My career that wasn't.

I graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in Journalism. This was so I could continue my brilliant career as a high school jazz columnist, copyboy and night reporter on my alma mater paper, the mighty Vancouver Sun.
But a funny thing happened on my way to byline fame and stop-the-presses action.
When I showed up for my interview at the Sun with my wife Peggy, they announced that they could only hire one of us and since Peggy had worked on magazines in New York and the Berkeley Gazette and, most importantly, was a member of the American Newspaper Guild, she got the job. Besides, they offered her twice the money I could get.
So she went to work on the paper and I went to work at a night liquor store.
I took interviews during the day but a journalism degree doesn’t attract much attention in the broader economy. I got a job with the prestigious but stolid Hudson’s Bay Co as an executive trainee. One of the truisms about Canada is that it doesn’t value talent and openly disdains ambition. Otherwise Diana Krall would still be singing in Nanaimo bars and Jim Carrey would be doing standup in Toronto.
I was treading water till I applied for a job at an advertising agency. I was hired on the spot by a brilliant guy from New York who liked the Berkeley part of my resume.
Thus did my 35 year career in advertising get started. The most fun you can have with your clothes on they say, correctly.
It certainly paid off in money and adventure after we left Vancouver.
The future has no facts and when you’re starting out you don’t realize there is no such thing as a career, just the jobs you get or lose. You’re usually so tied down raising a family or keeping up with the Joneses that you don’t understand that it’s more important to heed Joseph Campbell’s advice and follow your bliss.
If I’d stayed in Vancouver I would have had one year’s experience 35 times. No growth and no adventure. Journalism would have disappeared very quickly for me anyway until today you have the internet asking, “Is your cat psychic?”; the Enquirer screaming, “Dwarf rapes nun, escapes in UFO” to the over-packaged hysteria that masquerades as cable news. And on a page in Life magazine I saw today they couldn’t even identify Glenn Miller correctly. They had Ray McKinley playing the drums. Where have all the fact checkers gone?
In the satiric “Being There”, a TV reporter asks the infantile Chauncey Gardner if he prefers print or television news, and he gives his stock answer, “I like to watch”, and she announces triumphantly, “at least someone has the guts to be honest”.
So, what would have been the result of a career in journalism? Instead of a smile from Julie Christie in London and meetings in New York, Paris, Madrid and Tokyo I would probably have ended up back at the night liquor store.