Power to the (Retired) People

This is the story of persistence paying off and it was inspired by a phone call I received after writing a Letter to the Editor of the local newspaper I subscribe to.

It started when that newspaper suddenly stopped including a full listing of NFL games as part of the summary page (scorecard agate) in its sports section in September of last year. The information presented seemed more relevant to fantasy leagues and gambling than to the average sports enthusiast. This was short-lived but it was the driving force behind the gentleman who called me to take action. He did some digging to find the name of someone he thought could help remedy the situation. A letter and phone call later, the paper reinstated the scorecard agate and all seemed right in the sports world.

Fast forward to April of this year. Suddenly, the sports section dropped the scorecard agate and replaced it with the MLB agate during the week, only showing other active sports on the weekend. This is great if you are a baseball fan, and particularly useful if you are a fantasy league player, but for those of us who follow other sports like hockey (4 teams in the circulation area!) or basketball (3 teams in the circulation area!) it forced us to go elsewhere to get info on our local teams. At this, I jumped into the fray and wrote my first Letter to the Editor asking if the paper was following the strategy of the cable companies by raising subscription rates (which they had recently done) while cutting service. That letter was never printed by the paper. Thankfully I was not the only one annoyed by this, and the aforementioned gentlemen jumped back into action and wrote another letter to his contact. This resulted in another phone call, and voila, the full scorecard agate appeared a couple of days later.

I was overjoyed to see the scorecard sections for NHL and NBA teams back and wrote a quick thank you Letter to the Editor. In it I thanked the sports editor for bringing this back and implored that it be kept. Shortly after my wife spotted my letter in the paper, I received a phone call from the up-to-now unknown primary mover in this cause. A really nice surprise to hear from him as I figured I couldn’t have been the only person who took action, and I really appreciated all the effort he put into the cause – and that he got results by sticking with it.

Turns out that he is retired too and besides doing a lot of volunteer work, he is an avid reader of this paper – particularly the sports section. Thanks Alan for making my day with that phone call and for your perseverance in finding the right person and following up to get results. All of us who follow sports besides baseball very much appreciate your efforts!

The lesson here is that persistence pays off – power to the (retired) people! Now that you are retired and have time to invest when something matters to you, what can you do to create positive change?