been close, and I had lived away from home since leaving for college in 1965. I was not religious. But one of my deepest life regrets remains my failure to visit her after her diagnosis in 1980.

My dad himself had suffered a stroke in 1977, so both parents were infirm miles away while I was wrestling my own issues in Houston. One of my sisters worked as a lawyer in Denver. But the other one was fifteen years younger and still living at home with my parents while finishing high school. She had to grow up fast in that house where she assumed control at too young an age. She would go on to become a banking executive without attending college. I felt confident in her ability to continue handling things for our dad in his final years so I didn’t contribute anything besides some smart-aleck commentary.

Sitting with my dad and sisters while the funeral director pitched casket selections for my mom, I remember replying, “I believe people should rot where they fall.” Such was my emotional state at the time, that I never cried during her service. I needed to get home where my ex-wife was crossing a milestone in her own life.

She called out of the blue one day to announce a religious conversion that included allegiance to a minister who lived on some sort of collective in Wimberly, Texas, about 150 miles west of Houston, near Austin. She had decided to leave her job as a child welfare caseworker and move there. And she wanted to take our daughters with her. She insisted she no longer would recognize the temporary custody order I had secured a year before while she resided in a mental hospital. I responded by denying her visitation, and the fight was on.

Borrowing money from her dad, she hired an attorney and quickly learned that my order indeed gave me the power to deny her visitation. So, in June she filed to vacate the order and began a battle to win full custody for her planned relocation to Wimberly. My attorney was a friend from my days covering courts for The Post. Aware of my financial challenges, he agreed to defend our court order and argue for my appointment as permanent custodial parent for just $5,000. I still had to borrow that from my dad.

But I believed I had no choice except to fight for the girls. They both seemed to be stable and well. I had made plans to shift Erin to a different school for first grade for more convenient transportation. Her grades painted the picture of a girl excelling in the district’s Vanguard program for gifted students. At the same time, Shannon continued at the same Montessori program she had attended since infancy.

Since her release from the hospital in October of 1980, their mother had enjoyed split custody with my blessing, the girls living in her apartment on weekends and at my place during the week. For the first time in several years, our lives seemed stable. We were catching our breath from a period of domestic turmoil. Their mom even seemed to experience tranquility with the arrangement. I have to laugh now recalling that a religious conversion would disrupt tranquility rather than secure it.

Still, eager to make sure a custody fight would serve our interests best, I hired a long-time friend who worked as a private investigator while attending law school to research the religious group in Wimberly. His reports reaffirmed my suspicion that a shift to a farming commune would create a detrimental shock, regardless of their mother’s presence with them. At the urging of a new girlfriend, I scheduled therapy appointments for both girls as much to use as evidence in the coming trial as to show me if they were suffering emotionally from our new life. Their therapist would eventually tell jurors during our five-day trial in September that “the older one is thriving with life the way it is. He shouldn’t change a thing.”

I did not mention two of Erin’s major accomplishments. Under my supervision, she had learned to make a Scotch and water to deliver to me without spilling it: ice, cheap Scotch poured to a level of two fingers on the glass and tap water on top. In addition, she had helped me play darts in a bar called the Hard Times Soup Kitchen by serving as the chalker on the scoreboard, standing on a chair and improving her subtraction skills by marking the scores down from 501.

Asked about my career during the trial, I was able by September 1981 to testify that my freelance business was doing much better than expected, easily well enough to support the three of us without any financial support from their mother. Ampersand’s $1,500 per month retainer provided a financial base, and I showed I had managed to supplement at least another $500 from Time and the various magazine assignments. In contrast, I estimated my monthly expenses at $1,454 including $300 for the Montessori school, $285 for rent, $212 on my car payment and $200 for groceries.

The trial ended with jurors voting 10-2 in my favor. They asked to meet with us after the verdict to explain their decision. Speaking for the group, one woman asked if there was any chance we could find a way to stay together. She said jurors had been impressed with both of us, but thought the girls would benefit more from the stability I was providing in Houston. I laughed and told them thanks for their careful consideration. I promised their mother would have all the visitation she could handle in an effort to ensure the girls continue their relationship with her. Then I asked the judge for $40 per month in child support, just for the principle.

