Fifty-six years ago I got my first job. I was a newspaper boy hurling tomahawk folded editions of The Standard Star on front porches in New Rochelle, N.Y., earning about $9 a week. My final job, as director of communication for the Diocese of Charlotte, includes some supervisory oversight of the Catholic News Herald. It’s odd that after all these years I am still delivering the news. Fortunately, this last job pays better than my first.
My career was spent almost entirely in communications. The few exceptions were odd jobs during college, video production and some acting – more on that later.
I spent a good deal of my career in the practice of journalism, mostly as a TV news reporter. This was exciting and fast paced, and enabled me to meet luminaries like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Journalism at its core is the search for facts.
The next important turn of my career was in education when I was the spokesman for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System. This communications job required me to develop an understanding of what it takes to educate children. Teachers and principals, I learned, are a dedicated lot who start out with 5-year-olds who can’t read and through attention and in some cases, detention, turn them into productive citizens. Education at its core is the search for knowledge.
From education I moved onto banking where I ran an in-house television network producing training videos for a local bank. Banking was both baffling and simple. The baffling part was the complicated ways in which a bank accounts for the myriad funds entrusted to it. The simple part is that banking, at its core, is the search for money.
My last and favorite career move, and the one which lasted the longest, was working for the Catholic Church. To be a communicator in the Church is to have an understanding of Sacred Scripture and the teachings of the Catholic Church, as well as to grasp the culture of, in my case, the Charlotte diocese. Getting paid to learn and understand the history, theology and beauty of a 2,000-year-old institution and trying to convey Catholicism via various communication channels has been inspiring, challenging and fun.
What I have learned here is that the Church at its core is the search for facts and knowledge, but most importantly it is the search for truth. Christianity is the glue of civilization and despite the serious challenges that we currently face in the Church, that glue will seep through the collective disappointment we currently have in some of our leaders and will continue to bind us all to Christ’s mission of spreading the Good News.
Now for the acting. One of the first things I did with some of the money that I earned on my paper route was to go to the movies. In the balcony of the darkened RKO theatre in New Rochelle, I was mesmerized by the huge images of Fred MacMurray and his flying car in “The Absent-Minded Professor.” I set a goal for myself to someday be in a movie, preferably as a star. I sort of attained this goal during a brief acting career in the early 1990s when I was cast in the movie “Children of the Corn II, the Final Sacrifice.” I don’t recommend paying to see this film, but if it pops up on a cable channel my scenes are in the first five minutes of the film; you should skip the rest.
Movie stardom wasn’t my only goal. I also wanted to be a network news anchor, but like the acting thing, I peaked somewhat short as a local anchor reporting on school board battles and banking mergers. People should have lofty career goals, but falling short is OK, and if you enjoy what you are doing, as I have, the journey is a life well-lived.
As I head into a retirement, I will fill my days with frequent daily Mass, my woodworking hobby, sailing lessons and travel. The one career goal remaining for me is a path that I have been on and off ever since my days as an altar boy, and it’s the best goal for any Catholic: sainthood. Maybe not big-time sainthood like Thomas Aquinas or Mother Teresa, but an everyday saint who demonstrates the call of having a relationship with the Lord, evangelizing His Word and carrying out the works of mercy we are all called to perform. As my 9 to 5 days come to an end, I hope this final goal will be 24/7. It is, by far, the most important of my life.
God is good…in all things.
David Hains retired April 12 after serving 15 years as the director of communication for the Diocese of Charlotte.