For me, this career began a very long time ago, back when there were still hometown radio stations that paid aspiring disk jockeys and occasional news readers $1 an hour to hone their craft. So it was in the fall of 1959 that I read my first United Press teletype dispatch over a live microphone: the weather report for Eufaula, Ala.

A few days before Christmas that year, I played my first record as a real DJ: the Hallelujah Chorus. Only a high school sophomore, I would have paid them to let me work there. I think I have probably never loved a job so much as that first one.

The communications business has been in my blood since those days; I have rarely ventured far from it.

I got into print in the early 1980s for the first time here in Fayette County, working for the newly combined This Week in Peachtree City and the Fayette County News.

A few years later, I worked for the old Fayette Sun, first as reporter and then as editor. I left it to work as editorial director for a direct marketing company in Peachtree City in 1988.

In 1993, in the days after the Sun ceased publishing, a small group decided to start up a new paper, to be called the Fayette Citizen. It debuted in early February, 1993.

Some of the start-up people are still with us, the only paper in the county with local ownership. Two of the stockholders live in Peachtree City, one in Fayetteville and one in Jonesboro.

While I came up on what's known in the trade as the editorial side, most of my time is spent on the business side as publisher, but I still keep my hand in the editorial side as editor. Most weeks I put together the Wednesday front page and the inside opinion pages of all our papers. So if there's a column or letter to the editor you like or don't like, I'm the one responsible for choosing to put it there.

We launched the online version of The Citizen in the fall of 1996, one of the first newspapers in Georgia to go on the World Wide Web. We hope you find useful this electronic version of The Citizen Newspapers.

Personal info: I live with wife Joyce and two boys in Peachtree City. I have four grown children: one in California is a Mac guru for the second largest Internet service provider; one near Fayetteville is a sports equipment sales executive; and two in Macon are doctors, one in family practice and one in pediatrics. Oh, and have I showed you pictures of my two grandchildren ...?