Nicholas Beadle - Summer 2006

My father hanged himself the woods behind my house in Greenhill, Ala., when I was 8 years old and haunted the rest of my childhood. Writing freed me from his ghost and kept me off the path to a textile factory job that would not be there when I graduated from high school.

In eighth grade, a science teacher recommended me as a staff writer for the Florence (Ala.) TimesDaily’s teen page. I went into the job as a long-haired, plump teenager with a misguided taste in music willing to write reviews of CDs for less than what they actually cost. But after I realized I could write about politics and get paid for it (though still not particularly well), that I could help people by filling a ragged notebook full of chicken scratch and pounding on a keyboard, I found the path of a journalist had always been under my feet.

My hair had just been in my eyes.

Along that path, I have received an almost free ride to the University of Alabama, where I dropped my teenage weight and have spent four years working at the UA student newspaper, The Crimson White. There I have been tailed and threatened by campus politicos, tracked the continuing aftershocks of the school’s segregationist history and told much of my life’s story – and a few others – in a weekly column. In summer 2004, I worked for the late Birmingham (Ala.) Post-Herald, where I covered homicides, politics and the oddities of small-town Alabama.

Now the road has led me to Washington – as I always figured it would – where I will hopefully get my crack at covering Congress and the courts. If fate is in my favor, I will use what I know and what I will learn to burrow and dig until I carve out a home.

When momma calls me back to Bama in fall 2006, I will take over as the editor of the UA Corolla yearbook, continue as a reporter and columnist at The CW and begin my second-year as the co-host of a news talk show on the school’s student-run radio station, WVUA 90.7 FM.

(Oh, and finish my bachelor’s degree in journalism, political science and economics. That would be nice.)

I have no ghosts haunting me now, but journalism is still what keeps my heart beating and my feet moving – and the hair out of my face.

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