Who Am I’

When someone new shows up in one of your favorite magazines, I guess it’s only fair that they tell you something about who they are, where they come from and how they look at the world.

The “official bio” appears on page 10 of this issue. The unofficial stuff follows.

In my 35 years observing the insurance scene, I’ve set a few standards and guidelines for myself and the magazines I’ve worked for and I’m going to try real hard to follow those here at Insurance Journal. I won’t bore you with them all, but let me run just a few of them by you:

• Merry old England was never all that merry, you know, and the good old days in this business or elsewhere in life were never all that good. You don’t really want to go back, do you? So if you catch me waxing a bit too nostalgic, in the wry, wise and witty words of a late, great insurance columnist, “write me, quickly.”
• Do the same if I get into one of those grumpy-old-men “there’s nothing new under the sun” moods. That’s not to say that history never repeats itself and that there’s little to be learned by bringing a sense of the past to the task at hand. But let’s face it: If anything, there’s too much new under your sun and we’ll occupy ourselves mainly with just keeping on top of it.
• Veteran commentators need periodic inocculation against pomposity. If my colleagues or I take ourselves too seriously, do stick a very sharp needle into our over-inflated balloons. But then I don’t intend to take your affairs too seriously either. Just seriously enough. Humor, irony, and, yes, even occasional sarcasm, will, inevitably, infiltrate these pages, print and electronic. I just can’t help myself.
• Nothing raises the hackles more than an outlander, especially one from the East, imposing overbearing views on the natives. Rest assured, I don’t own a carpetbag. California and the western states have always loomed large and important on my journalistic horizon. Then too I was the founding editor of a national newsweekly’s California/Western States Edition, out of San Francisco, and I managed the editorial operations of Insurance West magazine, out of Seattle.
• I won’t tell you what I drink or who I vote for, but I do hope to be fair and completely open. If you ever think I’m falling short in that regard, I implore you to tap me on the shoulder should our paths cross on the convention circuit, or to call me or e-mail me straightaway.

I’m stepping into a long line of writers and editors, too numerous to name, who have worked for this fine magazine over its now near-80-year history. I hope to inform you and challenge you and entertain you at least as well as they have. Let me know how I’m doing.

Until next time…