Thirty-three years it has been since I packed up my darkroom, my Canon AE-1, and all my lenses. Thirty-three years during which I became a lawyer, a husband, a law firm partner, a father, and a person still searching for creative accomplishment. (Less you think my priorities are askew, that list of accomplishments is in chronological order. Our daughter is my greatest accomplishment. It just took some time to achieve it.) That creative part of me unsatisfied by my legal accomplishments. I started out creative. Loved writing. Wanted to be a writer. Loved photography too. An answer to my inability to paint or draw to interpret what I feel. Becoming a photojournalist seemed the perfect blend.
With college came some changes in my direction. I majored in journalism, but with a concentration in the creative side of advertising. A part of my college’s journalism school. The beginning of my sophomore year my father died unexpectedly from what had been diagnosed as a slow moving chronic illness. My junior year I was one of the five members of our college AAF competition team that won regionals and presented at the nationals in Washington, D.C. I graduated second in my class from the journalism school. (Greg Riley, graduated first in my class.) He was one of my teammates on the AAF team. He joined the Leo Burnett advertising agency in Chicago. We lived together for two years in Chicago, while I attended Northwestern School of Law. He is now an award winning poet.
My senior year in college I was offered a job in New York with Jay Walter Thompson. The then largest advertising agency in the world. A college career counselor, who I met with only once at the end of my college senior year, told me that with my grades I should be applying to med schools or law schools. So, I registered for the LSAT which was being given just a few days after graduation in the Nursing School’s auditorium. The night before the actual test I took the practice test that came with the registration packet. I did not do so well as to think the law was my calling. Still, early the next morning I sat for the LSAT. If I did poorly it was off to New York and advertising. Upon learning my scores, I instead took a year off. Lived at the beach. Worked as a law firm runner (this was well before email, cell phones, and the Internet) and completed seven law school applications. Each application included my personal statement about why I wanted to attend law school. Honestly, I had no idea why, because I hadn’t a clue whether I wanted to be a lawyer. My Uncle David, an accomplished lawyer himself, helped me write it. Taking the sow’s ear and …. Thanks to his significant advice concerning the topic of my essay and my decent performance on the LSAT, I decided to pursue “The Law” if accepted into a good law school (my only condition before choosing the law over advertising), I’ve been practicing law for 30 years.
We make life altering choices while we are young and still lacking any concept of the role they will play in the trajectory of our lives. Even more perplexing, our allegiances to these choices despite our eventual incontrovertible knowledge that no matter how good we are at what we became, we will never be satisfied by what we’ve become unless we chose our true passion. If only we had known what it was or brave enough to be determined to pursue it.
Chuck McIntyre