I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

It was cold out there, bitter, biting, cutting, piercing, hyperborean, marmoreal cold, and there were all these Minnesotans running around outdoors, happy as lambs in the spring.

In television, everything is gone with the speed of light, literally. It is no field for anybody with intimations of immortality.

You know, most reporters can't go back to the towns they wrote stories about. I never wrote that kind of story.

I would love to write something that people would still read 50 or 100 years from now. That comes with growing older, I think.

I recognize that I had a good deal of good luck in my life. I came along at a time when it was pretty easy to get a job in journalism. I went to work at CBS News when I was about 22, and within a year or so was reporting on the air.

I think the feature reporter often walks a very thin line between a truly human story and one that slops over into mushiness or sentimentality.