The storyteller turns 62 years old today, and he's decided he's been telling stories long enough.
Except for one last column in Monday's Deseret News, Max Byron Knudson Jr. is done writing for the paper.
After almost 23 years as the Deseret News business editor, and 33 years on the local media scene, Max says it's time to go.
It's not that he's lost his passion for the job, or his uncanny knack for digging out scoops. It's certainly not that he's lost his ability to turn a phrase. Whether giving his take on the state of Utah's economy or complaining in one of his sparkling car reviews about the lack of a left-foot dead pedal in some new car, Max has spent the past two decades inspiring laughter, rage and exclamations of "So, that's what's going on!" from Deseret News readers.
Of course, The Storyteller's own tale has chapters, too, and it's time for a new one to begin. But before he goes, let's look back to the beginning of the story. It starts, as such tales so often do, with a boy growing up on the mean streets of a bustling city . . .
Chapter 1: Hoodlum
Max grew up in Salt Lake City. In a way, he grew up with Salt Lake City.
As a child, he lived in the Goldedene apartments on the current site of the city library, sometimes sharing a bathroom with the people who lived in an apartment down the hall. It was a time of getting pounded routinely by the kid across the street and hearing prisoners yell down from the windows of the nearby county jail as he walked by.
"I spent my youth collecting wrappers out of the gutter from Popsicles that were a nickel then, and when you got, like, 300 of them, you sent them in and got a Bob Feller baseball glove," Max says.
Soon his father, Max Sr., joined the Salt Lake police force, and the Knudsons moved to a new house near 2000 South and West Temple.
"That's where I really grew up," Max says. "Back then it was just a good working-class, blue-collar type neighborhood. Early on, I was a good student, and I got good grades. Then I figured out that good grades didn't mean much to my peer group, so I tried to do in Rome as the Romans do and became a poor student and something of a hoodlum. But my social life prospered."
Still, the self-styled hoodlum managed to graduate, from the streets as well as from South High School, in 1958. "I have my mother, Beth, to thank for that," he says. "She got me out of bed and off to school every morning, a job for which she should have gotten a Distinguished Service Cross."
Chapter 2: Minstrel
Max decided to attend the University of Utah on a bridge-playing scholarship. Well, there actually was no scholarship, he says, but he did spend his one quarter at the U. playing bridge in the student union.
Obviously, he decided, the whole college thing wasn't working out. So he and a school friend moved to Phoenix and bought a coffee house. They called it the Crescendo.
"I worked at a floor-covering store called Tile Town by day and the Crescendo all night. I remember falling asleep standing up, I was so tired."
When the Crescendo went bankrupt, Max headed back to Salt Lake City.
The Kingston Trio then was what 'NSYNC is today, he says. Everybody wanted to play the guitar or banjo and be a folk singer.
"I became a folk singer and played at a lot of clubs around Salt Lake City," he says. "Grogan's on 800 South was kind of my home club."
He played with several groups, he says, but mostly with the Rovers, a group he formed with Tom Drury, another local talent. They eventually headed to California to seek their fortune.
"We played all around the L.A. area and at the Ice House in Pasadena. We were discovered there one night by a guy named Randy Sparks," Max says. "He was putting groups together right and left and initially he decided to make us the New Easy Riders. But he was also working on forming another group called The New Christy Minstrels. Early on, Tom and I were part of that, but we were gone long before they made a record or became famous.
"That's the only group that I ever had even a tenuous connection with that anybody's ever heard of."
Jerry Johnston, a Deseret News writer and columnist, says Max has "a big, barrel-house voice, like (more-famous Minstrel) Barry McGuire, who had often played at Grogan's with Max's group.
"Several of us at the paper once jammed with Max and his guitar for an evening, but it didn't work out too well. Max's voice is so powerful it simply overpowered everyone and everything else in the room — including (writer) Elaine Jarvik's drums."
Chapter 3: Soldier
Not surprisingly, a fledgling music career was not enough to keep Max from getting drafted by the U.S. Army in 1962. After basic training at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., he was made an information specialist, "the Army's term for a reporter or an editor or a PR guy," he says.
Even though he eventually would make his name as a journalist, this assignment was a fluke. He was supposed to be sent to a more "blue-collar" job in Alabama, he says, but the Army confused him with another man, a college graduate, whose last name was Knudsen.
"They gave me the job he was qualified for and sent him to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama to do manual labor," Max says. "It worked out OK, because I had always been good at writing in school, . . . but I doubt it did much for him.
"That's the only time my name has ever helped me, I think."
