When I first walked into the offices of the Milwaukee Community Journal in 1985, I was a 15-year-old high school student looking for a job. Even so, I immediately felt a strong sense of family.

As Mikel Holt put it, “You were a skinny kid with gigantic glasses who knew what he wanted.” I had dreamed of becoming a writer since Milwaukee Journal columnist Greg Stanford came to my 7th-grade class at Jackie Robinson Middle School and told us about his job on career day.