I identify myself as an author of literature. Not so measured by the sheer volume of the material I’ve written. That would be in journalism, in business magazine articles, of which I’ve had more than 900 articles in print, or about 2,000 pages. I’ve made far, far more money on journalism, that’s for sure.
Circumstances led me to specialized, surely as fate decides the flip of a coin. First I worked covering the international tobacco industry from field to finished product and marketing. Only a few know more about the true complexities of tobacco growing, farm and factory leaf processing, than do I. Same for cigarette and cigar manufacturing, packaging and marketing.
I once wrote that the cigarette is the most fiendishly intricate of all consumer products. True when I wrote it, probably true now.
Fortune next led me to reporting on tea and coffee– tobacco, tea, coffee the first great Colonials upon which the West was built.
My articles on these valued and highly profitable objects of desire led me into a multitude of varied experiences—going down into the hold of a Nicaraguan freighter, visiting the family of a subsistence coffee farmer in Ethiopia, touring hundreds of factories through Europe, climbing up towers of tea bales and coffee bags, entertained and entertaining the moguls of these industries.
Tobacco, coffee and tea. The Dutch and the Belgians do great business in them. Through time the most charming business to me, however, was that of Italian espresso–bean to brewer. As a result I ended up passing a good part of my working life, adding up to several years of my life, in Italian weed grown industrial parks, lost amid cracking slabs of Italian-miracle-age cement.
But it was pure exhilaration, at the time. Why I don’t know. Far it was from the darkened tasteful rooms of the Kansas parsonages where I was raised. Indeed I am literati in my heart, but my hands are gritty with reporting.