Mike North bids farewell and tips his cap to sports columnists

This column is the last one I'll write for the Daily Herald, but I will continue to stay in touch with my nearly 350,000 followers on Twitter @ North2North.

I have really enjoyed a great relationship for almost six years with the Herald, and they let me share my thoughts in print and online for people to read.

To Sports Editor Tom Quinlan and the Herald staff - from print to sales to the people getting the papers out - thank you.

While I can easily reach more people through Twitter and other platforms, I have been in love with newspapers from the beginning. Not only did I read papers from front to back every day when I was a kid, but I delivered them, from the Chicago American, to the Daily News, to the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

When kids were reading the backs of cereal boxes in the morning, I was looking at the box scores, reading men like Cooper Rollow, Ed Stone, Ed Prell, Richard Dozer, Joe Mooshil, Bill Jauss, Bill Gleason, Rick Talley, John Carmichael, David Israel and Terry Boers, among many other sports scribes.

When I got older and before I got into the radio business at 40, I moved to Palatine and heard sports radio host Mike Murphy talk about the Daily Herald, so I started reading it too. I loved reading folks like Mike Imrem, Patricia Babcock McGraw and the late but great Jack Mabley, along with others.

I was able to write this column partly because of the education I received from every writer I ever read. So another big thank you to all of them.

I was a high school dropout who failed seventh grade, but I was interested and fascinated by so much in the newspaper, and it made for a pretty good education. I had issues in school, but for parents who might encounter a similar situation with their kids, don't give up hope.

I learned so much from reading newspapers and watching TV. Education is important, but so are moxie, smarts, instinct, guts and determination. My wife tells me I have high grades in those areas.

Of course when you are married to a woman for 40 years who was always near the top of her class, that also helps too. My thanks to BeBe for typing my columns and crossing the I's and dotting the T's. I don't have a career or much of anything else without her. Through thick and thin, good and bad, she has been there.

To all the readers and listeners from throughout the years, you were - and always will be - the lifeblood of my career in entertainment. Thanks for sticking with me and believing in me.

I think I did pretty well as a "columnist," but I wasn't going to call myself that because I was never a journalist. Still, as I said, I did read them all, and I learned a lot from them.

And it certainly was a privilege. Thank you readers, and thank you to the Daily Herald!

• Mike North now plans to live part-time in Las Vegas, and you can still follow him on Twitter @ north2north.