Phil Drake's Blog: Thoughts From The Chubby Bugger

I was born in Pennsylvania in 1959 and spent my early years in Lewisburg where I feasted on peanut butter ice cream and kept on eye on cookie supplies throughout the neighborhood. When I was 5 we moved to La Porte, Indiana, where my cookie patrols continued. But it was the greatest place in the world for a kid to grow up. We had a house with three acres and almost every home on the street had children. Days were filled with making go-carts, riding bikes, playing Army, baseball and football.

My father was a food technologist, which means he made new food products. Many a night he’d sneak home some new concoction that he thought would hit it big. I remember he had a 55-gallon drum of pork rinds in the garage. And you could always waddle out to the garage and scoop out a handful. I grew up thinking that all families had a barrel of pork rinds tucked away somewhere.

My mom was a stay at home mom for years, but then went into real estate and then management of savings and loans. She grew up near the clay mines in the mountains of Pennsylvania. She’s a hard worker and the best cook I know. When I visit her I rarely eat out because I know I’m getting the best meals in town.

When I was about 10 we moved to Winfield, Illinois, about 27 miles northwest of Chicago. It was a small town then. But the days were not filled with sports so much as they were just hanging out with friends and riding bikes. What was great about that area was to get on one of the commuter trains and go to Wheaton or Chicago for the day.

A few years later our family moved to Archbold, Ohio, where my dad worked for La Choy foods. It’s a farm town tucked in the northwest corner of Ohio that prides itself on God, hard work and family. It was a little bit of a culture shock coming from Chicago but we survived. It was there that I graduated high school. I participated in sports, but I really sucked. I was lousy at football, cowardly at wrestling, too fat to do almost anything in track and was horrible at just about anything else I tried. I don’t know if I lacked the killer extinct or just didn’t have the confidence to try hard enough. I am thankful that these are not the things I dwell on. I excelled at lunch and sending excess rats in biology to meet their maker. I was also a very mediocre student while my brother and two sisters were honor students. I think my parents kept me around just to mow the yard.

If you’d ask people in Ohio about me, other than say that I sucked at sports they would most likely tell you they remember my cartoons. I was something of a self-trained artist back then and would draw cartoons of teachers and ladies with baggy boobs. I was also on the school paper.

It was during that time that I read a story in “People” magazine about a Vietnam veteran whose face was mangled during the war and the government refused to help him. A crusading newspaper columnist named Mike Royko wrote a series of columns that helped this soldier. That and the TV show “The Night Stalker” in which intrepid reporter Karl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) chased and was chased by all sorts of monsters inspired me to become a reporter. I thought I wouldn’t have to be too smart and I could still help people. That decision led me to a career that I have weaved in and out of for more than 25 years in Ohio, California and Montana. I have worked for seven newspapers and two wire services. Like most people in newspapers I have worked holidays, birthdays and weekends.

My adventures in journalism included meeting presidents, celebrities, local gadflies and other riffraff. My favorite story, one that I wrote early in my career, was about a giant of a man who raised miniature donkeys. While downing a couple pitchers of beer after the interview, the photographer and I realized that, in essence, this man was God and had created his own little world where donkeys ruled. I went back to the newsroom, popped a cigar in my mouth, threw my notes over my shoulder and at 22 years old wrote what I still think is the finest story of my career.

I have many memories of my years in a newsroom, including touching base with a reporter stuck covering a police standoff and handing her my socks to wear as she stood in the bitter cold in high heels to wait out the stalemate. Much of my career was spent as an editor, a basically thankless job in which you not only get yelled at by those you work for, but also by those who work for you. It was a lot of long hours, personal sacrifice and mistakes. Good Lord, I made a lot of mistakes, some of which haunt me to this day. I feel that if it would all end tomorrow I can honestly say I had a pretty fulfilling career. And I hope I was of some help.

“Fat Chance,” my first novel, reflects my lifelong struggle with weight. It’s not only a satirical look at fat and thin people; it’s also a romantic tale with chubby overtones. Much of the book is a reflection of what I experienced after losing 140 pounds through Jenny Craig. While I felt I was the same person inside, I was treated differently because of my improved appearance.

And while I thought I knew human nature simply through my experiences as a reporter and editor, I was woefully unprepared to navigate a thin world and the cutthroat game of dating.

I left newspapers in Southern California in 2007, and moved to Iowa to be near family. After two years of working some tough jobs that included working at a meat counter, an electronic surveillance company, hawking newspaper subscriptions and arguing with customers over telephone bills, In 2010, I got the opportunity to start up an online news service in Montana. My dog Pica and I now live in Helena and can be seen prowling the historic neighborhoods.