Beyond the Byline: Coming 'home' to build a family in the Midwest
Jim Slusher and his wife Patty loved their life in San Diego in the late 1980s, but there was something else they loved more - their families and their roots in the Midwest.
Jim was from a small farming community near Bloomington and Patty from the suburbs of Detroit, so the Chicago suburbs offered a near ideal place for them to come back "home" and start a family of their own.
Thus began Jim's 33-year career with the Daily Herald and the happy adventure of raising three sons in Mount Prospect.
Jim came to the Daily Herald in 1989 as news editor, primarily managing the copy editing, design and headline writing for the nighttime breaking news operation but also overseeing the copy editing staffs for the paper's Features and Neighbor sections. Over the years, he would move into various roles - helping the paper transition to digital production, overseeing a vast training operation as well as the photography and graphics departments and supervising the newsroom's senior staff, before settling into his current role in 2010 as head of the editorial page.
Jim's journalism career began in Clinton, Iowa, where he spent a year as news director for a local radio station following two years as a high school English and journalism teacher just across the Mississippi River in Fulton, Illinois. In coming years, he would cover literally every beat a newsroom has, moving first to Sterling and later to Saginaw, Michigan, where Patty was working in the advertising department. That led to an unlikely pairing between the newsroom and ad departments and their eventual California honeymoon when Jim got the opportunity to run his own newsroom at a small suburban daily in the San Diego suburbs.
In addition to his journalistic interests, Jim has always nurtured outside literary aspirations, but don't get him started talking about the experience unless you want to spend a long, gloomy evening. Suffice to know that he is the author of two self-published e-books available on amazon.com - a book of short stories and a novel - and he's completed a second novel for which he has spent many humbling years trying to find a print publisher.
In addition to writing, he loves playing rock 'n roll piano, yoga, weight-training and running. He has run four marathons and two triathlons and, as he turns 71 this fall, intends to complete the Chicago Triathlon in August followed by the Detroit Marathon in October.
He is proud of his journalism career, but it is still his family that is his greatest source of joy. His sons are now grown and have moved out to build lives of their own elsewhere. None have yet started families. Jim's hopeful that when they do, they'll feel the same lure that pulled him and their mother away from the comforts of southern California.