Their mother left Houston quickly after the trial and lived in Wimberly for about a year. In a telephone conversation in July of 1982, she would thank me for preventing her from taking the girls with her. The commune apparently did not work out well for her. But she did remarry, have another child and would move back to Houston a decade later, buying a house near me and rebuilding her relationship with our daughters. By then, I had built my freelancing business model into a satisfactory economic foundation for their future.

Despite the regular income from Ampersand, Time, Westward and Texas Sports, I continued searching for new opportunities by reviewing a wide range of magazines even while preparing for the custody trial. During this period, I landed another assignment destined to become a regular income generator for the next 15 years. It occurred when I had purchased a magazine called Writer’s Digest and reviewed its classified ads. I responded to a couple with my resume and quickly received a call from an executive in Tulsa at the headquarters of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG), the world’s largest organization for those professionals.

He explained that the AAPG wanted to produce a monthly newspaper for its members that would include legitimate news stories about the oil industry alongside announcements of important meetings and briefs about geological research papers. He wanted me to research

and write the first article as his Houston correspondent about the growing interest from Canadian investors in Texas oil ventures. Beginning with publication of that article in November of 1981, the AAPG Explorer newspaper would carry at least one byline from me every month for the next 15 years.

At the same time, I discovered an opportunity in corporate communications with Shell Oil Company’s US headquarters in Houston. Besides reading magazines and following classified ads, I had used the telephone to contact other Houston-based writers advertising in the telephone book to learn if they had extra work to toss my way in exchange for a referral fee. I quickly learned that most of the listings for “writers” were either disconnected or served as income tax expense deductions for individuals who received complementary listings to purchase an official business line. Did writers actually advertise in the Yellow Pages and find work that way? I found a couple of listings for individuals who sought work on pamphlets but no journalists. One of them noted my journalism background and suggested I contact his acquaintance at Shell, who worked as the editor for Shell’s monthly inhouse news magazine titled Shell News.

My timing proved perfect. That editor, Eldon Libby, responded immediately to my inquiry with an assignment, noting that his primary freelancer had just moved out of town. Libby assigned me to produce a three-story cover package for the June 1981 edition of Shell News about the company’s efforts to navigate a political landscape where state governments enjoyed increasing regulatory authority. The package included an overview article titled “Meeting Challenges of the New Federalism” and profiles of two Shell executives involved in lobbying.

While a few months earlier I might have scoffed at this work as propaganda since Shell controlled the final result, I still received some journalistic satisfaction from the interviews and writing. I gained great respect for Libby and would continue to take assignments from him several times each year. A few years later my Shell connection would cost me a big assignment from Time, which considered me for researching a major article on Shell, then gave it to someone else after learning I had earned fees from the company as a freelancer.

Another random contact introduced me to the previously unknown world of in-flight magazines when I chatted with him in a bar. At that time Kent Demaret was a former newspaper reporter teaching journalism at the University of Houston. I bought him a drink and asked him about his freelancing career, which he said had lasted ten years after his former newspaper folded.

“Ten years?” I asked in astonishment. “If I can do this for ten years I’ll be amazed. Who paid you for articles?”

Demaret laughed and said, “Magazines are out there. Just look. You know, all the airlines have monthly magazines to give to their passengers to read while in-flight. They don’t employ staff, so everything is written by freelancers. They pay well and the editors are always in the market for good, general interest ideas. No controversial or investigative stuff, but you can still write some fun articles and add income.”

Then he rummaged into his briefcase and produced a recent edition of the in-flight magazine he’d carried home from a trip to Dallas. He handed it to me so I could find the contact information inside.

Sufficiently informed, I referred to my list of article ideas and contacted the editor of Southwest Airlines Magazine with several suggestions. He liked the one about the Houston

resident who collected old political buttons—the same “collectors” story I had written for The Post as a staffer and for Ampersand’s banking client magazine as a freelancer. Southwest’s in-flight published my recycled and updated version in its November 1981 edition under the title “One Man’s Election Collection” in what would be the first of many sales to airline in-flights. Southwest in particular would become a regular client for me throughout several of its incarnations into a magazine titled Southwest Spirit during the next 15 years.

