This weekly newsletter debuted on Facebook Bulletin in late June 2021. Unfortunately, Bulletin is closing at the end of this year (end of this week!). But, as you know by virtue of the fact you're seeing this, Second Acts is continuing on Substack. A new year. A new start. But I wanted to first provide a kind of introduction to new (and old) readers about what they can expect, to tell you why I even write, and to invite you to subscribe.
I call this newsletter Second Acts because it's my reply to a remark by F. Scott Fitzgerald made (actually, it was found scribbled on a scrap of paper after he died) that "there are no second acts in American lives." If he really believed that, I think he was wrong.
My first act -- the one that began after I finished school -- was largely structured around work. I was a news reporter for more than 40 years, starting out at a small newspaper in Richmond, California and spending the last 32 years as an ABC Network News correspondent and, during the last 14 years, also the newsreader for the Good Morning America Weekend program. The demands and requirements of my jobs shaped the rhythms of my life, even where I lived. I lived in five different cities.
My second act began on September 29, 2018. That was the day after I walked out of the ABC News office in Manhattan for the last time. Looking back on my final months, I have this mental image like the one you used to see in movies where the months of a calendar on a wall fly off as if ripped away by a powerful gust of wind.
Like probably most people heading into retirement (or, in many cases, hurled into retirement unwillingly), I wondered what I would do next. I had thrived on the "juice" of chasing a story, interviewing people, traveling, the camaraderie, the dark cynicism and lofty idealism of the news fraternity, the dizzying excitement of working under deadline pressure. Television news can be demanding but also thrilling. What I liked most was interviewing people and crafting a story, their story.
With my retirement, I would be leaving all of that and going to ... I didn't know where.
I decided to go around the world, something I had dreamed of ever since I saw the movie Around The World In Eighty Days as a kid. I didn't want to just sightsee. I wanted to do something, meet people, experience the country I was in. I knew too that I didn't want to travel luxuriously. Luxury is bubble.
I signed up with an organization called Global Volunteers (https://globalvolunteers.org) to go to a small village in Tanzania in East Africa. I would teach English and help install hand washing devices, essentially, a horizontal pole attached to two vertical poles with a plastic bottle attached that is tipped by a foot pedal. The lack of simple sanitation measures was the cause of severe bacterial illnesses, even fatalities, especially among children. Installing the devices was tough physical labor, but it gave me a feeling of accomplishment. And I discovered that I loved teaching.
In Uganda, I volunteered as an assistant to the animal keepers at a zoo in Entebbe on Lake Victoria. I've lived in a banda, a round thatched roofed hut, on the grounds. I worked long hours and ate meals with the other workers. Later, I went trekking in the forests of Uganda and Rwanda. I noticed that I rarely saw old people in Africa. There's a reason. In many under-developed countries, the average life span is in the 60s, roughly my own age.
From Africa, I traveled to Spain, India, Singapore, Japan, then back back to the U.S. I'd done it. I'd gone around the world. I took a train from Los Angeles to Chicago and finally flew to New York.
After nearly three months on the road, I was home, once again facing the same question: now what?
Back in New York, I threw myself into a series of volunteer projects. Things I was curious about and interested in. And wanted to try to do something for people not as fortunate or facing harder lives as I had. I have been extraordinarily lucky. I had a professional career that perfectly fit my personality and interests. I've lived a comfortable life. I've seen a lot of the world. I could afford to retire. For most people in the world, that is not an option. Not even a notion.
I tutored first to third graders in East Harlem. I still do. I teach English to new immigrants. I work with ex-offenders on their job training skills. I have helped high school seniors on their college application essays. I joined the board of Midori and Friends, a non-profit that provides music lessons to public school students. I took a paid position teaching broadcast journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism where I tried to teach aspiring journalists how to tell stories.
I got gratification from these projects that I had never experienced in my professional career. For once, I wasn't just observing, I was doing. I was doing something for someone else.
But I wasn't telling stories. I wasn't writing. All my life, I had wanted to be a writer. Now I had the time and I wasn't doing it.
In the spring of 2021, completely by chance, I was recruited by a former ABC News colleague and friend to write for Facebook's new newsletter platform, Bulletin. The day she told me about it, I jotted down 45 story ideas within minutes.
Over the past year-and-a-half, I have written more than 60 articles for Bulletin, one every week. I never have a problem finding a story. They're all around us. When I see something new, or hear or read about something that's unusual or peculiar or that just piques my interest, I want to know more. It's the seed of a story. Sometimes, I will just wonder about something I already knew or knew a little about, and start re-examining it. It begins with questions: What is this? Why is it the way it is? Why isn't it something else? Where did it come from? And the always nagging, often unanswerable: What does it mean? Does it matter?
Human behavior -- our foibles, patterns, frailty, fears, inspiration, eccentricity, bravery, weakness, triumphs, failure, frustration, obsession, history -- fascinates me. These are my subjects. I write because the act of writing helps me understand my own experiences and observations, to organize and reflect my thoughts, and to question my assumptions and open my mind to new ideas.
The writer Joan Didion once said, "I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means."
As I move to Substack, I don’t know precisely what I’ll be writing about from week to week, month to month. I do know that my stories will almost always be about people, including people doing offbeat, unusual or interesting things in their second acts.
Here is my proposition. I will take you along on my journey. In my stories, you will meet the people I meet. We will explore. We will ask questions of others. We will question ourselves. The greatest surprise for me from writing this newsletter was that in researching, reporting and writing each article, it taught me something new, or changed a perspective that I had held. That's my offer to you: to learn with me, but also to be inspired to re-examine your own experiences and perceptions and assumptions.
There's a poem* by T.S. Eliot with lines that stuck with me from the first time I read them:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Please join me.
Thank you.
Ron Claiborne
December 27, 2022
Hello from a JE classmate! These posts are terrific - it's so easy to travel along on the waves of your writing. Great stories, great portraits of people. Thanks for doing this!
Looking forward to your 2023 writings!