Hello there. How’s it going?

Long time, no chat. Like a decade … or four.

The last time my byline appeared in the Bladen Journal was July 1985.

After 40 years wandering around, which included two years with the Richmond County Daily Journal, 34 years with the Fayetteville Observer and four years of being mostly retired, I’m back at the Journal, albeit in a part-time role this time, again covering sports.

The six years as sports editor for the Journal were, by far and away, the best job I’ve ever had. It was my first full-time newspaper job and I learned a lot working with the likes of Dennis Patterson, Harvey Burgess, Ed Knight, Marilyn Robinson, Barbara Bedsole, Edna Taylor, Larry Guyton, Denise Cross and Eddie Nye among others.

Ask Eddie about the time his car got stuck in the sand in the middle of nowhere near Little Singletary Lake while we were doing daytime reconnaissance in anticipation of a nighttime drug drop or the time he got struck in the head by a bird that flew into my van as we were riding to the golf course.

There were four high schools at the time – Bladenboro, Clarkton, East Bladen and Tar Heel. The rivalries were intense. When two Bladen teams met, I had to be careful that I didn’t wear the colors of either school. Once, fans threw wadded up paper cups and chanted “Go to (h-e-double toothpicks), Sonny Jones, go to (h-e-double toothpicks)” after their football team won an important game that I had picked them to lose.

It comes with the job and makes for interesting memories, although I would appreciate it if no one threw wadded up paper cups this time. If you feel a need to lead a derisive chant, then go for it.

As much as I loved the job at the Journal, working at a twice-weekly, small town newspaper wasn’t a formula for long term career planning. So, after a couple of years in Rockingham, I was blessed with an opportunity to join the sports department of the Fayetteville Times in November 1987. The paper later became the Observer-Times and eventually the Observer. I moved to the paper’s online department in 1995 and worked a variety of newsroom jobs until retiring on August 2, 2021.

Ironically, I began sleeping soundly for the first time in more than 30 years on August 3, 2021.

But my heart never left Bladen County.

I had a house built in the Cape Owen Manor subdivision near Dublin in late 1991 and drove back and forth to Fayetteville until we were sent home in early 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I married a wonderful Bladen County woman in 1993. We had a son in 1998. Then moved to my wife’s childhood home in Clarkton in 2020 after her mother passed away.

While working in Fayetteville I began helping with Bladen Online in 2012. Robert Hester had begun the online news site a year earlier and I wanted to help, although anonymously since I worked at the Fayetteville paper. Couldn’t have my byline appear on Bladen Online until I retired.

Robert Hester is the sole reason I’ve called Bladen County home since March 1, 1978. He called the Sanford radio station while I was on air and offered an air shift and sports show at WBLA radio. It was for $125 per week, which was a $5 raise from the job in Sanford. I lived the first six weeks in Elizabethtown in an extremely small room at Cole’s Motel for $30 per week. The motel was where Georgio’s is now.

Little did I know what the future held over the next 47 years and that, one day, I’d be back where it all began.

Sonny Jones can be reached at [email protected] and follow on Twitter @FOSonnyJones