Besides learning the value of recycling stories as I had with the “collectors” and the “treasure hunters,” by the end of 1981 I also boasted a rudimentary understanding of the two other pillars of freelancing I mentioned earlier: compensation strategies and clip files.

Identifying the “customers” in my blossoming business model as editors for a variety of publications, I realized they had various ways of paying for my goods and services, which I identified as story ideas and research. Magazine editors essentially purchased ideas based on their trust that a finished, publishable story would arrive. The standard agreement involved a promise from me to provide the finished product and their promise to pay the agreed fee either upon publication or acceptance. Usually, they also agreed to pay what they called a “kill fee” of some smaller amount if the finished article failed to met their standards.

I learned quickly that once I sold the idea, I likely was 80 percent certain of getting paid in full, unless I missed the deadline or really functioned below the reporting abilities I had polished during the last decade of work on newspapers. Most editors worked on a tight schedule with a budget that did not allow them to create much inventory of articles. They did not want to kill anything assigned because that likely would leave a hole in their monthly production.

For budgeting purposes, they also usually paid according to a schedule that reflected the different sizes of spaces they needed to fill. For example, a magazine like Texas Sports would routinely divide into the same sections each month so regular readers could feel familiar with the publication. Reviewing that magazine’s table of contents page for August of 1981, we find it divided into two primary categories of articles; features and

departments. Under the “Features” heading, we see eight different headlines including two stories with my byline—the story of selection of the Oiler’s cheerleading squad and the story about the state’s best high school football coaches. Meanwhile, the “Departments” heading tops a list of eight other sections with less specific identifications like “From the Press Box,” “College” and “Texas Legends.” My “top coaches” article covered eight pages in the magazine, and I received a standard fee of about $400 for that work. But the articles in the various departments likely paid much less for short treatment, perhaps $50 or $100 for a page in the magazine.

When the editor ordered my stories here, he told me the fee and the length he would need to fill the space in his plan for publication. It would be up to me to make that payment efficient. I quickly determined a fundamental truth of self-employment that I would follow throughout the next 15 years: Regardless of the payment scheme, I am always working for an hourly rate because all I really have to sell is my time. To elaborate, any time an editor offered a fee, I had to estimate how many hours I needed to work to complete that assignment in the same way that a carpenter might estimate the time needed to build a table.

As a fan of The Rockford Files television series, I adopted what I called my Rockford Rule. In quoting his fees, Private Detective Jim Rockford always told prospective clients he charged “$200 per day plus expenses.” That rate equates to $25 per hour for the standard eight-hour workday. In 2021, that would be the equivalent of $75 per hour or $600 per day.

Thus, when agreeing to accept $400 to provide a finished article in 1981, I silently told myself I actually had agreed to provide 16 hours of work on that project. All 16 hours would never occur consecutively because a reporter must schedule interviews at the convenience of the interview subjects. I needed to have four or five different assignments working simultaneously at all times to fill my day. Using the top high school coaches article for an example, once I had identified my interview subjects with my unscientific, informal poll of college coaches, I contacted each to schedule interviews. While it might have taken two weeks to complete my interviews, each interview likely lasted only about half-an-hour. The only true consecutive hourly work on any article would occur with the writing, which for the coaches’ article likely took about three hours because I could generate publishable copy extremely fast, thanks to my newspaper background.

Of course, I adjusted for some exceptions. If I wrangled an assignment from a prestigious magazine, for example, I could afford to spend more time to produce a superior article even if that lowered my hourly rate because the promotional value of that byline could be worth the difference. Time magazine, for example, paid less than $25 per hour, but the connection offered prestige as well as the security of regular work and reliable payments. Also, I realized my alternative likely was earning $5 per hour at a hamburger joint, so anything more than $5 ranked as the best choice for my set of skills.

In practice, over the course of my freelancing career, I’m certain I earned much more than $25 per hour on most stories written for a fee because I could finish them faster than the editors anticipated. My speed emerged as the special sauce in my recipe for freelancing survival.

Besides standard fees, editors also paid according to the measurement of the article they needed. Magazines measured length in terms of words, and some would offer to pay a certain amount per word. Some newspapers paid by the published column inch. But most were still equating those rates to standard budgeted fees. One of my old contracts from one, for example, offered 45 cents per word for 1,000 words—that was going to be $450 no matter how you describe it. Regardless of the payment scheme, however, I was always figuring it on an hourly rate and asking: How much of my precious time does this editor expect me to give him on this particular story?

