A week or so ago I saw where Daniel Ellsberg had died. Ellsberg gained fame for leaking the so-called Pentagon Papers to the press in the 1970s during the Vietnam War. Ellsberg died on June 16 at his California home. He was 92. He had remained a political activist for one cause or another until the end of his life. One of my first newspaper assignments was covering Ellsberg’s visit to Fort Collins, Colorado in the spring of 1978. I was a journalism student at Colorado State University, also located in Fort Collins. Ellsberg was downtown one Saturday afternoon in April; he was the keynote speaker at an anti-nuclear rally outside the old Larimer County Courthouse.

There was something like 6,000 people there. I was there covering the protest for the Triangle Review, a weekly newspaper that had its office downtown in the old “Triangle District.” I got a pretty good picture of Ellsberg being interviewed by a television crew. The editor liked the picture and he paid me $30. That was a lot more money than what I earned working for CSU’s student newspaper, The Journal. The Journal paid $10 a story, but only if they included a byline. The Journal was a daily paper and came out Monday through Friday. I covered a lot of different stories for them including “The Longest Walk,” a Native American protest march that was making its way cross country on foot to Washington, D.C. I managed to catch up with them in Pueblo, Colorado where they were camping at the fairgrounds.

That same summer, I worked as a reporter for The Limon Leader, a weekly newspaper in Lincoln County, Colorado. I covered all kinds of news; the high school graduation, city council meetings, fires, accidents, the Fourth of July Parade, rodeos, even a hailstorm. One morning in June 1978 an old timer named Bill Hinrichs came into the newspaper office dressed in a red, white and blue jumpsuit. He was wearing a gold hard hat and had matching gold-painted work boots. A steeple-jack by trade, Bill told me he was from Aberdeen in Washington. He said he was traveling cross country with the Mrs. and planned to paint a flag pole in every state along the way to pay for his trip. His goal was to get to Washington, D.C. where he hoped to paint the flag pole on the White House lawn. That same day, I took Hinrich’s picture for the newspaper. Using just ropes, he climbed to the top of the flagpole outside Limon Elementary School and painted his way from the top down. He wasn’t a young man. He was 65 years old. I wish I could have taken his picture in color but back then newspapers didn’t run color pictures. While I was in Limon, I did some reporting work for the Colorado Associated Press in Denver. I covered the American Agricultural Movement, better remembered as the “Farmer’s Strike.” I phoned my stories in to the bureau chief and sent my pictures to them on the evening bus so they’d have them for the wire service. The farmers, too, were planning a protest trip to our Nation’s capitol.

I graduated in December and flew back east where I’m from and eventually landed in Wiscasset, “Maine’s Prettiest Village.” Initially, I was going to work as a news correspondent for the Kennebec Journal in Augusta. Unfortunately, the editor who’d promised to hire me got sacked a few days after she’d offered me a job as the Winthrop news correspondent. I next tried the Times Record newspaper in Brunswick. The editor there told me he wouldn’t hire me unless I could type 100 words a minute. He really said that. Eventually, I took a reporting job for the Wiscasset Newspaper and Boothbay Register. They now include the PenBay Pilot and are owned by the Tandy family.

Dan DeRepentigny, who was the owner and publisher then, hired me at $100 a week.  In 1979 when I worked for The Register, I covered Wiscasset, Edgecomb, Westport and Alna. In the spring of 1980, I borrowed $10,000 and started my own weekly newspaper that I called The Wiscasset Times. I published my newspaper from July 1980 until July 1995. The Times Record printed my newspaper; we closed the deal with a handshake and did business that way for 15 years. (Imagine doing business like that today with nothing in writing!) After I closed my newspaper, I went back to school and got my master’s degree in journalism at the University of South Florida, Tampa/St. Petersburg. While I was there I picked up some extra money by working some for the Associated Press. I phoned in my stories to the Tampa office.

I’ve written lots of stories over the years, and taken lots of pictures to go with those stories. I’ve done some other things, too; I taught photography for University Maine at Augusta, delivered the mail for the Wiscasset and Newcastle post offices, drove the Wiscasset ambulance, coached a dozen different ball teams and written a few books. I worked for L.L. Bean for 18 years before returning to reporting in 2014 for guess who, The Wiscasset Newspaper and Boothbay Register. Funny how things have a way of coming full circle.

Phil Di Vece earned a B.A. in journalism studies from Colorado State University and an M.A. in journalism at the University of South Florida. He is the author of three Wiscasset books and is a frequent news contributor to the Boothbay Register-Wiscasset Newspaper. He resides in Wiscasset. Contact him at pdivece@roadrunner.com