Tell your stories, and keep climbing for the stars | Editor's notes
So Friday morning, I was taking a quick break from what is always my longest and most stressful day of the week. I was about 20 steps into a walk when some words of wisdom from an old boss came back to haunt me.
"This job is easy," the voice said, just as clearly as when I first heard those words 25 years ago. "People make it hard."
Those words were spoken by a man named Darrell Sparkman. He was my boss during my brief two-year sabbatical from newspaper life in the Bay Area when, believe it or not, I earned a living as a copier salesman.
"Easy for him to say," I mumbled while cutting my walk short. "Darrell never worked for a newspaper."
It takes a lot to get my dauber down, but my dauber was admittedly dragging a bit Friday morning. Just a typically dumb thing - one too many exasperating rounds of trying to have a sensible conversation with people too intent on arguing, only to realize I wasn't exactly helping by trying to argue back. That'll dump my dauber every time.
But from there, the darndest thing happened, as so often happens in any profession that you actually enjoy: I had a day where I got one reminder after another of why I love this job.
Two stood out. I'm hoping you noticed one of them yesterday, and I'm really hoping you'll read about the other today.
First, Saturday was a true "first" for the Enterprise-Record. Our weekly "Tell Your Story" feature was literally a postmortem masterpiece, written six months ago by a woman who knew she was dying - but wanted to share some final words of love and appreciation for a close-knit group of friends on the eve of their annual "slumber party" reunion weekend.
Not just any annual slumber party. This year marks 50 years of reunions for these amazing women from the Chico High Class of 1959.
Christena Wiseman died Jan. 16, 2026. Her story ran Saturday. If you haven't yet read it, please do. I promise you'll walk away feeling not only inspired, but will benefit from a good old-fashioned round of tears of joy. I know I did.
We've gotten a lot of great feedback to our "Tell Your Story" series since it launched a couple of years ago. None compared to the feedback for this one. If you love good stories, or have heartfelt memories of the Chico of your childhood, or are lucky enough to have had a good number of really close friends for a really long time, please. Do yourself a favor and read it. Stories like this literally come around once a lifetime.
That experience left me longing for the Chico that Wiseman wrote about, a still-small town where kids rode their bicycles to Five Mile without a fear of what might happen, and people left their doors unlocked at night, and problems like "drugs" and "Vietnam" were still several years in the future for a generation still marveling at Elvis Presley's first appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." It also had me thinking what a shame it was that today's young people couldn't experience such a tranquil, memorable childhood.
And then, the second-darndest thing of the weekend happened. I got a roundhouse reminder that today's younger generation includes some of the most bad-ass adventurers we've seen in, well, centuries.
We've restarted a series from years past called "Outdoor Adventures." The idea is this: Our reporters spend a day doing something they love in the great north state outdoors, and then write a story about it. This not only informs our readers about some fantastic recreation activities within a day's drive, it also gives our reporters a chance for a well-deserved "day away" to write a fun story.
When kicking around some ideas for this, our newest reporter - Lexi Lynn, all of 22 - raised her hand and casually mentioned "I'm climbing El Cap in a couple of weeks." Once she explained to me what "El Cap" is (that would be El Capitan, the 3,000-foot-tall monolith in Yosemite Valley), well, I instantly got vertigo. I hate heights. I conducted the rest of the meeting sitting down, like any good still-working Boomer should do.
Meanwhile, she went out and did it, and her story graces the front page of our newspaper today. Her first-person story of conquering fears of her own while enduring 16 hours of exhaustion and occasional terror is must-read, white-knuckle storytelling at its finest.
My role in both of the above stories was basically to say "Wow. This is really good."
Anyway, this weekend was a fantastic reminder that what we do often comes back to telling people's stories - or letting them tell their own. From the words of a woman who died six months ago urging us to keep on enjoying life, to the words of a woman 63 years her junior describing a death-defying activity in the face of sheer terror, it reminded me (and hopefully you) that we should always keep ourselves busy enjoying life instead of pointlessly worrying about what might come next … or arguing about things we can't control anyway.
There.
Isn't that easy?
Mike Wolcott is the editor of the Enterprise-Record. He can be reached at mwolcott@chicoer.com
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