Ah, yes, the name. Constantly mispronounced Ka-nood-sun, Max pronounces it Nud-sun. And forget about the spellings on mail he's received at the Deseret News: Masc Knudelsen, Maxz Knudson, Max Krudson, Max Knuds.
Dale Zabriskie, president of Zabriskie & Associates, based in Salt Lake City, has known Max for about 30 years and says he was always correcting clients as they tried to pronounce Max's name.
"Especially when taking them to an interview, we'd say, 'Now, Max says his name Nud-sun,' " Zabriskie says.
And last names aren't the only problem. Max is only known as Max through his byline and at the office. Kith and kin knew him as Mickey as a young boy and Mick as a young man, the same nickname his father had before him.
None of which had any further impact on Max's Army career. But singing did. He won several entertainment contests at Army bases around the country, making it to the all-Army competition in Richmond, Va.
"I lost out to a guy who did a Vaughn Meader-like impression of JFK, who was president at the time," Max says.
Max got out of the Army in December 1964 and again came home to Salt Lake City.
Chapter 4: Student
"It's now 1965, and I've reached the obvious conclusion that I'm never going to become rich and famous as a folk singer," Max says. "I came back to Salt Lake because that's where my family lived and I had at least a partial network to help me start over in life. My dad got me a job with the Southland Corp. as a manager at a 7-Eleven store, but that was a horrible job. The worst I've ever had."
Max had married for the first time in 1964 and later became a father when his son, Erik, was born. This first marriage ended in divorce.
After two years, Max left 7-Eleven and, in 1967, decided it was time to go back to the U. But this time, he was considerably more motivated.
"By now I know that the world's a cold, cruel place, and this is my last chance to make something of my life other than the fast-food industry, so man, do I study," he says. "I started out in the hole because I had all those E's and incompletes from that first quarter in 1958, but I eventually overcame it. I majored in English, because that seemed like the logical thing for somebody who enjoyed reading and was good at writing."
But as Max finished his second year at the U. — sustained by the GI Bill and a job his mom got him in the U.'s Art Department where she worked — he had an epiphany: The only things an English major can do are write the great American novel or become a teacher, and he couldn't see himself doing either. But he had taken a Journalism 101 class from Paul Cracroft and realized this was where he belonged, so he switched majors at the last minute and managed to complete the entire journalism course in one year, graduating in August 1969 with precisely the minimum hours needed.
It was in journalism school that he had met Karen Christensen, a political science major who had been minoring in journalism.
"He was the smart kid that sat in front and raised his hand and wore cute round glasses," Karen recalls.
Even though The Storyteller's singing career was officially over, Max had dusted off his guitar to woo Karen, "and I was appropriately wooed," she says.
"He tells stories well, and that's one of the reasons why I married him. . . . He's absolutely the most knowledgeable person I know. He's so wise."
They graduated together, and in September 1970, they were married.
Chapter 5: Enquirer
By then, Max landed his first job in the local media, an internship at The Salt Lake Tribune in 1969. After about five years at the Trib, Max says, he had a chance to make the big time with The National Enquirer. Yes, that National Enquirer.
"They offered me triple my pay," Max says. So, in 1974, he packed his bags and headed for Lantana, Fla.
"It was probably the hardest job I've ever had," Max says. "The hours were absolutely relentless. You worked seven days a week, 13 or 14 hours a day.
"It had sounded so easy before I went down there. I thought that if you were willing to just pervert your journalistic instincts and sell yourself for money, all you had to do was make the stuff up. But it didn't work that way. It actually was journalism of a kind, but it wasn't what I had been trained in. I was the only American there. Everyone else was from Britain or Australia and knew all about tabloid journalism."
After four months, he was fired.
"Everybody tells me, 'You should be honored that they fired you.' But I wasn't. I was as crushed as anyone who gets canned," he says. "I wanted to succeed, and if I left I wanted to do it on my own terms. I had sold my soul to the devil, and he didn't want it."
Max chalked it up as a learning experience and came back to the Tribune, working there until 1976, when he left to do public relations for AK Utah Inc. and its owner, well-known Saudi financier and arms merchant Adnan Kashoggi, developer of the Salt Lake International Center, west of the airport, and later, after Max left, the Triad Center west of downtown.
In 1977, while working for Kashoggi, Max's daughter Kelly (now 24 and a third-year medical student at the University of Colorado) was born.
Max left AK Utah in January 1979 and went to work at David W. Evans Advertising, but he quickly learned that doing public relations for the Utah Transit Authority wasn't for him. In March 1979, when he heard the Deseret News was looking for an investigative reporter for its Pinpoint Team, he applied.
