Plenty of people have tales to tell about their routes into chosen careers, and this is the story of the unpromising starts made by three would-be reporters, two living hundreds of miles apart and the third thousands of miles from either of them.
My fumbling entry into journalism was based, with one necessary refinement, on the Route One strategy of a glamorous young woman who both sang at the opening night of my folk club in small-town northern England and wrote about the event for the Darlington Evening Despatch.
"So," I asked during the beer break in the crowded back room of the Red Lion in Shildon, Co Durham, "how did you get on to the paper?"
"Oh, it was quite easy," she replied. "I rang the editor, said I wanted to go and talk to him about journalism, wore my shortest mini-skirt and told him I wanted a job. Why not give him a call yourself?"
Picture: "Ken"// Red Lion before even my time
Even through the smoke and beer fumes, I could see that I might find myself lacking in one detail with such an approach, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it without being slapped or arrested.
But I refused to be defeated by the deficiencies of my wardrobe and tried as best I could to follow the rest of the folk-singing hackette's example. To my surprise, the editor, a stocky, scholarly chap named Arnold Hadwin, agreed to see me. I pretended to be there to talk generally about newspapers and journalism, but he saw through it in an instant.
"I suppose you're here to ask for a job," he said, and after setting the sort of educational target ("just make sure you pass the first year of the ONC course you're taking") that even I could meet, proceeded to hire me.
He may have been swayed by assurances from the Despatch's Bishop Auckland office chief reporter, Mike Amos, that my dad's involvement in football, workingmen's club and heaven knows what else meant he knew everyone worth knowing in south-west Durham (though this overlooked the snag that my dad had no wish to lose friends by passing on their titbits to me).
In any event, I escaped from office-job tedium and made my entry into a world that has engrossed me for 40 years. My mind wandered back to those days as I reflected on the richly entertaining work of the other two, who happen to be fellow-bloggers on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
One, Dumdad, is an Englishman living in Paris. The other, Laurie, resides in Saint Paul, not de Vence but Minnesota. Both have written about their own lives in newspapers.
Dumdad cut his teeth as a junior reporter on the Whitstable Times in Kent. He remembers annoying his editor, Derek Spratt, by responding loudly when questioned about the contents of the morning's consignment of fish: "Sprats, Mr. Spratt.”
At his blog, The Other Side of Paris, can be found compelling accounts of both those local rag days and his subsequent labours in Fleet Street (the picture above shows him, second left, hard at work at a Daily Telegraph editorial conference). The delight that each instalment brought to his devoted readership suggests that these are chronicles people can enjoy however far from journalism their own work may be.
Laurie's early years in journalism were spent "in the frozen tundra aof northern Minnesota". There were gaps in her education, too, though not quite so gaping as mine. Her version of failure was not completing a BA. 
But Laurie had no shortage of drive. "I was 11 or possibly 12," she writes in the first chapter of The Birth of a Hack at her site, Three Dog Blog. "I decided that journalism was my future. Why? Why not? I loved to write, I loved to snoop, I always wanted to know everything first."
When, at 19, she joined the splendidly named Duluth News-Tribune, it was as a lowly newsroom clerk. And even that job was offered to her only because the preferred applicant resigned after a few days.
But it was more than enough to reinforce her journalistic ambitions. Once everyone realised that she made vile coffee and had grander things in mind, they began giving her snippets to write and minor reporting beats; one required her to call twice daily at the harbour to collect the names of the ships that had passed under the aerial bridge on their way to and from the lake.
Finally, Laurie broke into the established editorial ranks. And like Dumdad, she divides her reminiscences into two sections. The first covers the newsroom dogsbody, cuttings library and parish pump roles, the second her progression to proper reporting and the emerging signs that she had the ability to rise to senior roles including her current job as a daily newspaper projects editor.
So Salut! salutes Dumdad and Laurie, while noting that what draws the three of us together is the modest, almost folksy way we all made our starts. Today, every third teenager seems to be on a media course. But where do they all find employment?
Even disregarding the decline of newspapers, there isn't the slightest doubt that few will ever get their chances as we did in Whitstable, Duluth and Bishop Auckland. "I wouldn't recommend this route now to anyone," says Laurie of her own graduation to the work she wanted, "You'd never make it."
What has changed, of course, is what has also changed in a variety of other careers. Competition for places has intensified to the extent that you now need diplomas coming out of your ears to hope to be considered as a trainee muckspreader.
Back in Durham, or at any rate the Durham of then, things were different. I still hear the astonished tones of the colleague. "You'll never guess what," she spluttered. "They're taking on a graduate!"
It beggared belief. But the remark was overheard by another of the straight-from-school brigade, and he had words of reassurance. "No need to worry," he said. "They're only going to let him do entertainment stories."
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