Listen to the author reading this story:
Long after he’d made his mark on the world, my father told me the story of how he got his start in the shoe business. It was in the mid-1930s, and he had just graduated from the high school of a small Missouri town west of St. Louis. Jobs for young men were scarce then—the Great Depression was ravaging families and economies—but through the influence of his father, who was a well-known women’s shoe stylist, Dad managed to get a job cutting patterns on the assembly line of a St. Louis shoe factory.
Somehow—the details are missing from memory—my father met with a bigwig in the St. Louis shoe business. When the man learned my father’s surname, he asked whether he was related to Alvaro Careaga, the shoe stylist. “He’s my father,” Dad told him. The man then asked my father if he also designed shoes. “Sure I do,” he replied.
“Well,” he told me, years later, “of course I’d never drawn a shoe in my life.”
But on the basis of my father’s bold fib, and, no doubt, my father’s self-confidence, the man offered him a position with his company. And that is how my father got his start as a designer of women’s shoes.
In this regard, I am my father’s son. I too lied my way into the vocation of journalism, a vocation that opened doors to a long career in public relations and marketing.
My journey began during my junior year of high school. That fall I enrolled in a class called Journalism I. I was not a diligent student; my grades were mediocre at best, and often below average. I held my own in the required freshman and sophomore English courses, sliding by with Bs or B-minuses. But if I were to stay on the college prep track, which seemed to be the best way out of the world of factory and service jobs, I needed to take an elective English course my junior year. The choices were yearbook, Speech and Debate, English Literature, and the one I thought would be the easiest, Journalism I.
Another factor that came into play was the teacher, Mrs. H. She had taught freshman English, and despite my lackluster performance in her class, I thought she seemed fond of me, the way some people are fond of stray dogs. So I thought I’d have a good chance of making a passing grade in Mrs. H’s journalism class without having to put forth much effort.
Soon after the fall semester of my junior year began, Mrs. H. assigned us to something she called “beats.” It was a term, I later learned, from the journalism business that signified what areas reporters might cover at a daily newspaper: the police beat, the school beat, the city government beat, and so on. Mrs. H. assigned us to write one news story a month from our respective beats, and stories that were good enough, she said, would make it into our school newspaper, the Spartan Scroll.
When I learned that my assigned beat was geography class, my heart sank.
I’d taken geography my sophomore year and did not do well in it. That was what I later came to call my experimental year—the year I discovered pot and made a few connections, friends of friends, who could feed my burgeoning interest in smoking the stuff. If geography were limited to parts of the world that produced the best grades of marijuana—Columbia, Mexico, Jamaica, Panama, Thailand—then I probably would have aced the class. But Weed 101 was not a part of the curricula, and the geography teacher, a stern veteran of the classroom named .. K., held high expectations for her students. I was a classic underachiever, more interested in rock music and the stoner comedy of Cheech and Chong than in memorizing the names of rivers and world capitals, so our worldviews did not mesh. I thought she was there to make my life miserable, and she thought she was there to teach me something. Somehow, through the haze of that sophomore year, I managed to get through her class with a low C.
Furthermore, when Mrs. H. assigned me the geography beat, I could not understand how a subject like geography offered anything worth writing about for the school newspaper. Our school had no geography club, and except for whatever was going on in Lebanon it was a relatively peaceful time in the world. There were no upheavals or government coups in the news, and so the names of cities and countries remained unchanged. Leningrad was Leningrad, and as far as anyone knew it would never again be called St. Petersburg. And it was obvious to me, just by looking at old Mrs. K., that the woman hadn’t done anything innovative in her 30 years of teaching geography. So what was there to report?
September flew by. The time came to turn in our first beat stories, and I was empty-handed. When Mrs. H. asked me about my assignment, I told her I was still working on it and would turn it in late. She frowned and nodded grimly. Her eyes told me she knew I had not even talked to Mrs. K. since getting the assignment and had no intentions of it.
I was fully prepared to accept my fate and flunk Journalism I. But a few days later, a minor miracle occurred when Mrs. H. assigned us to write a review of some kind. She said it could be a review of a book, a work of music, a movie, a play—the choice was ours. She gave us a week to accomplish the assignment.
Now this, I thought, was something I could do. When I wasn’t getting high with my stoner friends, I spent most evenings in my room, pretending to study while swaying to KISS, Thin Lizzie, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, Styx, or the Steve Miller Band. One thing I knew, I thought, was rock and roll. I figured I could easily throw together some paragraphs about one of the albums in my collection and be done with it.
The idea unfolded slowly in my head. All that week I meditated on the notion of writing an album review. But which album?
It dawned on me one evening as I listened to the new Lynyrd Skynyrd album, a recording of live performances called One More from the Road. It was a two-record set, a double album that folded in half, like a book, and that made it a great surface for winnowing seeds from my latest pot purchase. On this occasion I found another practical use for the album. Reading the liner notes on the inside cover, I noticed on the right-hand section a block of reverse type and inset to the photograph of Ronnie Van Zandt and the band performing beneath the spectacular blue-green glow of stage lights. The reverse type was a brief history of Lynyrd Skynyrd, written by a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, some guy named Cameron Crowe. The write-up told how the band got its start by playing in honky-tonks throughout the south and summarized the group’s slow but steady ascent to stardom.
