LISA DENTON: The other day, a blast from my past appeared on my desk. A colleague who had saved a stack of old newspapers discovered a front page with a story I had done for The Chattanooga Times in 1997. I had spent an evening at the Cleveland Speedway for a story on dirt tracks and how NASCAR's popularity was fueling interest in all aspects of racing.
I'm no grease monkey, but I remember how much fun it was to write that story. I took my son, who was 9 at the time. The highlight for him was meeting the track's owner, Joe Lee Johnson, a NASCAR pioneer, and getting an autographed die-cast car from him as a souvenir.
I do more editing than writing now, but finding old clippings like this reminds me how much fun I had getting out of the office to chase down stories.
CLINT COOPER: I know you must have felt like a fish out of water at the speedway, Lisa, but I remember when I had to do a feature story on a woman bodybuilder for the Chattanooga Free Press when I was a part-time sportswriter while I was in college. She had won some regional and, perhaps, some state titles in her sport.
Unattached at the time, I was curious about this young woman, who was certainly at the pinnacle of her sport but out of the norm in looks for the average woman.
The woman was as nice as she could be, but her oiled, muscled, orange-tone body was not what I hoped my ideal mate would have. She'd have been perfect when it came time to rearrange the furniture, though.
LISA DENTON: One of my favorite adventures was the time I got to ride in a hot-air balloon at Camp Jordan. It was an untethered ride, which sounded like a good idea at the time, but after we started descending over semi-trucks on I-75 I was ready to reconsider. We made it to the lawn of the Georgia Welcome Center just across the state line for touchdown. It was way cool.
That's the beauty of a reporting job. You get to do things you normally would never get to do and ask questions that would be considered impertinent under other circumstances.
CLINT COOPER: Funny that you should mention asking impertinent questions. My first fall as a part-time sportswriter, I had to go down to a high school football game in Dalton and ask a football coach if he'd been fired. It was bad enough that my everything's-wrong-with-it, yellow Mercury Monterey station wagon would barely make it to Dalton, but I had never talked to the guy and didn't know why he might've been fired. Talk about scared. I was petrified. Fortunately for him, he hadn't been fired, and I gained a measure of ability to ask the tough questions when necessary.
I haven't had any balloon rides, Lisa, but I did get to ride in an ultralight airplane once. I felt like a barnstormer from the early days of flight as we swooped down nearly to the ground and then way up over the hills and highways. It was a thrill ride no roller coaster could match.