How did you become involved in AJHA?

I earned my PhD in American Studies from NYU. While I was researching conservative media activism, I was unfamiliar with AJHA or journalism history as a field. In 2016 I attended the Joint Journalism and Communication History Conference because it was hosted by the NYU Journalism, which just so happened to be located in the same building as my department. That’s where I first learned about AJHA, and where I first met Anthony Nadler (with whom I’d later edited the book News on the Right).

Why are you a journalism historian?

Much of what I study wouldn’t be considered “journalism” to many, perhaps most, in our field. I’m primarily concerned with right-wing media, and how the modern conservative movement in the United States cultivated a critical disposition toward the press. The book I’m currently writing for Columbia University Press, Making the Liberal Media, is less about the press than about the long history of right-wing antipathy towards it. Over the course of my research, I realized that what counts as journalism is often in the eye of the beholder. While many may (rightly) consider right-wing media as propaganda, its audiences often experience it as news. As I’ve written in American Journalism, I see journalism history as a study of what Raymond Williams once called “structures of feeling,” or the dialectic between how people experience reality and more formal or systematic notions of what’s true. In short: I’m interested in how people, particularly conservatives, have experienced the news of the day throughout history. This focus allows me to see an ongoing battle for credibility over who has the authority to tell the “true” story of public life, a battle often overlooked by scholars operating under traditional normative understandings of what counts as “journalism.”

Why should we care?

Our field is dwindling. History departments are being defunded, and journalism department lines for historians are few and far between. Declining funding and accelerated time-to-degree expectations are making it difficult for graduate students to justify dissertations that involved time consuming (and often costly) archival research projects. The long-term survival of journalism history requires adopting a capacious definition of terms and a welcoming disposition. If a weirdo with a PhD in American Studies and a bizarre fixation with right-wing propaganda can find a home in “journalism history,” anybody can.

What’s the weirdest thing you’ve found in the archives?

Phone sex transcripts at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. I was in Simi Valley researching the Reagan administration’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. I stumbled across a folder marked “Pornography,” and couldn’t resist taking a peek. Apparently, some anti-porn crusaders had documented their 900-number calls in an attempt to get the Reagan administration to shut them down. My favorite transcript begins “Hello you miserable worm. This is Mistress Sharon from page 34 of High Society. I knew you would call. You just can’t get enough, can you…”

What hobbies/interests do you have outside of academia?

I’ve never had a hobby. When given the opportunity, I enjoy: travel, hiking, making people laugh, conspiring (non-criminal), organizing (political), performing high-concept punk rock (hype-man), washing dishes, and Werner Herzog.

A.J. Bauer is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at the University of Alabama.  

By Michael Fuhlhage

It’s not an overstatement that I owe my success as a scholar to the American Journalism Historians Association. I want to use this column as second vice president to talk to everybody in the organization, but especially to those of you who joined recently as graduate students and junior faculty, about what getting involved has meant for me and how you can get the most out of being an active member.

The 2005 AJHA convention in San Antonio was my first time presenting research. I was a master’s student at the University of Missouri School of Journalism trying to figure out my way from the newsroom into the academic world, and I joined a crop of AJHA rookies that included scholars I now count as friends, including Gwyneth Mellinger, Jennifer Moore, and Keith Greenwood. I’m sure I knew far less about the way academe worked than anybody at that convention, and “wide-eyed” would be a charitable way to describe the nervous wreck that was me at my first academic convention. There was, as it turned out, no need for worry. The senior scholars took me in immediately, offered pointers, asked intriguing questions to help me deepen my thinking, and of course encouraged me to keep coming back. It’s a friendly, open, and welcoming group that I found immediately endearing and adopted as my scholarly home. I’ve been to all but one AJHA convention since then.

There are so many opportunities for members to push themselves in new directions, I came to learn. And I’ve benefited as a scholar from taking part in them. Here’s my progression and how taking part in AJHA committee service has helped me to grow.

After getting papers accepted for presentation a couple of times, my mentors in my doctoral program at UNC suggested I try organizing panels. Once I got the hang of that, I began submitting research in progress in my quest for feedback on emerging projects. Each of these outlets for sharing ideas is an opportunity to learn to be better at finding evidence and writing historical research.