I don’t recall exactly how this rock journalist expressed his thoughts into words on the inside of that album cover, but I do remember thinking that whatever he had written was perfect. His words were the perfect solution to my Journalism I problem.
Brazenly I lifted large portions of the write-up and scrawled them almost verbatim in my spiral-bound notebook as the record blared. Before the final thunderous guitar chords of “Free Bird” had ended, I had completed my assignment.
Mrs. H. was delighted with my work and with the progress I’d made, seemingly overnight. She returned my paper with a blue A written on it and asked me if I would mind letting her publish this review in the next edition of the Spartan Scroll. She also asked if I would write a monthly record review for the paper. She explained that the review would replace my regular monthly article from the geography beat. I would now have the record beat.
What could I say? Any fate was better than the geography beat. I readily accepted Mrs. H’s offer.
The plagiarized review was my first published article, my first byline. When I held that pulpy tabloid student newspaper in my hand and saw my name in print, the effect was intoxicating. Never before had I had such recognition.
But soon the initial high wore off, and I began to worry. I realized that what I had done may have been pragmatic in the short term, but was also unethical and fraudulent, and that I could be in serious trouble if anyone were to discover my theft and narc on me. The possibility of suspension from school entered my mind and took root there.
I needn’t have worried, though. Most of the writers on the Spartan Scroll staff were blind scribblers, sufficiently ignorant of rock and roll to know anything about Lynyrd Skynyrd, a magazine called Rolling Stone, or some obscure writer named Cameron Crowe. Except for one guy who was a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen and Born to Run, everyone else probably listened to Donna Summer or the Bee Gees or whatever was on top 40 AM radio. If anyone knew of my cheating, I never heard about it.
So I got away with my lie and got my own monthly column in the Spartan Scroll. I also got instant recognition, and a reputation handed to me that I now had to work to keep.
I started buying Rolling Stone from a local drug store every week to learn how real rock critics wrote. I turned first to the review section and read each article over and over. I read mostly to learn, although I did lift a few lines here and there when I thought it would inconspicuously serve my purpose.
I wrote these reviews in longhand and turned them into Mrs. H., who grimaced at my grammatical flaws but saw to it that they were corrected before the stories were typeset. The articles were nothing great, and I noticed that Mrs. H.’s enthusiasm for my work seemed to wane with each passing month. But in the process of writing on a deadline, I felt myself learning to appreciate the work that real journalism entailed. I even began to rewrite some of my later columns before turning them in. Mrs. H must have noticed some improvement because near the end of that year she asked me if I’d like to continue writing the reviews during my senior year, as a regular member of the Spartan Scroll staff.
As a senior, I began to gain a reputation as the school authority on rock-and-roll music. I even sold a local record store a year’s worth of full-page ads in the school paper and worked out a deal with the owner that provided me with a free album of my choosing each month to review, in exchange for a promotional line at the bottom of each article.
So I continued my record reviews but also wrote other stories, including a feature about the geography teacher Mrs. K.’s husband, a beloved auto body repair instructor in the vocational school who had announced his retirement.
By the start of my final semester, I decided I might like to study journalism in college. I applied for a few scholarships but didn’t get any, didn’t have the grades or much of a record of extracurricular involvement. I got a part-time job at the local Kentucky Fried Chicken, saved money (I even reduced the all-important budget for weed), and took two years of classes at our town’s junior college. I joined the newspaper staff there my first year and covered a range of topics—basketball games, student committee meetings, faculty council, whatever. I started to enjoy journalism. At the end of that freshmen year of junior college, I was named the newspaper’s editor-in-chief and received a nice scholarship that went along with the title.
In the meantime, I read other writers beyond Rolling Stone’s rock critics and began to dabble in fiction and poetry. I tried on writers’ voices as though they were clothes: Hemingway’s spare prose one day, Twain’s caustic wit the next, London’s straightforward descriptions on occasion. I found writing that fit and writing that didn’t. I learned from the good and the bad, and through it all, without my realizing it, a voice began to emerge.
From the voice of the plagiarist, other voices came forth. I learned to recognize those that weren’t me, and to shed them, the way a sprout sheds the protective covering of a seed and becomes its own thing.
Andrew Careaga is a writer from Rolla, Missouri. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Argyle, Club Plum, Flash Fiction Magazine, MoonLit Getaway, Roi Faineant, Spillwords, Syncopation Literary Magazine and elsewhere. You can find him on X/Twitter and Instagram at @andrewcareaga, on BlueSky at @andrewcareaga.bsky.social, and on his website andrewcareaga.com.
Fun to read the story of your birth as a writer, Andrew! Congratulations!