In addition to learning payment schemes, I also learned the value of maintaining a large collection of clip files in these days before the Internet, when online search engines would place background information at every freelancer’s fingertips. From my days as a newspaper reporter, I understood the value of a well-organized editorial library, or “morgue” as we called it because it held all the dead stories from the past. So much of newspaper reporting involves updating from an older article, using previously reported information so the reader understands the basis for the information that is new. Often as a newspaper reporter I would add three paragraphs of new information to the top of ten paragraphs of an old story and then move along to cover something else.

So, as a freelancer I started clipping articles from newspapers and magazines to build my own personal morgue. I had no way of predicting what clips I might need in the future, but I knew I had to anticipate some subjects that could prove helpful. It started small, with just a couple of filing cabinets. I would clip articles, identify them as topics and place them in folders, believing some day I could use the information to save time researching a story. For example, at the end of the year I clipped the annual big news story roundup published by the city’s two daily newspapers and the weekly Houston Business Journal and filed those in a folder titled “Houston History.”

By the time I stopped freelancing in 1997, I would have an entire room filled with four-drawer, legal-size filing cabinets holding clippings about subjects as varied as “cannibalism” to “securities fraud.” I never had a chance to write a feature on cannibals, but background from The Smithsonian magazine remained in my files, just in case. The extent of my morgue had become so well known by the 1990s that I occasionally received calls from editors just offering to pay me for background information they couldn’t find on their own. Today they just search on Google or Wikipedia for that stuff.

With my custody case decided and my ex-wife relocated to Central Texas, I started feeling more secure by the end of 1981 in both my personal and professional life. I had guaranteed income from Ampersand and Time, plus variable opportunities from several magazines. I compared my business model with the culture of early humans evolving from hunters and gatherers into civilizations. Ampersand and Time ranked as my vegetable garden and chicken coop while the magazines provided big game whenever I could kill it. Unwilling to take the future for granted, however, I continued searching for new opportunities and realized trouble brewing on the horizon with Ampersand.

As managing editor of Southwest Racquetball and Houston HomeTrade Journal, I hired freelancers myself to write articles, while also writing some of the stories, too. But the women running Ampersand had grand ambitions to produce expensive full color magazines, and that required them to generate revenue through advertising. Somewhere they had received an infusion of cash to start the process, so they hired a staff of about four advertising sales associates and a sales manager to crack the whip on that team. The manager reminded me of every used car salesman I had ever encountered.

Ad sales were struggling, and I was not surprised, based on my discussions with sources in the businesses the magazines sought to cover, particularly the Houston racquetball clubs. I noted a fatal flaw in Ampersand’s business plan: They had no serious audience for the racquetball magazine. They distributed it for free to clubs in five states, leaving stacks on the lobby desks for members to take home and read, employing the same strategy as publishers of in-flight magazines for airlines. Unlike passengers on a plane, however, club members had other things to do while using these facilities. They came there to exercise and could not care less to read about it. Ampersand offered a product it could not even give away for free, club employees told me, noting that members rarely took the magazines home. They sat on the counters until a new batch arrived to push last month’s copies into the trash.

Although that era had witnessed a boom in construction of racquetball and exercise clubs, Southwest Racquetball had little to offer beyond coverage of the tournaments conducted regularly at those clubs. And I learned those tournaments attracted only a small percentage of club members. Once I snapped to this reality, I had to laugh. I could provide articles about fitness and strategy, of course, but the niche market for those articles would be narrow as well.

I even asked Joyce about the market research conducted prior to launching the publication. She said she had a friend whose boyfriend claimed racquetball represented a growth industry. Fitness freaks already enjoyed multiple magazines to help fill their research needs. But I soldiered onward, collecting my $1,500 per month and filling the magazines with articles no one ever saw. The sales staff could not sell ads, and their manager, of course, blamed my editorial contributions as not being attractive enough to draw readership. But Ampersand could not verify readership anyway since it just dumped stacks of magazines at clubs hoping members would read them. Besides that, I made sure Joyce approved everything I did and repeatedly told her to suggest new ideas for coverage.