After getting a couple of panels accepted, I was invited to join the Research Committee as panels competition coordinator.

Linda Lumsden told me when she recruited me to succeed her as research chair that overseeing the research papers competition would teach me more than I could imagine about what made excellent research in the form of accomplished scholars’ judgments about what made a successful paper and what elevated nominees for awards above the rest.

As research chair I also oversaw the Joseph McKerns Research Grant competition, a role that gave me and reviewers the opportunity to see how other scholars define excellence in research. Reading the files of grant winners was like taking a master class in how to construct proposals that ensure funders that their money will be well spent. Their example has given me ideas for how to formulate my own successful research funding requests.

The research chair also works with key members of the committee, the panels and research in progress coordinators, to make sure submission, reviewing, and acceptances went smoothly. It’s a role that puts you in the position to have positive contact with every author of an accepted research paper and funded grant proposal and to connect with scholars who serve as paper reviewers. It’s a role that helps build relationships with professors who are among the most likely academics to be invited to review your tenure file.

Those experiences as research chair gave me the confidence to run for and serve twice on the AJHA Board of Directors, joining in decision-making and advising about the direction of the organization. It was that service that led me to believe that I could handle entering the rotation from second vice president this year to first vice president next year to president after that—as long as I have my fellow members and leaders to show me the ropes and keep me pointed toward true north.

I’m serving for the reasons I laid out in my candidate bio last fall, namely these: As my scholarly home for 19 years, the AJHA has been a source of inspiration, instruction, direction, and friendship since San Antonio. Without it, I wouldn’t have made the connections that helped me achieve tenure, found an audience for my research, and found my scholarly purpose. It’s my goal to use my position in the AJHA’s leadership to encourage an expansive definition of diversity in scholarship, help junior scholars, and defend history against those who seek to undermine it.

The journey has been nourishing and fulfilling so far. It started with taking a small step by joining a committee and pitching in. The AJHA has done so much for me, and I am honored that I have the chance as second vice president to pull together the program for our next convention. See you in Pittsburgh!

Michael Fuhlhage is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University and currently serves as AJHA Second Vice President. 

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I’ve been a member of AJHA for so long I don’t even remember exactly when I joined—though I know it was in the Dark Ages of Microfilm, when I was a graduate student constantly explaining to classmates and professors how the intellectual rewards of reading old newspapers could ever outweigh the miseries of spending hours with my head inside a microfilm reader. So I was thrilled to discover an association full of scholars who just got it—just got both the value and the pleasure of studying the many and changing ways societies have told themselves stories they recognize as consequential and are willing to accept as true.

Later on a Joseph McKerns research grant sent me to Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, where the rich collections of 19th-century journalists’ papers got me thinking about the many different ideas of what journalistic “truth” could mean. That laid the foundation for my latest book, Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History.

Since you’ve written a whole book focusing on fakes, frauds, propaganda, and humbug, do you think journalism is irredeemable?

No, no, no! Journalism has a lot to answer for, but I had, and have, no intention of catastrophizing it. Part of what I wanted to do was explore on their own terms the ever-evolving and surprisingly diverse expectations of what newspapers were for and what “truth” meant. But I also make the argument that the twentieth-century turn toward objectivity, for all the rightful concerns that ideal has always raised, was also a genuine effort by journalists of good will to stamp out the fakes and the humbugs–and that we still have something to learn from how that worked.

How has the way you do newspaper research changed since those Dark Ages of Microfilm?

Obviously digital search engines have radically altered some of the ways we do research. Having essentially eliminated the tedium of page-by-page scrolling and scanning, they now allow us to zoom in on, say, rival papers’ accounts of obscure events, or the evolving uses of a word, or the journey of a rumor or story from paper to paper, or how often particular reporters got bylines.

But using search engines can also tempt us to stick to only those questions we already know how to ask and whose answers we can already envision. And as someone who has always loved historical newspapers for their intimate connection to communities long gone and the stories they told about what mattered to them, I still enjoy diving at random into the higgledy-piggledy columns of some local paper (whether digitized, filmed, or in hard copy) and imagining myself among those who read and discussed it back when its ink still smeared. Decades after I first happened upon the column of telegraphic news in the Vincennes (Indiana) Western Sun for March 21, 1868, for instance, I am still wondering what its readers made of the squib that read, in its entirety, “Rats cannot live in Alaska, because their holes freeze up, nor in St. Thomas, because their holes are turned wrong side out by earthquakes.” What did “truth” mean to those readers? How did that story fit into their vision of their world?

