My first sale was 25 years ago!

I've been going through my stacks and boxes of paper (the memory boxes, as we say with Elina) as I'm making a donation to the county archive here in Turku, Finland. I found the first newspaper article I ever sold: it was to the magazine my father was working at, the small Leftist newspaper called Satakunnan Työ (The Satakunta Labour News or something to that effect). I was only 14 at the time and I think I pretty much ripped the piece straight out of a mechanics journal as it was about the new car models being developed at the time in the Soviet Union! There's much to laugh about this, but then again I noticed that this was almost exactly 25 years ago, as the article was published in the mid-December 1986!

Later on I started writing movie reviews for the same newspaper (under the moniker Umberto D.*) and honestly I think that was better suited to me than writing about cars, since I still don't have a driver's license!

* Umberto D. being of course the famous neorealist movie by Vittorio de Sica. My dad thought I should use a pseudonym so that noe one could argue they favour relatives in any way. I must've been the last movie critic in Finland to use a pseudonym! They were pretty much in use in the fifties and in the sixties, but by the eighties they were gone - except for me. This car-related clip was published anonymously.