I was 12 years old when I started working for the Deseret News.
The hows and whys I got the job are lost to history — I’m sure it had a lot to do with Gilbert Benson, aka my father, who was a big proponent of child labor, i.e., kids having a job. All I know is, one day, my twin brother Dee and I were informed we had a paper route. We’d be delivering the Deseret News in the evenings during the week and the Salt Lake Tribune on Sunday mornings. I can still remember the route numbers: 605-C and 605-D.
Each afternoon around 5, we’d ride our bikes, accompanied by our dog Pokey, to the corner of 9400 South and State Street in Sandy, where two bundles of newspapers would be waiting. We would fold and double-band each individual newspaper, turning them into missiles that would ideally land on the porches — and less ideally the flower beds — of the homes in the Greenwood and Walters subdivisions that comprised our delivery area.
The last delivery was to our house. A bright orange cylinder tube with D-E-S-E-R-E-T N-E-W-S stenciled on the side was the first thing you’d see when you turned into our driveway. As far as I know, we always subscribed to the paper. Sections of it were constantly scattered throughout the house.
I liked to read the comics and would glance at the front-page headlines, but it was the sports section that called to me. I was capable of spending inordinate amounts of time with the baseball box scores. The sports columns by Dee Chipman, Hack Miller and George Ferguson were a great source of entertainment.
I wouldn’t realize how much of a subliminal influence the enjoyment of reading the paper had on me until I was in college.
I was in my fourth year at BYU and still searching for a major. I’d tried business, I’d tried economics; I hated or strongly disliked both.
Then one day, I passed a stand displaying the Daily Universe, BYU’s student newspaper, and something in the recesses of my mind clicked.
In 2025 speak, I was triggered.
Triggered in a good way.
Although up to that point in my life I’d never written anything that hadn’t been assigned by an English teacher, I marched into the Daily Universe office, found the sports editor, R.C. Roberg, and asked if they ever let regular students write a story for the paper.
R.C., as it turned out, was supposed to cover a wrestling meet that night in the Smith Fieldhouse. Instead, he sent me.
Career-wise, I’ve been doing nothing else ever since.
A year and a half later, after graduating with a journalism degree, guess who hired me?
Actually, I got two offers when I started applying for newspaper jobs in the fall of 1972. The first one was from the Ogden Standard-Examiner to write high school sports. They offered me a salary of $550 a month, plus overtime.
The second one, which came just a week after Ogden’s, was from the Deseret News, also to write high school sports. Their offer was a salary of $500 a month, with no overtime.
George Ford, the managing editor, was the person interviewing me for the job in a conference room at the Deseret News.
I told him about the Standard-Examiner’s offer, which anyone could see was higher.
I looked at George.
He looked at me.
The cards were on the table.
“Well,” he said, “you better take theirs.”
What? And turn down my hometown paper?
Off and on, I’ve been with the Deseret News ever since. I wrote sports for the first 25 years. For the last 27 years, I’ve written slice-of-life columns. In 2011, I went from full-time to part-time.
The people I’ve met, the places I’ve gone, the things I’ve seen, the opportunities I’ve had, the friends I’ve made — it boggles my mind to think of it all, and I was there.
Why am I bringing up all this history now? Because the Deseret News turns 175 this Sunday (June 15) and I wanted to say “happy birthday” to a newspaper that has taken care of me and has been such a big, irreplaceable part of my life. There is no way I could ever repay all I’ve been given. Many happy returns to the world’s best newspaper/news site, and sorry about the ones I threw in the flower beds.