Early writings
By William Wetherall
16 December 2025
While calling myself a journalist, I have been a reporter in pursuit of news on only one occasion. From the start of my life as a writer, I have been mainly an opinionist when not a publicist, and a feature writer. Most of my articles have focused on current, especially social issues, but I also take on history, language, and literature.
My first two ventures into the world of print media -- for which I received nothing but the thrill of seeing my by-line in the paper -- were published by The Union, a Civil War era broadsheet, hence the title, published in Grass Valley, California, where I graduated from high school in 1959.
Grass Valley is a small town, but is the largest municipality in Nevada County, in the Sierras northeast of Sacramento. The Union had been a town rag in the early gold-mining years, but then became a county paper. I was acquainted with the editor, who owned the building leased by the shoe store where I had worked part time, across from the paper's office and printing plant on Mill street.
Nevada-County Education and Culture
My first published article -- A Treatise on Nevada-County Education and Culture -- appeared in the 16 April 1963 edition of The Union. I was 21, an electrical engineering major in my junior year at the University of California at Berkeley, with a B+ GPA, and enjoyed my studies. But in the fall of 1962, with the publication of Rachael Carson's Silent Spring in September and the Cuban Missile Crisis of October and November, I lost my political innocence and decided to drop out of engineering.
I became disillusioned by the prospects of working in the aerospace industry, a synonym for weapons development. I stopped going to classes and audited a few courses on the humanities side of campus. I have never turn my back on science and math, but their applications by global corporations and technocratic nationalistic governments continue to sadden me.
My diatribe filled over one full broadsheet page of the older kind with small print and crowded columns. Reading it now is painful, illuminating, and entertaining. How did such rubbish get as far as the linotype operator? It would have broken all of today's spelling, grammar, and style checkers, and driven an entire bay of human fact checkers and PC-minded editors to the brink. Yet my father, on his death bed half a century later, could still remember a line he treasured about how doctors save the broken backs of ditch diggers, who save the backs of doctors from being broken.
Life in the Army
After sitting out all my final exams in the Spring 1963 semester at Cal, the College of Engineering put me on academic probation for a year. That summer, while working on a surveying crew for the Tahoe National Forest, the local draft board -- aware that I was no longer attending college -- ordered me to take a physical, which I easily passed.
While in college I had worked summers on ship-to-air guided missile systems at San Francisco Naval Shipyard. So thinking that I'd be assigned to a missile unit if drafted for 2 years, I enlisted for 3 years in order to choose my military specialty.
After basic combat training at Ft. Ord near Monterey in California, I was sent to Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio in Texas for my Military Occupational Specialty (MOS) training as a medical corpsman. I was then assigned to a Ft. Ord ambulance company, which was part of a medical battalion that supported a 24-hour-readiness Strategic Army Corps (STRAC) evacuation hospital, but also supported basic training maneuvers.
With time on my hands, and fresh memories of basic training, I banged out Life in the Army -- my first newspaper column -- which The Union ran in 16 long installments from 29 October to 26 November 1964.
Robert Ingram, the editor and owner of The Union, read the galleys but touched very little. One time, though, something I had written required surgery, and pinched for time, he had the galleys hand delivered to my father to rewrite and tone down. My father had no trouble cutting and recasting the problematic graphs. I learned many red-lining skills from my father, a lawyer who knew how to write.
I saved nothing from the column, not even the clippings. Yet I now have copies of everything -- the galleys and correspondence with Ingram, and a full set of clippings -- in Japan. Ingram's widow found my file in her husbands office and mailed it to my father, thinking I might like to have it. And Bob Lobecker -- one of my closest friends from high school and college, a local boy who unlike me finished his electrical engineering studies at Cal and then earned his living as an EE -- had clipped the entire column in real time, and decades later he sent it to me.
Rejection letter
In the summer of 1964, while in the ambulance company at Ft. Ord, writing the first installments of the "Life in the Army" column, there was a meningitis outbreak at the training facility, which resulted in the entire base being quarantined. I followed the reportage in the press, and certain that I could contribute to the outside world's understanding of the causes of the outbreak, I submitted an unsolicited article to the San Francisco Examiner -- or perhaps the Chronicle, I frankly forget -- and received a personal and encouraging rejection letter from an editor.
It was not a pre-printed rejection slip, mind you, but a hand-written, thanks-but-no-thanks note -- encouraging me and giving me some advice. The editor said my writing reflected the zeal of a journalist and story teller. The problem was, I was too alarmist about things that were well understood in the real world, where most readers would not be shocked by my reports of the conditions of life in Ft. Ord's barracks.
In other words, if I wanted to be a writer, I would have to be less naive. This was probably the best advice I have ever received. It did not dampen my idealism and romanticism, but it did help me become a better doubter, skeptic, and even cynic.
While at Berkeley, I submitted a number of poems and vignettes to various magazines, and had gotten several rejection slips of the form-letter kind, sent in the self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) I always enclosed with a submission. I kept them in a file, tokens of my clamoring for admission to writing circles.
I added the rejection letter to the file, proud of it as evidence that I might have discovered an alternative to a career in engineering. A few years later, when visiting my parents -- in a funky erase-the-past, clean-the-slate mood -- I threw out a box of youthful memorabilia, including the file of rejection slips -- and even photos of my high school classmates, though I hesitated tossing the yearbooks, all but one of which have survived and are now in Japan.
It would be several years, after settling in Japan, before most articles I submitted to newspapers on spec were accepted -- usually as I wrote them, and with my titles.
Last revised 16 December 2025