What hobbies and interests do you have outside of academia?

I’m not a bad photographer—I do street photography with an SLR camera—and I am a terrible pianist. (Cheerfully terrible. Also terribly merciful; I have an electronic keyboard and a set of headphones, so no one hears me but me.)

Andie Tucher is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of Journalism and Director of the Communications Ph.D. Program at Columbia Journalism School. Her latest book is Not Exactly Lying: Fake News and Fake Journalism in American History (Columbia UP, 2022). 

By Richard Fine

On May 7, 1945, veteran Associated Press journalist Edward Kennedy bypassed military censorship to break the news of the German surrender he had just witnessed. He did so after authorities had prohibited release of the story for at least another day at the behest of their Russian allies. No action by an American correspondent during the entire war proved more controversial. His fellow reporters in Paris denounced him for what they termed “a deliberate, disgraceful and unethical double-cross.” The military stripped him of his credentials and ordered him back to New York. For weeks, commentators in the States either lauded him for reporting facts the public had every right to know or condemned him for a breach in ethics and for threatening military security. The Price of Truth details the surrender story controversy, then uses the episode to challenge the accepted view that the press’s relations with the military were amicable during World War II and only ran off the rails during the Vietnam War. When shorn of “Good War” nostalgia, media-military relations in World War II resemble those in Vietnam far more than most accounts would have it.

There is another more historiographic reason why this episode might speak to journalism historians even beyond those interested in how the press interacts with the military. While Ed Kennedy’s motivations and journalism ethics are central to the story, getting a sure sense of Kennedy’s character proved a challenge, one familiar to historians of all stripes. To begin with, there was little to go on—what documentary evidence exists largely centers on his thirteen years at the Associated Press.  Beyond that, Kennedy was an intensely private person who did not much talk or write about himself, so private that his daughter only learned from an obscure document in the AP files uncovered decades after he died that Kennedy had been married at least once before he married her mother.

Moreover, there is conflicting testimony from those who knew him. Many journalists, including a number who worked with him, respected Kennedy’s professionalism and especially admired his steadfast opposition to excessive censorship. Others, notably some at other agencies, described him as tightly-wound and unscrupulous. While some colleagues noted Kennedy’s ability to function well under intense pressure, others thought Kennedy erratic.   

While in Cairo, for example, Don Whitehead, then a young AP reporter, was shocked when Kennedy confided that he was in love with the wife of a correspondent then stationed in Teheran and that he was plotting to kidnap here and bring her to Egypt as his secretary. (I suspect that Kennedy was pulling the inexperienced Whitehead’s leg.) For another, one friend, Melvin Whiteleather, found him a “nervous wreck” at the end of the war, exhausted after supervising all AP operations in northwestern Europe. Others, though, considered him still to be functioning well despite his fatigue. There are also hints, but only hints, that Kennedy’s drinking was a problem, but if excessive drinking were a hanging offense, then the gallows would be crowded with war correspondents.

All of this to say that while Kennedy’s character remains opaque, what evidence exists very much leans toward Kennedy acting on principle in 1945. He sent the surrender story knowing full well what its personal cost would be.  For the committee of journalists who campaigned a decade ago for Kennedy to receive a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, there was no question that Kennedy had done his professional duty in 1945 courageously. Kennedy proved an enigmatic subject, and brought home to me the truism that all history is conjecture, however well informed.

Richard Fine is a Professor Emeritus of the Department of English at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

The American Journalism Historians Association is seeking an editor for the Intelligencer, the organization's electronic newsletter. The editor solicits essays, edits copy, and posts to a monthly blog distributed to members. The editor works with officers, committee chairs and members to generate content, including teaching essays, research essays, and other material on topics relevant to AJHA's mission. The editor also serves as an ex-officio board member and attends AJHA Board meetings. 

If interested, please submit a resume and a letter explaining why you would make an effective editor to Ford Risley, Publications Committee Chair, at jfr4@psu.edu by March 30. 

