Calvin Lawrence and I were part of the Missouri Nine, we fledgling reporters moderated by Sunday Times staffer John Whale, who made Ten. Cal was my immediate room-mate; he was a sharp reporter, who would develop into a first-rate editor at Newsday. I believe today he is with abc.com.

In Autumn 1981, I met quite a few people that either were Asian Indians or had strong ties to India. One was my roommate, the great Indian author Pinki Virani (’Bitter Chocolate’). I also photographed some Indian protestors, and interviewed the great British journalist James Cameron, who was married to an Indian woman. In the end, I should have written a story about Indians near the close of my semester in London, but didn’t, and more’s the pity for that.

One story I worked on during the Autumn of 1981 focused on “The Teachers,” a commune-school group in Wales with an office in London. Although I didn’t end up writing about that group then, I did interview some of their principals in London. My story would have focused specifically on a young child who had been put out into the wilderness alone at night by the group, for some minor misdeed or another. Mine would have been a good story, had I chosen to formally write it up and have it published.

In Autumn 1981, when I was a freelance journalist in the Missouri-London Reporting Program, I tried chasing down a story relating to the US-British R&B performer and actress Bertice Reading. It became a frustrating affair, but every journalist can relate their own story like it, regarding their baptism in the profession of journalism.

In the autumn of 1981, I met and interviewed several IRA relatives of the Maze Prison hunger strikers. I also photographed some of them. Some of the events described here were recorded in my report for the Columbia Missourian a few week’s later. My paternal grandmother was a Fitzgerald, so I’ve long been interested in the Irish, and have written extensively about them.

It was difficult during my London Reporting Semester in 1981 to write the 12 required stories, mainly because I devoted so much time to taking pictures then. However, doing both writing and photography that autumn proved very valuable to me, in the long run, as this column and future columns by me suggest.