My family, once more

I forgot to mention yesterday that my father and mother were both journalists. My dad worked in the same newspaper (Satakunnan Työ, www.satakunnantyo.fi - sorry, still don't know how to make hyperlinks) for over 30 years and is now retired. My mother started her own business in the mid-eighties and is also now retired, for health reasons.

They met in a newspaper called Uusi Päivä (New Day) in Turku - in the same building where we live now! Uusi Päivä is no more, it ceased publication in 1969, just after they moved from Turku to Rauma where I was born. I don't know why it ceased, but I've heard later that there were other newspapers in Turku that were also put down at the same time. Uusi Päivä was a Leftist paper and could very bravely boast of having given the legendary "one-star man", Tapani Maskula, the movie critic of the Turun Sanomat, his first regular column in the sixties.

My dad had started writing in the mid-sixties, when he wrote about movies for Forssan Lehti. He was sixteen or seventeen years old and had already put up a movie club with some friends of his. I think the first film he ever reviewed was "The Bitter Victory" by Nicholas Ray (which I haven't seen myself, by the way). He's the one who taught me how to watch cinema and took me by the hand to see "The Big Sleep" and other classics (and later on taught me the magic of old books).

My mother wrote just about everything in Uusi Päivä, mostly news, but also theater and book critics, but after she had born me and my big brother she pretty much got away from these things. There may have been some sour human relationships at work, since she should've got some job at Satakunnan Työ where my dad worked, but for some reason she didn't. Later after my parents had divorced she worked there as a proof reader, but never as a staff writer, even though she would've had the capabilities.

Hence they were both writing people and tried their hands with fiction. Unluckily they didn't get very far with it. However they taught me and my brothers and sister that you can live by writing. This is exactly what I do. Thanks, mom and dad!