I did not grow up in a house of books. There were no overflowing shelves, no ritual of bedtime stories, no quiet insistence that reading was a habit to be cultivated. What I had instead was something far less curated and perhaps far more formative: the daily newspaper. It arrived without ceremony and I read it without instruction.

Inkstained fingers, folded pages, headlines half-understood; this was my education. And somewhere in that routine, almost by accident, on the last page of the Afternoon Dispatch and Courier, I found a voice that would stay with me far longer than any syllabus ever could. What I did not know then was that this voice had begun its journey decades earlier, on the last page of this very paper, within the Free Press Journal’s supplement, Bulletin. It........

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