Published April 21, 2026

Everybody Has a Story is the name of a feature the local paper here has for readers to tell a tale from their lives. The main stipulation is that it must be true.

I (lightly) edited many of them when I worked for the paper from 2013 to 2021, and it was one of my favorite duties. The best of the stories often felt like something that could have fit on a show like “The Waltons,” with narration at the end to wrap it all up.

As I would read through them, I wondered: Did I have a story like that?

This prompted me not long ago to jot down memories from throughout my life. I’m still working on narrowing my list, but I’ve come to realize what an eventful year 1986 was.

January

In my first year as a full-time sports reporter, I had some interesting experiences. On Saturday, Jan. 25, 1986, I drove to Houston to write about Joe Dumars’ first NBA game close to Lake Charles, Louisiana, where he played college basketball.

The Houston Rockets beat his Detroit Pistons 117-112. Before the game I saw Houston’s Ralph Sampson warming up in the tunnel with a heavy jump rope. After the game I saw Detroit’s Kelly Tripucka icing down both knees and drinking a cold beer.

Before the game, I stopped at a Houston hospital to visit a priest I knew who was dealing with the implications of a cancer diagnosis. I don’t think I saw him again until 20 years later when my mom died.

He lived until last summer. I’m glad I stopped to see him in the hospital in 1986. I had driven him to his hometown years before when he got the news that his father had died. We had quite a history.

The day after the Pistons-Rockets game, a day off for me, I watched on TV as the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl 46-10 against the New England Patriots.

Two days later, I was working at a part-time job I had on the side when we heard the news that the Challenger had exploded after takeoff.

At some point during January, I got to meet Yogi Berra. He had joined the Houston Astros coaching staff and came to Lake Charles as part of a publicity caravan. He gave us quotes he’d said countless times before, but somehow they sounded fresh from 3 feet away.

“This is a nice restaurant,” Berra said. “It reminds me of my old favorite in New York. Nobody goes there anymore, though. It’s too crowded.”

February

The Sunday after the space shuttle disaster, I had maybe my biggest assignment yet as a reporter. Meldrick Taylor defeated Robin Blake by unanimous decision in a boxing match that brought NBC Sports to Lake Charles to televise the bout.

The thing I remember most is my short conversation with NBC announcer Marv Albert. For months, I told this story whenever someone asked me if I’d ever met someone famous.

“Do you know the name of the referee?” he asked me at ringside long before the fight.

“No,” I said.

And that was that.

(For the record, it was Alvin Topham.)

May

On May 25, 1986, a friend and I drove to Dallas for Hands Across America. I’d wanted to participate in a peace march for nuclear disarmament months earlier, but when the paper offered me a regular paycheck instead of part-time work, I jumped at the chance.

Otherwise, my life might have gone in a different direction.

I still remember and can sing the Hands Across America song!

I interviewed a handful of participants and wrote a story in a diner, then dictated it by phone to someone at the paper. One of the editors later told me, “You captured the spirit of it!”

We’ll come back to why I had to dictate the story.

August

After spending much of the summer reporting on American Legion Baseball, I flew to an assignment for the first time, traveling from Houston to Denver to Rapid City, South Dakota, for the American Legion World Series.

I brought with me a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, an early laptop or notebook popular with newspaper reporters at the time.

The “Radio Shacks,” or the “Trash 80,” as some people called them, could be a little buggy at times. I had to dictate my Hands Across America story to someone because multiple attempts to transmit it from the hotel failed.

Rapid City had a surprise waiting for me. I couldn’t find a phone with the kind of modular jack I’d need for sending my stories back to Lake Charles. Phones at the stadium and in my hotel room had cords as thick as my index finger, and they were not detachable. What was I going to do?

I looked up the phone number for Radio Shack in the Yellow Pages and told my plight to someone who worked there. He asked where I was staying, and when I told him, he said, “We’re in the mall next door. Come by whenever you have time.”

How convenient! I walked across the parking lot and considered buying acoustic couplers to use for transmission, but those weren’t always reliable. Sometimes they inserted a garble or two into a story!

Then the store manager had an idea.

“We have modular phones here,” he said. “You can come here when it’s time to send your story to your paper, and we’ll take care of you.”

