I should have posted this on Saturday, but didn’t think of it, alas. However, 14 years ago this week — February 13, 1996 — I had what you might call my first 15 minutes of fame (although, compared to the Katrina boomlet that would follow 9 1/2 years later, it was more like 15 seconds of moderate attention), when the Hartford Courant published an article about me and my unofficial high-school newspaper, this blog’s namesake, The Living Room Times. It appeared statewide on Page A3.
Brendan is a slender boy with red hair and expressive green eyes. When he talks, his words tumble out like an avalanche. He carries a battered notepad in his pocket and lugs around a three-ring binder packed with back issues.
“When I see something interesting, I just write it down,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
He reports on the monumental as well as the mundane. And because this is high school, the distinction is often blurred.
The basketball team wins a key game. A class takes a field trip to Boston. Midterms are postponed due to a blizzard. A student says goodbye to her friends before moving to Indiana. Someone aces a geometry quiz. Those are stories that have made the front page of The Living Room Times.
Incidentally, the article’s author, Daniela Altimari, is still at the Hartford Courant 14 years later. And, as one might have surmised from the high quality (IMHO) of her writing in that dinky little article about me, she’s good at her job: Daniela has become a hotshot, top-notch reporter now. I frequently see her byline atop big, important stories, like about the recent Middletown explosion. On a lark, I friended her on Facebook the other day, and we chatted a bit. She claims to remember me, though who knows. 🙂 Anyway she’s done really well for herself in a tremendously struggling industry — not too long ago, the Courant laid off, like, half its staff — and has certainly come a long way from writing feature stories about nerdy high-school freshmen whose “words tumble out like an avalanche.” Heh.
Anyway, you can read the whole article here, and view Living Room Times back issues from 1993-1999 here. After the jump, you can see the February 14, 1996 issue of the LRT, reporting on the fact that the Courant reported on it.