So, it came as no surprise one day in 1982 when Joyce called me into her office for a chat. Ampersand could not afford the magazines any more, she said, so they would “suspend” publication while seeking ideas for new publications. In the meantime, she did not want to lose me. While she could no longer pay me $1,500 per month, she wanted me to continue to use my office in her building for my freelancing business. I politely declined and decided to move my business into my apartment full time. My transition to a home-based operation took my business model to a new level where it would stay until the end.

Within a year in 1983, Ampersand’s building on Shepherd Drive would become a restaurant called Backstreet Café. Whenever I dine or drink there, I wax nostalgic about the building’s role in my freelancing business. Despite the failure of the Ampersand magazines, I’ve remained grateful that the opportunity emerged when it did.

I realized the loss of $1,500 would create a substantial hole in my monthly bankroll, but I had prepared. The experience would always serve to remind me the dangers of taking the future for granted and failing to anticipate unforeseen dangers in business. I would approach every publication as one that could vanish with next month’s advertising sales. But I had learned several important fundamentals destined to help me and my daughters survive and even thrive through self-employment over the next 15 years. Ampersand had helped me build a solid foundation, and I say “Thanks” to Joyce, wherever she might be. 

Developments in my personal life made that transition to a home-based business more efficient. Winning the custody trial in 1981 and watching my ex-wife leave town had provided an expectation of permanence that allowed me to make some changes. From that point forward, I would embrace my role as the head of a household of three, running the business to benefit me and my two daughters.

By March of 1982, we had moved west to the suburbs of Houston’s Sharpstown-Bellaire neighborhood into a sprawling apartment complex on Hillcroft Avenue, leaving the inner city behind. I had transferred Erin into a different public school where she would stay throughout her elementary years and maintain friendships from there with girls who would serve as bridesmaids in her 1999 wedding. Shannon began kindergarten at a public school in the neighborhood, and then she joined her older sister in the Windsor Village Vanguard program after qualifying for first grade in September of 1983. A school bus picked them up near our apartment and delivered them in the afternoon to another public school for daycare, where I would retrieve them by 6 PM—or earlier if my schedule allowed.

During these years, I developed a couple of fairly serious romantic relationships but nothing destined to last. With extra time available for a while in the day time, I started playing guitar, teaching myself to play a repertoire of about 50 songs and forcing my daughters to endure bedtime performances while I covered songs by Dylan, Jackson Browne, Kris Kristofferson, Paul Simon and others plus an assortment of folk classics like “500 Miles” and “Aura Lee.” I became fairly serious about learning new and challenging material and performing it as well as possible.

On the business front I entered the technological revolution by investing about $2,000 on one of the early Apple home computers, using it primarily as a word processor since digital telephone connections remained a couple of years away. The machine clearly improved my ability to edit my writing without “xxx-ing” out parts of sentences as I had to do with my electric typewriter. Once the primitive telephone connections became operational, freelancing would take another giant leap forward. For then, however, I still needed to print stories on paper and send them in the U.S Mail or, for Time, via Western Union.

Even before my break from Ampersand in 1982, I had cultivated additional clientele destined to fill the gap in my revenue stream for the next 15 years. My book deal on the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas legend failed to generate anything more than the $1,000 advance I had received in late 1980. I finished a manuscript in time, but the over-ambitious publisher closed his business and left town for reasons unknown to me. I eventually published the book myself in 2012 under the title I, the People: How Marvin Zindler Busted the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. The real estate developer with the publishing ambitions closed that operation before I could write any follow-up to my book about handling divorce.

But assignments from Time grew more frequent, and I continued to land projects from the usual suspects of Shell News, AAPG Explorer, Westward and Texas Sports. While still editing Southwest Racquetball in late 1981, however, I learned that Houston’s city magazine—called Houston City—was getting new ownership with a new editor. In the past year I hadn’t earned any assignments from the old editor, who had been a rival in our newspaper days from the 1970s. Sensing an opportunity, I mailed a list of story ideas to the new editor, and he took the bait.

