To Move or Not To Move, That is the Question (Part 1)

In 1976 I was caught between a rock and a hard place. I was at the start of a promising career at UPI in Hartford. I might even have made it to the White House bureau, the pinnacle of any UPI career. My girlfriend had moved to California; we had only been together for six months. The San Francisco Bureau of UPI had a 20 year waiting list for transfers because “you can move people in, but they never move out.”

My parents said I would be an idiot to move to California. So did my friends, so I asked my college mentor, Edwin Diamond for his opinion.

“Your heart and your head can’t be in different places,” he said. An excellent piece of advice.

He noted that the UPI promise of opening a bureau in Springfield, Mass. might not happen. On several occasions in his own career, he had been promised positions that never came through.