People talk, I get to listen

Lee Benson portrait Thursday, Dec. 16, 2010. | Scott G. Winterton, Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — I was three years into college when I had my epiphany.

I was majoring in economics, with a vague plan of going on to MBA school and making large amounts of money. Then one day, looking around for a better fit, I walked into the school newspaper office at BYU to see if they ever let students not majoring in journalism write a story for the paper.

As it turned out, the sports editor was at his desk. He said it just so happened that yes, they sometimes let regular students cover stories, and what’s more, there was a wrestling meet that night at the fieldhouse between Utah and BYU and if I wanted, I could write about that. (I think he was supposed to cover it.)

I bought a hot dog and drink at the concession stand, watched the meet (this was pre-Title IX, when colleges still had wrestling teams), wrote about it, slid the copy under the door of the Daily Universe, and the next morning picked up the newspaper to see my byline staring back at me.

From that moment forward, one thought guided my future: They pay you to do this?!

I switched my major to journalism, got hired by the Deseret News, spent the first quarter of a century writing about sports, and ever since writing a general interest column.

“Find a job you enjoy doing, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” Mark Twain wrote.

If nothing else, I did that.

The greatest part of the job is people will talk to you. It is journalism’s great and abiding asset. It doesn’t always apply to everyone. A Jazz player after a bad game; a Democrat on Fox News, they might not be eager to chat. But almost everyone else wants to talk. I’ve been doing this for a while now and still can’t quite get over it. One minute you say hello and open your notebook in front of a stranger, the next minute they’re telling you their story with enthusiasm, in great detail, as if you’ve been friends for years.

There is no end to the subject matter; no limits to the entertainment. The year 2019 was typically diverse. I wrote about everything from a disabled drift car driver to a college professor who raced his mountain bike from Canada to Mexico in 16 days; from billionaire Dick Marriott putting up historical markers in his father’s hometown of Marriott, to a historian in the sleepy farm community of Corinne talking about 150 years ago when the town had 15 saloons and attempted to become the state capital.

I talked to an 83-year-old band leader who plays his saxophone at 360 gigs a year; to two brothers who run a clean comedy club in Provo that has been seen by an online audience of more than 2 billion; to a woman on State Street in South Salt Lake who owns a hearse and runs a one-of-a-kind Halloween-themed store that is open year-round.

I talked to Utah’s only living Medal of Honor winner; to a Syrian refugee studying at Salt Lake Community College who is well on her way to law school; to a physicist who was part of the space program that 50 years ago put a man on the moon; to a man who was sitting in the United States Capitol 78 years ago when FDR delivered his “Day of Infamy” speech.

I talked to two compassionate women who opened a coffee shop in Park City that hires only the disabled; to a Provo doctor who went to the Dominican Republic on a weeklong humanitarian trip and wound up starting his own charity in the country; to a Sandy couple who did something very similar to that in the Philippines; to a Marine veteran who uses his soldiering skills to help stop poaching in Africa; to a man who made a fortune acquiring McDonald’s franchises and then sold them off to help the less fortunate.

I talked to three former football stars I remember from my sports writing days, one who is attempting to find a remedy for the brain disease CTE, one who is doing everything he can to educate the public about mental illness, and one who qualified for a heart transplant at the age of 70 because he never stopped working out.

And so on and so on and so forth and so forth, until another year has flown by. As always, I look back amazed at the interesting, fascinating, inspiring things people do — that they’re willing to tell me about it — and that they really do pay you to do this.

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