By Natalie Bonner, Alex Boothe, and Caleb Aguayo

University students from institutions in the Southeastern U.S. gathered to present their research at the American Journalism Historians Association’s 2024 Southeast Symposium on Feb. 3.

The Symposium aims to foster a welcoming environment for undergraduate and graduate students to present their research and to promote scholarly conversation among the students and their peers.

This year’s research topics ranged from comic book history to the media coverage of historic events, including World Wars I and II, the 1903 Iroquois Theatre fire and Native American newspaper opposition to Alaskan fish canneries.

Makenzi Azeman, an undergraduate student from the University of Florida who researched the comparisons between Nazi propaganda and Israel-Palestine focused political cartoons, said she enjoyed the wide range of topics presented.

“It was very enlightening to hear about so many different great topics,” Azeman said. “I’m really glad I came because I’m a big fan of history and it was all really interesting to learn about.”

Faculty from the participating institutions recommended the students to present their research, and they then reviewed the students’ research to select the most comprehensive undergraduate and graduate papers for awards.

Tressie Nuñez, a psychology major from Samford University, focused on the changing images of Batman’s archnemesis, the Joker, in the history of DC comic books. While unrelated to her major, she said she enjoyed researching a topic that was of personal interest to her.

“I just thought it was really cool to talk about it and that people were receptive and actually enjoyed it,” Nuñez said. “I really enjoyed the conference, and hearing that everyone else’s topics and ideas were broader than I had even thought about was really awesome.”

Justin Gray, an undergraduate student from Augusta University, worked alongside his professor, David Bulla, on a paper that examined the The National and its failed business model as a daily sports paper.

“It was a great experience. I liked the location and getting away for a few days.” Gray said. “I enjoyed everyone’s presentation and being able to present my work.”

More information about AJHA and its Southeast Symposium can be found here.

How did you become involved in AJHA?

I learned about AJHA through my colleagues, Drs. Mike Conway and Gerry Lanosga in the Media School at Indiana University Bloomington and Dr. Rachel Grant at University of Florida-Gainesville. They each shared how the network fortified them professionally and personally. I learned more about the group after receiving the inaugural microgrant to support my research on the late journalist Mattie Smith Colin of The Chicago Defender. Colin covered not only food and fashion but also the tragic Emmett Till lynching in 1955. Colin’s riveting coverage of Till’s death and the return of his body from Mississippi to Chicago centered the experience of the young child’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley. The event marked a critical moment in the long Black freedom struggle.

My career and Colin’s overlapped in Chicago during the early 2000s. I had no idea of the depth of her work and life in Chicago. I appreciate greatly AJHA’s belief in the project, allowing me to further explore a Black woman’s career in American journalism history.

How do you define political and everyday life journalism? How do you conduct research on the connection between these two genres?

I define political and everyday life journalism through interdisciplinary lenses, which includes journalism studies, history, and sociology. For the political, I’m guided in my inquiry by Michael Schudson’s perspectives on journalism as a democratic tool to evoke empathy and inform citizens about policies informing their decisions. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley’s insights into the Black freedom struggle and its emancipatory possibilities help me to see the political through a different paradigm. An everyday life definition comes from several scholars, including sociologist Erving Goffman. He views everydayness as a series of interactions and experiences people engage in daily—either significant or simple.

During my daily journalism career in news and features, I observed the values placed on each within the newsroom. Based on my experiences, semi-structured interviews, and archives, I look to enlighten scholars and audiences about the connection between the two genres. Analyzing text or transcripts allows me to see how themes about race, class, gender, culture, and politics appear within one or more articles or images. Working at the intersection of both the political and everyday has uncovered nuances about journalism content, production, and its producers.

What excites you about archival work?

I’ve been exploring Black and mainstream newspapers for my Mattie Smith Colin project. I love it! I am transported back in time observing “woke culture” and Black people’s lives, filled with discussions about race, voting rights, international affairs, and fancy social affairs. The status quo stories about a historically marginalized group seen in mainstream papers are debunked. I grew up reading The Indianapolis Recorder to my grandmother and my father carried the Chicago Defender in his hometown of rural West Point, Mississippi. He said he had a pen pal through the Defender’s Bud Billiken Club. We always had Ebony and Essence magazines in the house.

