“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.“
— Yogi Berra
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There are no coincidences in life. Only the mystery of what might have been had we taken that other fork in the road.
“Hello,” she offered from her car. We had a class together at Kilgore College. Likely English, history, or math. We were both freshman students at KJC in 1966.
I don’t remember her name. Time does that to me a lot these days. What I remember is the yellow ’65 Mustang she parked next to us at the Dairy Queen. And that she was attractive, and her long blonde hair and cool car fit the image of absolute perfection in my 18-year-old college male mind.
My friend and roommate, Ronnie Lilly, and I were cruising the DQ in his ’57 Chevy. “Hello,” I waved. “What are you up to this evening?”
“You won’t believe it,” the car-to-car conversation continued. “I just got back from seeing a fortune teller in Longview. Unbelievable, the things she knew about me.”
“Really,” I asked? Wondering how well I was disguising my skepticism. Never did put any stock in so-called mystics. Carnival sideshows at best.
While I successfully figured out how carnival sideshow magicians sawed damsels in half as a youngster, I had never been close to a clairvoyant. Therefore, perhaps it was out of curiosity that a couple of days later I paid the Longview lady a visit on my way home for the weekend in Mount Pleasant.
She got no more than “name, rank, and serial number” from me. No facial expressions. No responses to her leading “I see …” statements. Paid and done, I continued my journey home.
More than half a century later, I can honestly say that little of what she “foretold” was anywhere near my life story as it exists today.
She did, however, stumble onto two memorable moments. One, that I lost a gift from a girlfriend, and rather than tell her I lost it, I replaced it. True.
Two, that my stay-at-home mother for all my life had taken a job.
Mom was glad to see me when I arrived later that evening. “Your timing is perfect,” she said. “I just got home from work. I haven’t told you. I started working at the Tribune this week.”
“You did what,” I choked?
Thus, a life-long series of fortunate incidents was set in motion. Now, memories that often cause me to think. Asking, “What if? Wonder what my life might have been like had I taken that other fork in the road? Or if I had missed just one of those people I met on that path?”
Such as meeting Morris Craig because Mom took that job at the Tribune where Craig’s paper was printed every week. The same person who asked what I planned to do after one of my fork-in-the-road choices turned out to be less than fulfilling. “Dunno yet,” I responded.
“You’re a photographer. Come work with me for a while until you decide,” Craig offered. That unplanned intro into the world of communication led to a second newspaper gig in Louisiana at a weekly owned by Lloyd Grissom in Tenaha. Lloyd also owned the Tenaha East Texas Light with an office in Center. A community that, at that time, was still on my “never been there” list.
But it was there, a place I frequented only one early morning a week, that a Shelby County resident came in to place an ad. Someone who, by sheer chance, I had met in Naples while working at the Monitor. That reunion resulted on a move to Shelby County a couple of years later. Right after newspaper entrepreneur Jim Chionsini purchased the East Texas Light from Lloyd.
Do you see where this going?
My path crossed with Jim’s at a Center Lions Club meeting. That started a life-long friendship and partnership connecting me with an incredible number of newspaper professionals from Texas to Alabama.
Meeting Fred Wulf and Rick Campbell while working at the Center newspaper led to them offering me a job some 15 years later. After I had taught journalism at Stephen F. Austin State University and after publishing the newspaper in Boerne for Jim. They hired me to assist in shaping a marketing department for their rapidly growing new company, Portacool. Fourteen years there connected me with marketing professionals and incredible people across the U.S. and abroad.
Coming full circle, Jim bought the Center newspaper a second time in 2013, recruiting me to help in that effort and initiate talks with the Palmer family that resulted in the acquisition of The Mount Pleasant Tribune. The newspaper where Mom worked for 17 years. Where I met Morris Craig.
Almost three years later, the current owners of the local newspaper, individuals with whom I had worked or known professionally during tenures with Jim, called on me to publish the Center newspaper. One more time. Marking my third time at the helm of the publication in 41 years.
Through it all, I still don’t believe in coincidence. And I still don’t believe in phony prognosticators professing to foretell the future.
I remain convinced, however, that everything happens for a reason. And that’s really the reason I took that fork in the road a lifetime ago.
You know … the one Yogi was alluding to.
—Leon Aldridge
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Aldridge columns are published in these newspapers and magazines: The Center Light and Champion, the Mount Pleasant Tribune, the Rosenberg Fort Bend Herald, the Taylor Press, the Alpine Avalanche, The Fort Stockton Pioneer, The Monitor in Naples, and Motor Sports Magazine.
© Leon Aldridge and A Story Worth Telling 2023. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided full and clear credit is given to Leon Aldridge and ‘A Story Worth Telling’ with appropriate and specific directions to the original content.
A Story Worth Telling 