In the spring of 1971, I still had not been accepted to Penn State’s University Park campus. I was only accepted to the [former] Ogontz Campus but I wanted to go away to school. My father made some calls and suggested Altoona Campus. He contacted Dennis Stewart there to ask if there were any openings and stressed journalism was my major.
Timing is everything. Stewart knew of two needs for the coming fall: a sports editor for the Altoona Collegian and a sports reporter to work for the Altoona Mirror covering campus sports.
I had been freelancing for five years for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Bulletin (started in eighth grade) doing community sports.
This was a perfect marriage—me and Altoona. I was accepted to Altoona Campus.
I had a great time. I learned what it was like to work hard and be independent by living off-campus and walking a great distance every day during that hot, summer term (I started early). I made lifetime friends at Altoona, and became very close to Ron Hoover and his family, as did my future wife, Carla, who attended Penn State’s University Park campus. I joined a frat. I found Dave Kimmel, who hasn’t aged a day.
The curriculum was harder than at University Park, I felt. I learned good study habits, and how to focus on things and narrow that focus to specifics. I also learned something about myself: I had leadership qualities.
For example, back then (1971-72), there were no co-ed dorms. We all wanted them. I led a student revolt and we seized the girls’ dorm in 1972 and held a sleep-in for days until we could get the University to start talking about co-ed dorms. And since I was already writing for the Mirror, I covered the “event” for them. It took years, but as I am told, co-ed dorms eventually happened at Altoona.
One of my closest friends from the Altoona days was Tom Lucas, who Hoover convinced to join the Altoona Collegian. Tom is now retired, a former VP who owns a beach condo in Laguna Beach, California. I fell in love with a girl for the first time in my life in Altoona. And had my heart broken there, too—a good lesson learned. I played sports there, as I did in high school, and made many friends. Sadly, two of them who lived with Tom and me when we moved to University Park are now deceased.
On the day I turned in my English literature final to Ron Hoover in what was my final semester at Altoona, Hoover wrote on the “Blue Book” (I aced every English course in Altoona), “You’ve probably given more to Altoona than it has to you. Good luck, you’ll go far, Tim.”
I have often thought of those words, but he was wrong. Altoona gave me the courage and confidence I needed as a teenager moving into his 20s to go forward and stick with journalism. I graduated from Penn State in 1975 and was among the 4 percent of journalism students nationwide to land a job at a major newspaper that year—part-time at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Within two years, I was hired full-time at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. From there, I went on tour: back to Philly working for a tabloid, then Washington, then Houston, then back to Philly again in 1986, full time at the Inquirer, where I stayed for twenty-four years.
In 2009, I took a giant leap of faith and convinced Comcast’s Jon Litner (now NBC Sports Group president) to hire me as their hockey analyst on an upstart website called, CSNPhilly.com. This was the beginning of the Comcast SportsNet network digital group.
I quit the Inquirer and waited two weeks for Comcast to offer me the job; I have been there six years now. I am among the very few older newspaper guys (56 at the time) to make the transition from newspapers to digital to TV.
Most reporters my age are dinosaurs who can’t make the transition from newspapers to digital. Many are fearful of change and, especially, social media. I don’t like it, but I realized if I wanted to survive the Ice Age, this dinosaur needed to blend into the new age.
I now cover the Philadelphia Flyers and the NHL for NBC Sports and CSNPhilly.com and appear regularly on television. What I love most about my job is that I don’t have to really work for a living. I get paid to watch hockey games and travel to some pretty cool places. Hockey players are the most “normal” of all athletes. Also, I get to eat at some of the best restaurants on the planet.
I have had more “memorable” experiences that I can recount over the forty years I have traveled. One that stands out is when I covered the Winter Olympics in Italy in 2006 and did a story on the struggling Italian hockey team; it ran world-wide. Days later, I was walking down Via Filadelphia in Torino, a street named after Philadelphia and lined with restaurants. One restaurant was closed because they were having a special party there. As I walked past it, someone banged on the window from inside and motioned for me to come in. It was one of the players from the Italian team. The entire team was having a lunch with all the members and their families and they invited me. They all had copies of my story that had appeared online.
Follow Tim on Twitter: @tpanotchCSN
