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Celebrating 35 years of Opinionating

It was 35 years ago, in December of 1989, that I first formally entered the opinion business.* Earlier that year, my friend Bob Savage had started The Clarion, a weekly newspaper serving our little corner of Upstate New York. Bob also owned the local radio station which is how I met him.

“Don’t do it!” I warned him, when he told me he was thinking of starting a newspaper in April of 1989. “You’ll never make any money!” I wish I had listened to my own advice, but then, if I had, I probably wouldn’t be here on Substack today!

In September of 1989, Bob called me up. “You were right,” he told me ruefully. He was losing money on the newspaper and getting ready to close it . “Not so fast,”I said. Having retired from a short-lived career as an attorney in 1986, and being unsuccessful in a run for NYS Assembly, I was looking for my next project.

I agreed to put some money up to keep the paper alive and came in as a 50% partner. It took me a few weeks to get up to speed on the technical aspects of putting out a paper on two state-of-the-art Apple Mac SE/30s. Then shortly before Christmas, a shocking event occurred in our community.

A horrible accident happened in which all 5 members of a local insurance agency were killed on a snowy highway when an automobile driven my friend Mark Dwyer crashed into a jack-knifing tractor trailer. In my 18 years of newspapering I covered a lot of tragic stories, but that was the worst.

After I had put that gut-wrenching issue of the paper to bed on Christmas Eve, I sat down to write my first Clarion Call column, “A Christmas Lesson.” I continued to write weekly columns for the next 18 years until selling the newspaper in 2007 and retiring from the business. (I had bought out Bob’s interest after 2 years and operated it for the last 16 years on my own.)

That column, and about 100 more, were published in a book of my “Greatest Hits” in 2003 titled “Writing for Myself (And ticking everybody else off!)” The title refers to the fact that in my opinion columns, and to a lesser degree in our news columns, I tried to follow Mr. Dooley’s adage that, “the duty of a newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” (Mr Dooley was a fictional character created by Chicago newsman and humorist Finley Peter Dunne starting in the late 1890s.)

A few of my old newspaper columns are also preserved online at my clarion call.com website including my famous 1996 column “In defense of Tofu.” I haven’t updated that web site in years so the information on how to order the book there is obsolete.

If you really insist on buying my 252-page opus, please send a check for $17.95 to Genesee Graphics at PO Box 236, Geneseo, NY 14454. (Or simply call me at 585-233-5338 if you want to pay by credit card.) I’ll even autograph it for you!
(Price includes shipping in continental U.S. Call or email me at corrin07@gmail.com for a quote on International shipping.)

After selling the newspaper, I continued to write an occasional column in a Wordpress blog that I created called (Can you guess?) “The Clarion Call.” In 14 years I wrote over 100 columns up until the end of 2021. (For the curious, those columns can still be found here.)

In January of 2022 I moved over here to Substack and in the last three years I have published another 20 columns. Since I am now starting to get a few paid subscribers, something I haven’t had since I sold the newspaper 17 years ago, I am committed to writing more often.

In early 2021 I was talking with my former newsman Howard Appell about getting back into the news business. I told him that print was dead and if we really wanted to have an impact, video was the wave of the future. Thus began the start of our video channel, “Two Old Men in Chairs.”

Actually we ended up with two channels, one on YouTube and one on Rumble, after quickly learning that there were certain things you were not allowed to talk about on YouTube. Sadly, Howard only lasted about 6 months before having to retire for health reasons.

After continuing to broadcast solo for a while, I decided to change the name of the channel to “Old Men in Chairs,” with the idea of occasionally employing a series of guest “Old Men.” As I approach my 74th birthday next week, however, I have decided that joking about my status as an Old Man is no longer funny. Besides I am getting younger every year!

Therefore, I have been thinking about a new name for the channel, and finally after finding a lot of the ones I wanted such as “Conservative Hippie” and Right-Wing Boomer” were already taken, I hit on (You’ll never guess…) The Clarion Call!

In the next few days I will make that change and do a video explaining most of what you just read. I think it just makes sense to coordinate the branding for all my ventures under a banner that I have been using in different formats for 35 years! If you want to check out the channel here is a link to the name change announcement I made.

Finally, I am aware that the term Clarion Call has been used by some in a religious connotation to mean a calling from or to God. In my case, it was merely an accident that Bob named the newspaper the Clarion long before I got involved, and I mostly avoid religious topics.

Clarion had been a fairly common name for newspapers back in the day, and the word harks back to the clarion horn used to call people to battle in ancient times. In more recent times, it has come to mean any clear call to action, and that is what I sometimes do in my editorializing whether in print or in video. I am still trying to afflict the comfortable!

*Actually my career as an “Opinionator” started a few years before my buy-in to the Clarion newspaper. After losing my 1986 primary election in the 136th Assembly District, I started a political newsletter called “The Grapevine.” I published that for a couple years with my first personal computer, a 286 Compaq Deskpro. That was an adventure in itself, fighting months of painful learning curve to figure out how to operate that pre-Windows MS-DOS-based computer and the Wordperfect and Planperfect programs.