A Traveling Name

My name has been in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. Windsor, Ontario Canada. Saint George, Utah. Reno, Nevada. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 

I've never been to Canada. I only know it through what famous people have come from there to the United States. Ditto Saint George, Utah and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I've heard of them. I've no interest in visiting them.

I only knew Reno, Nevada from Sister Act. Then, after my family and I moved to Las Vegas, I only knew it was closer than it had ever been before. Five years later, we left Las Vegas, and that was still all I knew of Reno.

I've been thinking about this because of an assignment that Stephen K. Peeples recently gave me. He's a journalist who worked at The Signal newspaper in Santa Clarita when I started as his intern in 2006 through College of the Canyons' Cooperative Work Experience Education program (CWEE). He left the next year, but blessed man that he is, I started working for him again, two years ago on a freelance basis, doing audio and print transcriptions for him (the latter being .pdf files of articles, and typewritten manuscripts that he wants in Word), proofreading, and the occasional rewrite, and we've still got that rapport going.

Amidst his many projects, he's looking to restore his early career, pulling out unpublished articles from when he was a young journalist, and later articles he hadn't seen in years, wanting them on record in Word. This happened to coincide with the features he was writing for his website about what would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday, and one of my many tasks was to transcribe .pdf files of an article he wrote for the Signal's weekend Escape section from December 2, 2005, which noted that Lennon would have turned 65 the previous October 9. 

I noticed, on the bottom of the three .pdf files containing the article, that he had pulled it all from newspapers.com, and I got curious. I have in my closet a sealed plastic bin containing the entirety of my run at The Signal, including when I was made interim editor of the Escape section for five weeks after John Boston, a 30-year veteran at the paper, left, as he believed, rightly, that they weren't paying him what he was worth, and the owners at the time, based in rural Georgia (which was really useful for a newspaper operating in Santa Clarita, California), were indeed notorious skinflints. I also have some of my movie reviews from the Teentime pages that were in the back of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's now-defunct weekend Showtime section, which I wrote for from the tail end of middle school to the end of high school. But that's all I've got. I don't even remember what article got me second place in the Journalism Association of Community Colleges' mail-in competition when I wrote for the Canyon Call newspaper at College of the Canyons.

So I wondered what newspapers.com might have of my work. I went searching, and that's when I found that my name had been in more states and countries than I've been to (only if you don't count when my family and I spent five days moving cross-country from Pembroke Pines, Florida to Valencia, California in August 2003, and passed through Alabama, Mississippi, Lousiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona). 

The first time my name appeared in a book was not when What If They Lived? was published by BearManor Media in March 2011. I wrote to Roger Ebert's "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column in very late 2001 because in his review of David Mamet's Heist, he says that the line spoken by Danny DeVito, "Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money!", is one of the funniest lines David Mamet has ever written. I didn't understand why or how it was funny, and I asked Ebert for his rationale. 

Now, I don't know if Ebert had a full-fledged website up and running at the time, but I remember that my question was answered. And many others followed on the same topic from other readers, who also didn't understand why the line was funny. Then came the publication of Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2003, which contained the Movie Answer Man questions and answers from the previous year. And there my name was, in print, in Ebert's book: "Rory L. Aronsky, Pembroke Pines, Florida."

I was proud of my reviews for Teentime, but to me, this was a mountain above that, the sun shining on me even brighter. My name was in a book! It was there for many to see! And I had a reason for being in that book!

