When you reach a certain age — like, say, 70 — life isn’t chronological as much as it is psychological. You start to look in the rearview mirror a little too often, and not always with the best results.
Meanwhile, those aches, pains, and afflictions that started creeping up on you don’t suddenly get worse. They will progress, of course, but you don’t wake up the morning of your 70th birthday with a host of hurts you didn’t have the day before.
Birthdays that end in zero always seem to be days of reckoning. There goes your innocence and naivete when you turn 30. Time to grow up. At 40, according to those who know, you approach the peak of your earning power. The pressure mounts.
At 50, you get your first colonoscopy and with it the specter of mortality, and you join the club of the middle aged. Sixty means perhaps the beginnings of arthritis, or some other chronic condition you’re now forced to manage.
But by 70, most of us are retired. Our work is done. And we begin to wonder what we have to show for careers in which we kept our heads down and grinded it out day after day with our eyes on the present and not the past or the future.
At 70, we become naturally expansive and introspective about our lives. We learn that the world that was such an integral part of our existence now turns while we’re off riding into the sunset. And if we don’t have something — a hobby or some other regular activity — to keep ourselves relevant (at least in our own minds), that sunset will end in darkness and, often, desperation.
I caught myself in the grip of darkness and desperation in the weeks leading up to my 70th birthday (Aug. 29 for those who are wondering). Just what have I accomplished? Have I written that book I started when I turned 30? I have not. I’ve started it at least a dozen times but I can’t get past the first few chapters without hitting a major writer’s block.
Did I become a national columnist? I did not. I retired as a columnist for The Item, and it was great to be able to regale our readers with my opinions, but Mike Royko or Hunter S. Thompson I was not.
Nor did I ever see a musical composition of mine published or recorded. If you Google me, a dozen Steve Krauses come up before anything of mine appears. By these accounts, mine was an ordinary life. I never made much of a difference to anyone.
But as the song goes, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I came to the paper at the age of 25, with plans of using it as a springboard to journalistic notoriety. It didn’t work out that way in one sense. But it did in another.
Thanks to the inestimable John Moran, who was the managing editor at the time, I grew to appreciate the role local newspapers played in the big picture — something perhaps more important now than in 1979. I poured my energies into community journalism for the next 45 years, and I never regretted it. I left my dreams (some would say fantasies) behind, and found instead a worthwhile, and increasingly valuable, aspect of the business.
I’m not alone. The seven directors of the Essex Media Group (parent company of The Item), led by publisher Edward M. “Ted” Grant, and including Michael H. Shanahan, John M. Gilberg, Gordon R. Hall, Monica Connell Healey, J. Patrick Norton, and Edward L. Cahill, all have Lynn-area roots.
Colleagues such as Grant, Paul Halloran, Victor DeRubeis, fellow septuagenarian Bill Brotherton, Thor Jourgensen, Rich Fahey, Sean Leonard, Tom Dalton, Joyce Erekson, Cary Shuman, and the late Jim Wilson — just to name a few — always fought to keep this most important resource alive.
Some of us won awards, but they weren’t Pulitzers. I didn’t get into the sports reporters’ wing of the national Baseball Hall of Fame. But I like to think the exposure we all gave local kids who otherwise wouldn’t have had any bright lights shone upon them more than made up for it. Local issues that otherwise never would have seen the light of day got their chance to be covered and discussed.
It’s easy to cherry-pick your failures on these days of reckoning and conclude that you’ve wasted your potential by swimming in a sea of mediocrity. This is when we have to give ourselves a break and remember that all lives have meaning.
And on those days when the knees hurt a little more than usual, and when the fatigue of 70 years weighs heavily on us, we can look back on our lives and realize that even if Google doesn’t think that highly of us, we’ve made an indelible mark on our own little corner of the world.
Steve Krause spent 42 years with The Daily Item, retiring in 2021 as a senior writer. He also served as sports editor for 17 years and as news director. He won numerous writing awards during his career.