It worked like a charm. And I earned my keep: A customer watched curiously while I worked on it, and he asked a sales person what was going on. He bought a TRS-80 Model 100 right there on the spot!

My work all done, I wrapped up my stay with a trip to Mount Rushmore on my last night. The cool (cold?) night air in August was a revelation.

September

The end of August and all of September were taken up with an investigation I did on the men’s basketball program at McNeese State University. Occasionally I looked up to see how the Astros were doing in their quest to go to the playoffs again.

They clinched it with the best three-game pitching performance I’d ever heard of.

In a 4-0 win against the Dodgers, Jim Deshaies struck out the first eight batters he faced and pitched a complete-game two-hitter. The next day in a 6-0 win against the Giants, Nolan Ryan pitched no-hit ball for 6 1/3 innings and gave up just one hit in eight innings. The Giants finished with two hits.

In a 2-0 win against the Giants a day later, Mike Scott threw a no-hitter and the Astros wrapped up the National League Western Division championship.

Three games, four hits allowed, 35 strikeouts, and no runs allowed. Unbelievable.

October

My investigation came to a head with the publication of my story on October 3, 1986. Months later, the coaching staff learned it would not be retained, and McNeese was placed on probation for two years.

I had scary moments along the way, receiving threats and ominous late-night visits by trucks to the house I was renting, headlights shining brightly into my bedroom window. Someone floated my name as a suspect on campus for the alleged theft of $8 from someone’s purse. Efforts to discredit me were fully underway.

When all was said and done, the story won an award, and I survived. Someone who had insight into how the story had gone over said, “You were never in any real danger. No one thinks you wrote that story. They all think (the paper’s editor) wrote it and they put your name on it. That’s why you’re still alive.”

Okay, then.

I wrote another story that month that won an award. On October 15, 1986, I covered one of the best playoff games in baseball history. The New York Mets beat the Astros 7-6 in 16 innings to win the National League Championship Series in six games.

The Mets thus avoided having to face Mike Scott one more time.

Astros pitcher Bob Knepper took a one-hitter into the eighth inning and a 3-0 lead into the ninth. The Mets tied it, and the game lasted another few hours. I’d had most of my story written, except for postgame quotes, and at some point I pressed my finger on the delete key and erased it all.

I’ve covered games in noisy stadiums, places with 100,000-plus seats, but I’ve never heard a roar like the one inside the Astrodome when Billy Hatcher hit his 14th-inning home run to keep the Astros going for another couple of innings.

Under that roof, the sound had nowhere to go.

What I ended up writing hours later somehow convinced a contest judge to award me first place.

I rode an elevator down to ground level at the end of the night with a few of the Mets. Then I watched on TV a few days later as they beat the Boston Red Sox in seven games to win the World Series.

What a year

Iran was in the news a lot. In November, we heard about something that came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair. The Reagan administration had also had an eventful 1986.

In December I got to see one of my favorite bands, Lone Justice, on what turned out to be a classic “Saturday Night Live” thanks to a memorable sketch with William Shatner. That was just a few weeks after I got to see “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” or as I call it, “Star Trek: Save the Whales.”

The music I liked in 1986, when I hear it today, reflected a person who still believed in many things, but mostly in trying. One of my favorite albums, Will Ackerman’s “Conferring with the Moon,” came out that year.

Hurricane Bonnie affected my hometown in June 1986. In July, Boeing finalized a deal to bring work and jobs to a retooled former Chennault Air Force Base in Lake Charles in its rebirth as an industrial airpark.

I’m still searching for my “Waltons” story. That photo up at the top is of the childhood home of Earl Hamner Jr., creator of the show. The house inspired the one in the series.

I’ve rewatched episodes lately and realized that in the 1970s, we were watching stories set 40 years earlier. Stories about Hitler and the approach of World War II, and more. That’s when I realized that looking back to 1986 from my viewpoint in 2026 is a 40-year flashback.

How is that possible? It doesn’t feel as long ago as “The Waltons” felt in the ’70s.

In much the same way, even though the math checks out, it doesn’t really seem possible that 1986 — having lived through it — was 40 years after the release of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

When I think about such things relative to what feels old and what doesn’t, it blows my mind.

Thanks for reading. Sending love. Protect your peace.

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Featured image of house by Little Vignettes Photo via Shutterstock.

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