Also, when I conduct archival work, I like to see the connections between people, places, and events researched. In the future, I plan to learn more about network analysis to further illustrate these relationships. Visuals tell stories.

What hobbies/interests do you have outside of academia?

I have been working on life/work balance. I love to cultivate plants, take nature walks, knit, travel, spend time with family and friends, and practice my calligraphy. My hobbies rejuvenate me and inspire my writing. My new interest is genealogy. I get excited finding and verifying facts, and then, weaving together a more comprehensive narrative of my maternal and paternal family’s American experience.

Dr. Lisa D. Lenoir is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. 

By Molly Thacker

In recent years, the arrival of unaccompanied immigrant children to the United States has galvanized public opinion, confounded elected officials, and generated media coverage both heartfelt and hysterical. As Americans grapple with how to best address these young people, the long and unexamined history of unaccompanied child migration to the United States often remains overlooked. In my dissertation, I sought to understand how the nation’s first attempts at regulating this unique form of migration at the turn of the twentieth century influenced modern laws and perceptions. After conducting research in 1,300 immigration casefiles of unaccompanied children stored in the National Archives and over 4,000 clippings from 193 different newspapers and periodicals, I realized that the news media played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and government actions regarding these most vulnerable of immigrants.

Journalism history was not an initial focus of my dissertation, but as I perused the archived casefiles, I understood how this story could not be told without analyzing media influence. I found numerous instances of clippings sent to immigration officials by the public, urging action for detained children based on stories that pulled at their heartstrings, in addition to interoffice memos referencing that morning’s Washington Post or bureaucrats fretting about how editorials would spin their decisions. American newspapers were not just a window into how the public viewed this form of migration—journalists were active participants in shaping the discourse, legislation, and lived experiences of unaccompanied immigrant children.

I argue that sensational newspaper coverage regarding the arrival of Greek and Italian boys contributed to the pathologizing of unaccompanied child migration and led to the first federal laws regulating this practice. In contrast to earlier portrayals of Irish and German unaccompanied children, praised in the media for their plucky spirit and apparent desire to become Americans, newspapers painted these newcomers from southern Europe as unloved, neglected spawn from broken homes who would undoubtedly become future criminals or dependents on state coffers. Media coverage can shape the contours of debate, and the hysteria and moral panics generated by such stories manufactured consent for new restrictions on unaccompanied child immigrants.

However, some children used the media to their own advantage, and newspapers became a platform of protest and agitation for unaccompanied immigrants and their advocates. One such instance was Shlomi Kleinman, a 12-year-old stowaway detained by officials at Ellis Island in 1907. After escaping an abusive father in Warsaw and evading Russian imperial soldiers, he arrived in New York seeking his mother who had immigrated years before; however, he had no address, only the names of two uncles with whom he believed she was living. Before Shlomi could be deported, aid societies placed advertisements in the city’s Yiddish press searching for his uncles in the Lower East Side, and major New York papers printed his pitiful yarn. Once the Associated Press newswire circulated his story, Ellis Island and immigration officials in Washington became inundated with letters from across the country, pledging support for the boy if his mother could not be found. But against all odds, the uncles heard the news, and indeed, Shlomi’s mom was there. The boy was duly admitted, and census records confirm they made a home together in Manhattan—a reunion made possible thanks to the power of the press.

While modern sensibilities may be shocked by the thought of children embarking on treacherous migrations alone, Americans have welcomed such children before. My research demonstrates the weighty position that news media held in influencing which unaccompanied children were met with succor or with scorn, a role it still occupies today.

Molly Thacker is a doctoral student at Georgetown University. 

By Jack Hamilton

It’s awkward to write an article like this. I cringe when reading Ernest Hemmingway’s writing about writing, which he did often and irritatingly. As in: “When I had to write it, then it would be the only thing to do and there would be no choice.”

I am an accidental professor. I acquired a doctorate (while I was a low-level political appointee in the State Department) to prepare to write a book. As far as other books go, one idea led to another. Sometimes the connection from one to the other was unexpected. I have just finished a short book on a cocktail, which to my surprise turned out to be the product of World War I propaganda, the subject of my previous book.

