Five thousand plus columns later, what's left of the hair is white, I've got a pot belly, and need a nap after lunch.
So why am I laughing about it? Luck, nostalgia, relief I'm still kicking? Probably all of them.
Don't get your hopes up. This isn't a retirement column. I'm just taking a look back today and liking what I see as my book of favorite columns - "Here's to the Winners" - arrives soon.
The presses are cranking and the ink's drying on the pages right now. To be honest, I'm pretty excited and apprehensive.
I know how special the people I've written about in this book are - how their courage and achievements touched our hearts and inspired us.
There isn't a column in this book that you're not going to shed a tear or two of joy over, and want to stand up and cheer. I did.
But do these kinds of stories matter anymore or are we so caught up reading about the Charlie Sheens, Lindsay Lohans, Wall Street crooks and small city politicians on the take that a book about winners is passe these days?
I didn't think so 26 years ago when I walked out of San Quentin prison after interviewing five inmates on Death Row.
The first thing I did was grab a stiff drink and a hot shower. Ten years was long enough writing about cop killers, drug addicts and serial killers. It was time to go find the winners, I told my editors.
They said it would never work, that people didn't want to read that stuff. Well, they were wrong. You did.
Charlie Sheen can't hold a candle to Ila and Dale Pawley, a white couple from Arleta who adopted a 6-day-old, African-American crack baby abandoned outside a hospital, and raised the boy on love and faith.
While Sheen's been getting high, the former crack baby was graduating from the Sandra Day O'Connor Law School at Arizona State with his proud parents at his side.
You tell me who's a better story.
While Lindsay Lohan was collecting DUI's and thumbing her nose at the courts, Jaime Gonzalez has been finishing up medical school at USC.
As a baby, doctors told his parents Jaime's birth defects were so serious he would never walk or talk. How he proved them wrong to become a doctor himself is going to have you cheering. I promise.
So will the Petersens, a Northridge couple who woke up one night to find the infamous Night Stalker standing at the foot of their bed holding a gun.
Richard Ramirez shot Chris Petersen twice in the head, but that didn't stop this bear of a man from rising out of that bed to protect his wife and their 6-year-old daughter sleeping in the next room.
Chris let out a primal scream and chased the most feared man in L.A. - screaming in fear himself - out of his home before collapsing on his front lawn.
That's what I'm talking about when I say "Here's to the Winners."
You're going to find 62 of them in this book. And not one of them is named Charlie Sheen or Lindsay Lohan.
Dennis McCarthy's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
Julie Benz Charli Baltimore Lisa Snowdon Sara Foster Teri Polo
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