"William B. Smart, who was then the editor, said, 'Well, we're going to fill that position in-house, but we're looking for a new business editor. How would you like that job?' I thought for a minute about how I had never taken any business classes and knew nothing about business and said, 'Sure. I'll take it.' I had recalled that my old Trib city editor, Will Fehr, had told me that a good reporter can cover anything.
"It was quite a relief to me to get this job. It's where I belonged. It's what I do best."
Chapter 6: News hound
Max says he learned how to cover business by what the Army terms OJT, for "on-the-job training."
"This will confirm the suspicions of many people out there who have watched me during the early years," he chuckles.
"I have always had a humility borne of the fact that I don't hold a business degree or an MBA," he says. "I've worked in four businesses, but I've never been accountable to the bottom line in any way. It's odd that I would end up spending all these years reporting on something that I never really knew about. But Fehr was right, a good reporter can cover anything. You just keep asking questions, even the really dumb ones."
Matt Brown, Deseret News associate city editor, was hired onto the business desk by Max in 1985. "It never ceased to amaze me to see him (Max) stroll in at 8 a.m., get a call from one of his numerous sources about some huge deal closing and then, in a matter of an hour or so, see a thorough, clear, readable story go to the copy desk ready for a headline and to be printed," Brown says. "Even in his last years in this business that burns out many by the time they're 40, Max still itched to get a scoop, and you could see the adrenaline pumping through him when he beat the competition to a story."
Both the job and the city have changed over the years, Max says, and he has tried to change along with them, whether that has meant cranking out his copy on computers instead of typewriters or altering his idea of a big story.
"There have been so many companies come and go," Max says. "The only bank that I started out covering when I started here that still exists is Zions. All the others have gone, and many of them have gone through several different names. The retailers I used to cover, they're all gone. It's been an amazing thing to watch this city change over the last two decades, and the stories that I write have changed with it."
Zabriskie says Max has not changed in at least one way: "He's eminently fair all the time."
Kelly Matthews, executive vice president and economist for Wells Fargo Bank, echoes that, saying he has "trusted Max completely."
"I felt very comfortable with his integrity and his honesty," Matthews says. "If he had any questions about what I meant or said, rather than portray something in a misleading way, he would clarify it or he would write it in a way that supported what he knew I was talking about."
But for many people, like Steven Fidel, associate editor of Deseret News Online Services, talking about Max means talking about cars. "Max gives business writing the kind of upgrade that leather upholstery gives a good car," Fidel says. "And speaking of automobiles, Max's car reviews are almost as fun as an actual test drive — and the reader isn't stuck with a pushy salesman."
Max says he started writing his auto reviews in the early 1980s, and he receives more reader feedback on them than on anything else he writes.
"If I have any fame at all, it's for the car reviews," he says. "All the other thousands of stories I've written on finances and banking and retail and development, that isn't what people ask me about. They always ask me, 'Hey, Max, what are you driving today?' "
Others say Max is about much more than cars and stories. Deseret News editorial writer Marjorie Cortez, a former business writer, says she appreciated Max's sensitivity to the challenges of working mothers and his commitment to his family.
"When Lindsay was a little girl (Max's second daughter, now a senior at Intermountain Christian School) and Karen would bring her in to visit her daddy, Lindsay would sit on Max's knee, and the two of them would become lost in their own world, as if no one else existed," Cortez says. "I never really understood that connection until I had my own children."
What it all comes down to, whether in journalism or in life, is that Max cares, says John Hughes, Deseret News editor and chief operating officer.
"That's why year after year, with 30 minutes to deadline, he's gotten a tip from one of his many contacts and sat down fussing and clucking to produce great news stories that are some of the best and most colorful writing to appear in the columns of the Deseret News," Hughes says.
"I can't imagine what we'll do without him."
Chapter 7: ????
Nonetheless, The Storyteller is leaving.
"The thing that I have going against me in remaining a useful member of society in retirement is that I am not a particularly good self-starter," Max says. "I live in awe of people who work at home, who can find the will to do that without a short deadline or a space to fill. I am somebody who needs the structure of a company like this."
He'll keep golfing with the Deseret Gnus, the group of staffers with whom he has hit the links almost every weekend for the past 15 years. Karen says she hopes that, in retirement, he manages to get a hole in one. "He deserves that."
Max admits that as an old retired guy he might just read books and become a recluse, as his wife fears.
"I hope she's wrong, but that's a definite possibility," he says.
Turns out there's one story The Storyteller is still working on.
"It's a new chapter in my life, and I haven't had one of those for a very long time."
But as every storyteller knows, surprise endings make for great reading.
E-mail: gkratz@desnews.com