Irv Kupcinet

Chicago, with its big newspapers and major broadcasting stations, couldn't have been a better city to start a journalism career.

As a kid, I'd get up at 3 in the morning during school vacations to help my father on his bakery-truck route. He didn't get a vacation from that schedule.

I wish all high schools could offer students the outside activities that were available at the old Harrison High on Chicago's West Side in the late '20s. They enabled me to become part of a school newspaper, drama group, football team and student government.

By the time I got to Northwestern University in 1930, I was a football bum more interested in being an All-Star player and signing on with a pro team than going after a newspaper job.

My father, a bakery-truck driver, was the epitome of the work ethic that probably kept me knocking out columns six days a week for a rough total of 12,600 over 50 years.