Wichita Southeast High School

Like, when did you decide that, "Oh, my gosh, I wanna be a journalist"?

You know, uh, I worked on my high school newspaper in Wichita, Kansas, Southeast High School.

We were the Golden Buffaloes, so our student newspaper was called The Stampede and our yearbook, which I was editor of, was called The Hoofbeats.

So you can see a kind of-

So it's, it's changed the, it's changed the way we deliver the news so that now the number one platform for USA Today, which used to be the biggest print newspaper in the United States, our number one platform is now the phone, are now smartphones.

Uh, and we're, we're exploring TikTok in a more serious way.

Uh, but you know what really strikes me is how while the way we deliver the news has changed so much, the kind of task that we face, the mission that we have, the job that we do, it's just like it was when I was at, uh, at the Southeast High School Stampede.

'Cause you go out and you try to see important, interesting things that are happening and come back and explain them to people, and that is really what has drawn me to journalism from day one.

go to high

school? Southeast High School in Wichita.

Southeast High School, okay.

And so...

I grew up in Wichita, came to El Dorado in 1965 to attend Butler Community College, and then I worked at the Kirby Funeral Home, and we would go on the death calls and ambulance calls because they still had the ambulance with the funeral homes at that time.