By John Toth
The Bulletin
“Someone told me that you and Sharon are retiring and moving away,” said a friend and advertiser. “Tell me it’s not true.”
It’s not true. We are definitely not retiring, and we are not moving anywhere.
We have decided that while retirement is great for many people our age, we’re not ready yet, if ever. Eventually, we’ll have to, but it’s not in the cards for the near future.
Sharon and I have discussed this at length. We have weighed the pluses and minuses, and concluded that it’s not for us, and here is why.
If I had continued working for the Houston Chronicle in 1994, rather than taking a leap of faith and starting The Bulletin with Sharon, my wife and confidant, I might be in a different frame of mind. Like most of my colleagues, I would have worked until retirement, attended my retirement party and started a new phase of my life.
I would have had a great time writing for the Chronicle until retirement. But Sharon and I thought that if our publishing venture were to fail, we’d just go back and get jobs again.
I was a full-time reporter for the Chronicle, assigned to the Brazoria County area. Many people still stop me and recall stories I wrote back in those days. I still have a big stack of clippings in my closet. Back in those days, we kept clippings instead of digital copies.
I loved that job. I lived in the community in which I reported on, and we started a family in Brazoria County. Brazoria County is where our roots are. So, we’re not going anywhere.
I tried to do both the Chronicle and The Bulletin for a while, but it was too much. One had to go - the secure Chronicle job or the startup Bulletin. It wasn’t even close. With three kids and a mortgage, I quit the big paper to focus on the little one.
What did we have to lose? Well, a lot, but we were determined to give it all we had. At least, we could say that we tried.
We’re in our 30th year of publishing. We’ve had other businesses that we owned during that time, but when we decided to start cutting back and freeing up more of our time, The Bulletin won out over the others.
To give us some more down time, we decided last year to print four times a month. Four or five months of the year have five Tuesdays, and we use those weeks to research story ideas in the Western Caribbean, especially in January or February.
This year it didn’t work out, and we researched on how to stay here during the cold spell. The calendar just didn’t cooperate.
So, while we work hard and enjoy putting out each edition, we found a way to depressurize four or five times a year, recharge our batteries and jump back into the publishing world. It has worked out well so far.
I never really totally depressurize, because when I get bored on one of our fact-finding trips, I work on the paper in some capacity. I always buy the cruise ship’s Starlink service for the duration of the trip.
Sharon and I want to reassure all our readers and advertisers that we’re NOT pulling the plug on The Bulletin. And, we’re not going anywhere. I realize that there has been some confusion because another popular weekly in the county folded last year. That wasn’t us. We have no plans to do anything but print The Bulletin weekly.
I know that we’re not as young as we used to be, but we’re also not as old as some people we know who still work physical jobs. I admire them, because I just sit in front of a computer and type on a keyboard.
And with the good Lord’s help, I’ll be doing that for a very long time.
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