At heart I am a journalist. I like to ask questions. I once wrote a book about books – Casanova Was a Book Lover – because I wondered why certain books are stolen from libraries and others (such as poetry) are not. 

For what it is worth, I will offer three thoughts on lessons I have acquired. 

1.  I have learned from working with co-authors. Some know a lot about theory, which I do not. Others have had specialties that help answer questions. I am thinking, for instance, of working with my LSU colleague Jinx Broussard on African-American foreign correspondents. One of my current collaborators, Heidi Tworek, has far ranging knowledge that enriches our collective work; she will be one of the giant media historians of her generation. 

2.  Related to this, I have acquired respect for quantitative methods. I am not well schooled, but co-authors like my friend Regina Lawrence are. I remember a comment from Jorge Luis Borges. He said, as I recall, that he sometimes considered which language was the best to tell one of his short stories, French, English, or Spanish. The same may be said of methods. Which one gets the best answer? Often it is both. Unfortunately,  reviewers of scholarly publications often rule out methods that are not theirs. Quantitative scholars dislike qualitative research, and vice versa for historians. This is a loss to all fields.

3.  Finally, I embrace the idea that Robert A. Caro articulated in the New Yorker. The title of his article tells it all, “Turn Every Page.”  It is a joy to work in archives but also tempting to go too fast through papers. I remind myself to slow down and be patient. I take as many photos of documents as possible. I’ve had many insights, sitting in my study, by looking at a letter or diary entry for the third or fourth time. “I am constantly being asked why it takes me so long to finish my books,” Caro wrote. “Well, it is the research that takes time.”

I will close with a comment given by my agent years ago. I had received a very bad review. I called him.

“Well,” I said, “anyway, I had a lot of sales last week.” 

Peter replied, “Forget it, keep writing.” 

How comforting to know there are so many questions out there for us to answer.

John Maxwell Hamilton is the Hopkins P. Breazeale Foundation Professor in the Manship School of Mass Communication, Louisiana State University, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

How did you become involved in AJHA? 

Doctors Vanessa Murphree and David R. Davies, AJHA members with whom I worked closely during my graduate studies at The University of Southern Mississippi, encouraged me to submit a paper to the 2014 national convention. My paper was accepted and I attended the convention in St. Paul. I had such an incredible experience at that convention that I became a member. I was awed to meet so many of the scholars whose work I cited in the paper or read in one of my media history courses - William David Sloan, John Coward, Tom Mascaro, Carolyn Kitch, and Mike Sweeney were just a few of the people who stood out - and humbled to learn that they were all amazingly kind people.   

What part of historical research do you enjoy most? 

For me, the most rewarding part of history is helping my students to discover a passion for the field. I am one of those AJHA members who does not teach a history course. However, I find ways to work historical inquiry into my courses and, more importantly, work with the University of West Florida's Office of Undergraduate Research to find young people I can either guide or, in some cases, employ as co-authors. To date, I have produced two peer-reviewed journal articles and a pair of AJHA Convention-accepted conference articles with undergraduate co-authors. 

What scholarly work have you done outside of history? 

I wrote a humble textbook in 2020 that has proven moderately popular with undergraduate students - it's a concise journey through writing for the communication professions - but my pride is the work I've done with the Department of State's International Visitors Leadership Program. Over the last half-decade, I have done presentations and workshops about modern journalism for media professionals and community leaders from such nations as Azerbaijan, Niger, Tajikistan, India, Vietnam, Latvia, and more. In a nod to AJHA, I always include a sizable historical section in these presentations. 

What do you do in academia outside of your AJHA activity? 

Perhaps I am odd, but I love the service element of our profession. I am most proud of my work as UWFs Faculty Athletics Representative - a role which allows me to represent UWF at the NCAA and Gulf South Conference levels, among numerous functions on campus - and my association with our campus Title IX office, but I have been thrilled to be allowed to work in numerous capacities on and off campus. 

What hobbies/interests do you have outside of academia? 

I don't know if parenting counts as a hobby, but my wife and I are raising two great little boys. The older, who is 5, attended an AJHA convention when he was about 90 days old back in 2018. When I am not working as either a faculty member or parent, I have a real passion for working out. Right now, I put in a solid five days per week at my local gym.