I have no regrets about leaving my lucrative job

In 1985 I left a lucrative career in the construction industry for a newspaper job.

It wasn’t for the money.

In fact it was more than 10 years before I again began making the hourly construction wages I had given up.

But I found the work interesting enough to make a career out of it, and there were the perks, free coffee among them.

I also had the great pleasure to work with a number of talented photographers along the way. And while I never made enough money in the newspaper business to afford paintings on my walls, some wonderful photographs hang there instead.

A framed photo of my daughters icing a cake hangs in the dining room. It was taken by Stephen Matlow to illustrate a feature story in the Livingston Enterprise. Matlow, who is now retired, was the first news photographer I worked with. He set the bar very high. His shot of an elderly man using a garden hose to fight a raging fire remains one of the best spot news photographs I have ever seen.

A candid black and white of Malcolm Story hangs in our upstairs hallway. It ran with a piece I wrote in the Bozeman Chronicle about the aging patriarch of one of Montana‘s pioneering families. Doug Loneman took the shot. A talented shooter, Loneman was fun to watch work. As cantankerous and demanding as he was toward me, he always made his subjects comfortable and it showed in his work.

He wisely left the newspaper business years before I did and opened a studio.

A couple of photographs by Erik Petersen, who replaced Loneman at the Chronicle, hang in the house. He and I worked together on some fun stories, including a collaborative effort to float the length of the Yellowstone River, and another about hiking through the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

The Petersen’s hanging on my walls, however, are shots of me and my dogs. Erik, who also quit newspapers to open his own business, still hunts with me every fall.

In our entryway hangs a beautiful shot of a wetland in Yellowstone Park taken by former Chronicle shooter Thomas Lee.

At our cabin on Fort Peck hangs a shot of a flying pheasant, taken by the late Deirdre Eitel, another talented Chronicle photographer.

I have no regrets about giving up a better-paying job for newspaper work. It made for an interesting career, pictures on the wall, and all the coffee I could drink.

Parker Heinlein is at [email protected]