The first interview I ever did was with a man named Marlin Fitzwater.
For those who don’t know who he is, Fitzwater is the longest serving presidential press secretary in the history of the country, and the only person to ever be appointed to the role by two different presidents: George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
In 2002, Fitzwater helped to build the Marlin Fitzwater Center for Communication at my college.

While you may think I’m writing about a baseball game, I’m not. My inspiration for this column actually came from a football game. It wasn’t one of those heavily hyped NFL games or a college matchup but a local high school game. In most small Minnesota towns on a fall Friday night, you will see the largest assemblage of people under the Friday night lights of a football field.

This year we mark 25 years since the 9/11 attacks, when nearly 3,000 innocent Americans were killed in an unspeakable act of evil.

When my wife and I started getting serious, she surprised me one day, while we were on a date.
We had been dating for about a year at this point. She has always, up to that point, struggled with long-term relationships.
So the fact that she had gone to my family’s yearly weekly trip to the beach in Rhode Island, and that she was splitting her time between my apartment in Kasson, and her place in Mankato had meant a lot already.

People by nature are curious. We want to know things. But it isn’t just factual knowledge we crave, it is often more personal information. As social beings, we sometimes want to know the details of other people’s lives. Some would call this curiosity or concern, but others would label it gossip. But whatever you call it, most people seem to desire it.