I hope you had a nice holiday season and as the end of the year is just a few days away, it’s time to reminisce about days gone by and look to the days and weeks ahead.

For me, I’m going to fulfill my goal of retirement. I turned 70 last July and while that wasn’t my original goal, (I never wanted to retire) I am facing the reality that it is time.

I’m glad that my son, Brent, has become the man that he is and will be taking over the daily responsibilities as publisher.

I first began considering retirement a year ago after a rough year with my health in 2016.

As you know, I have Parkinson’s disease. The symptoms first appeared in 1995.

Two of my hospital stays in 2016 were a result of falls I had. One was in Las Vegas, the other at my home.

In October I had a near-death experience, when I suffered internal bleeding from an unknown source. I spent five days in the Mayo hospital’s intensive care unit. I had two colonoscopies and swallowed a small camera inside a pill that travelled through my digestive track. Neither of the procedures showed anything that could have caused so much bleeding. I was down four pints of blood when I was admitted at the hospital’s emergency unit.

The doctor who examined me said, “It’s good they brought you in when they did. You probably would not have lasted another 48 hours.”

That comment was the key to me accepting what Diane had been telling me for the past couple of years. “You’ve got to retire and take better care of yourself.”

So it is with this column that I’m announcing my retirement.

It’s been a wonderful career, one in which I have many memories. The highlights are many. So I’ve decided to run a series of columns addressing my career.

I graduated from Arizona

State University in 1969 with a BS degree in advertising with minors in art and journalism. My freshman year, I received one of ten scholarships awarded by the Central Newspapers Foundation. The scholarship paid for my last three years of college. Since my folks paid for first year, I came out of my university career debt-free.

I wasn’t involved with politics on campus until midway through my sophomore year. The guys in my dorm voted me to be their representative on the Residence Hall Council.

It was there I met Randy Persson. We became good friends, especially after representing ASU at regional and national conventions. Going to these conventions were my first two times on an airplane.

Randy and I got involved in a drive to have coed dorms on campus. We weren’t trying to have sleepovers but simply to have males and females study and socialize together. The administration at first was very reluctant. But we got to have a couple of trial evenings and weekends and after we graduated, co-ed dorms became an accepted way of on-campus living.

My first job was with a Scottsdale advertising agency called LPE Advertising. One account was McCulloch Properties. I worked as a copywriter and my third day on the job, I was driven to a place called Fountain Hills. The date was Jan. 19, 1970. I remember asking my driver, Randy Wood, “Where are you taking me?”

We were heading out a two-laned road called Shea Boulevard. We passed a few scattered houses along the way once we turned off Scottsdale Road.

I later learned his father, C.V. Wood, developed the original master plan for the community and it was his idea to build the world’s largest Fountain as the future town’s centerpiece.

We finally arrived, and Randy said, “Welcome to Fountain Hills.”

My next column will be about those early days in Fountain Hills and how my college involvement in pursuit of coed dorms prepared me for the challenges of running a small town newspaper and dealing with small town politics.