Unbeknownst to me, until now, my name had traveled farther. And through newspapers.com, I've found that Ebert's "Questions for the Movie Answer Man" column was in newspapers too, syndicated in many places. I see here that my question and my name appeared in The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Thursday, January 17, 2002. The Star-Phoenix of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada on Saturday, January 19, 2002. The Windsor Star of Windsor, Ontario, Canada on Saturday, December 29, 2001 (which I see is why I made the cut in Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2003; I was right on the edge to tip into the next year). The Daily Spectrum of Saint George, Utah on Friday, January 4, 2002. And the Reno Gazette-Journal on Thursday, January 3, 2002. I was going to graduate high school that year, and I'd barely been out of Florida, save for one notable time in 1994 when my family and I flew on Delta to Newark, New Jersey because my father's grandmother (maternal, paternal, I don't remember) was in the hospital. I was also told that I had been in New Jersey as a toddler, and that I had lost my Cabbage Patch Dolls figurine in the snow and was so upset over it. Only when the snow melted did my father's parents (not really grandparents, which is a whole history in itself that doesn't interest me enough to rehash here) find it and mail it to us back in Florida. I don't think knowing that my name had been in more states than I had been to then would have changed anything. Back then, I was gung-ho on becoming a full-time film critic somewhere, and I was going to get there (that changed after five weeks as an interim editor at The Signal. Not only was I unsure of where the industry was headed, just like everyone else in it, but I determined that I didn't want to live on an ulcer farm anymore. The upside is that the average deadline does not at all compare to a journalism deadline, so it puts me at an advantage in my work because I don't flinch in the face of them). It impresses me now, though, that my name has traveled like that.

And for some reason, I see here on newspapers.com that my review of The Producers for the website Film Threat ended up printed in the Tallahassee Democrat on Friday, December 23, 2005. I don't think Film Threat ever syndicated reviews like that. They appeared on the website, and that was that. I haven't seen the layout of it yet, but I'm interested to know.

Besides all that, in scrolling through my journalistic past on newspapers.com, I'm floored at how ambitious and prolific I was. That's not bragging, because I wrote movie review after movie review for the Teentime pages, earning its 2000 Teentime Movie Reviewer of the Year award, its 2001 Teentime Movie Reviewer of the Year award, and because I was graduating high school, the overall 2002 Teentime Reviewer of the Year award. I wanted that full-time career so badly, and man, did I ever try to work toward it. 

I think if I had found newspapers.com's holdings of my work in my 20s, I would have been embarrassed by my writing, thinking to myself, "Thank every powerful god within range that I can do better now than I did before." But now, at 36, having passed the point of no return to 40 (at 35, you still have a choice of sorts, can try to pretend to delay it), I want to remember my mindset back then, that burning ambition, that all-consuming passion for movies. I want to see if all that work (of which there's at least 310 pieces, if not more) reminds me of things I haven't thought of in years, that I didn't realize I still remember. I want to remember the late Bob French, one of the two kindliest editors I have ever known, when I interned at the Sun-Sentinel's satellite office in Weston, whose rare anger came as a total shock. There was one day when he was on the phone and his voice rose with a venom that would seem new to him, and the entire office went dead silent. His anger was an event, much like Halley's Comet. 

I also want to remember how I thoroughly admired John Boston, the other kindliest editor I have ever known, when I started at The Signal, to the extent that I got into Tootsie Roll Pops because he liked them, and started reading The New Yorker because he read it. I even had a subscription for a time. I'm still in touch with him every now and then, but back then, I wanted what he had, being so completely steeped in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he had lived since the mid-1950s. Having moved so many times in my life, I had never known a place like that and wanted to know what it was like (not for Santa Clarita, just the general feeling). Also, he was, and still is, a phenomenal writer (he writes weekly columns for The Signal, which has been under new ownership, local ownership, for some time now), and that was reason enough for me to want to be in his orbit, to learn how he did it and how he maintained it. When I was 11, I admired Andy Rooney, had a few of his books, and tried to write like him. I realized then that I couldn't because I was Andy Rooney, and I had to find my own style. But what people to admire as I tried to figure out who I was in journalism and what I wanted out of it! I'm glad to have done it, but I don't regret not being in the game anymore. Trying to get my next book projects going is busy enough for me. It's enough just to have the chance to be back in these memories, which don't come about all that often these days in the midst of my writing. But I hope to find pieces, work ethic examples, and moments that could even inform what I'm doing now.