At that time, regional magazines ranked as the most prominent publications for writers outside of newspapers. In cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia, their ability to produce lengthy investigative features and commentary had made them the bright lights of journalism in the 1970s. Founded in 1973, the statewide Texas Monthly had already achieved legendary literary status on a national basis and loomed as the regional behemoth here. But upstarts created in Dallas and Houston had risen by 1980. The golden age of regional magazines would last for the next 20 years before losing out to a number of cost factors that would leave most of them publishing public relations fluff or dying altogether. Of course, New York magazine and Texas Monthly still rank as respected publications, but most of the others resemble only shadows of their former selves.

Although, I viewed these magazines as premier targets for my writing ambitions, I also had been cautious to approach. As a single parent, I needed cash flow more than prominence and feared those magazines would demand excessive amounts of my time. I did not want to blow my opportunities in the prestigious regional magazines marketplace by submitting subpar copy. I lacked the confidence in the beginning to transfer my success in newspaper reporting to legitimate magazines. While newspapers wanted me to make a long story short, magazines sought just the opposite, to make a short story long.

But my success with articles for Westward bolstered my confidence and when David Legge moved from Dallas to helm Houston City, I pounced. An experienced magazine editor, Legge worked for the publishing company that owned the Dallas offering, D Magazine. The company had dispatched him to Houston to remake Houston City in its image. After receiving my article queries, Legge invited me to the Houston City offices and offered a short course on magazine production. Sketching a diagram on a legal pad, he explained what he called the monthly city magazines formula of short department articles, larger feature stories and regular specialty issues through the year.

He liked two of my ideas and assigned them on the spot: Houston’s best poker players and a history of the Astrodome. At this point, these suggestions were just interesting

ideas without any research to show I could produce them. But his confidence boosted my confidence, and the contracts for $1,500 each added incentive. About the time Southwest Racquetball was serving its final edition, my story on Houston’s poker players appeared in Houston City’s February 1982 issues. My story on the Astrodome would follow in June.

My Rockford Rule on compensation did not apply to Houston City because I believed those bylines to be worth considerably more than $200 per day in promoting my name as a freelancing brand. Nonetheless, I’m sure I earned at least $200 per day on those articles despite the extra time I took for research and the extra attention I gave to the writing. I confided my self-doubts with the magazine’s managing editor after he published the poker story, and he expressed surprise. He assured me I had done a great job “infiltrating that community” he had not even known existed in Houston until he read my draft.

During the next 15 years I would continue to work regularly for Houston City through several changes in personnel and for its successor publication, Houston Metropolitan Magazine. I would learn that editors may come and go, but the beast still needs copy to eat. By the time Fred Rhodes took the wheel about 1985 at City, he would be calling me and beginning the conversation, “I know you’re the man to see when I need a few stories.” He would even offer me a full-time staff position later in the decade, but by then I had come to view those jobs as higher risk than freelancing because of the turnover at the top.

The turnover opportunities would become even more apparent when Gabrielle Cosgriff became editor of the fledgling Houston Metropolitan following the closure of City in 1989. She had been editor for Southwest Airlines’ Spirit in-flight magazine and had used me there extensively from 1984-1988, even paying me a monthly fee to produce a business news column in addition to regular features. While her successor at Spirit wanted to use writers he knew, Gabrielle popped up almost immediately running Houston Metropolitan. She called and said, “You’re doing a business column here, now. And anything else you want to propose.”

So, by 1983 I realized I had been freelancing for more than two years without any time available to even look for a full-time job. I recalled my early conversation with Kent Demaret when I experienced astonishment he had freelanced for a decade. But I had to acknowledge that my efforts so far had succeeded in providing a living for me and my daughters. With Ampersand and its $1,500 monthly payment in the rearview mirror, however, I needed to drive ahead in finding new clients to fill that regular income gap.

In the next couple of years, I would do exactly that, connecting with the trio of publications destined to form the core of my enterprise throughout the rest of its run: Money magazine, The Journal of Commerce (JOC) and The National Law Journal (NLJ). By 1990, those publications would be contributing more than half of my annual income publishing my byline hundreds of times. 

But I wouldn’t find them overnight, and only one of them would enter my life because of specific efforts on my part to connect.

Next in Part Three: Finding my trio of core clients.