About Humor Columnist Tim Rowland
Tim
Rowland was born in 1960 way up north in Winton, Minn., and was quickly
deported to Berkeley Springs, W.Va., where he spent his formative years.
To the people who have actually been to Berkeley Springs, this will explain
a lot. It is a curious mountain town with all the typical West Virginia
qualities, yet it is within two hours of the White House. So half the population
consists of programmers of Cray computers for secretive federal defense
installations, while the other half derives its income from the equally
secretive moonshine sector. Well, that may no longer be true for the current
generation. Many of their daddies encouraged them to “break the mold,”
and get an education, so they all went off to tech high school and became
lawnmower repairmen.
Tim might have followed in their footsteps, or pursued an equally honorable profession, but at the tender age of 8 he picked up his first pen. His mother cried that night. She pleaded with him to put it down and walk the straight and narrow, but it was of no use. And it was at age 10 that he stole his first joke. The adventure-travel bug bit Tim in 1976 — an affliction he maintains to this day — when he rode his bicycle across the United States, 4,280 miles from Oregon to Virginia, as part of the national “Bikecentennial” program. Despite his young age, his parents believed that travel builds knowledge and character, but more importantly, they were glad to have him out of the house.
In a clear indictment of the American educational system, Tim graduated from West Virginia public schools and enrolled at West Virginia University because of its national reputation for setting sofas on fire in the streets after home-football victories. But classes couldn’t hold this free-spirited renegade. They might have, if he had ever shown up for them in the first place, but since he didn’t, it is a waste of time to debate the point. Instead, he hung out in disreputable joints, most notably the Daily Athenaeum, WVU’s school paper, where he gained invaluable experience by making multiple phone calls to the Hallelujah Chinese Restaurant on Beechurst Avenue, just so he (and about 10 other people listening on the same line) could hear them answer “Herro, Herrerrurriah.”
The
laughter and merriment faded when he learned, despite his pleas, the school
was intent on awarding him a degree. He felt a tightening in his chest and
for a second there, it looked as if Tim might be on the brink of suffering
a job. To avert this catastrophe he remained at the school after graduation,
editing the student paper and taking a heavy load of history classes, which
he did not attend. To pay for this lifestyle, Tim bartended in a neighborhood
haunt called “Gene’s” where he happily served college
students and coal miners alike, and took long, unsupervised breaks in the
beer storeroom.
He might have slacked happily ever after, had Page Burdette, the editor of the Martinsburg (W.Va.) Journal not known Tim’s lone weakness: Happy Hour. He received a phone call from Page early one Friday evening when Tim was not at his strongest, and coerced him to come to work. Tim’s had it in for editors ever since.
Thus began Tim’s career as a journalist, covering real issues that were important to real people, such as the refinancing of the Martinsburg sewer debt. Despite this important and fast-paced work, Tim was still able to find the time to hack into the newspaper’s computer system and steal the editor’s passwords, which he sold to coworkers interested in sending inter-office memos in the editor’s name — stuff like, “You’re fired,” or, “See me immediately.”
Inevitably, these pranks led to a demotion, and Tim was forced to go to Charleston to cover the West Virginia State Legislature, where he would hang out sipping Jack Black in the Senate cloakroom on days that he could afford the two-bribe minimum.
This dedication couldn’t help but catch the attention of editors at larger newspapers. Sure enough, he was hired by Hagerstown (Md.) Herald-Mail editor Gloria George, and he knew he had arrived at the big time when he began to cover even larger cities that were refinancing even larger sewer debts. Tim’s experience — and not the “unpleasantness” in the newsroom involving a story he wrote about alien sightings at the Leitersburg Peach Festival — doubtless played a role in the fact that he was eventually sent to Annapolis to cover the Maryland General Assembly. There, he padded his resume by proudly authoring a corollary to NCAA basketball’s Big Dance, called the “Big Dunce,” in which he paired 64 inept senators and delegates in regional brackets to determine the state’s stupidest lawmaker.
It was also here that he first waged his ongoing War on Facts under the premise that news stories just aren’t interesting enough if a journalist is forced to rely on what really happened. The Herald-Mail did what all papers do when a reporter disdains the facts: They made him a columnist, a niche where Tim finally found a home. For a while, he wrote syndicated columns for the Bridge News Service out of New York City, until the features arm of the company — and Tim swears he had nothing to do with this — went bankrupt. These and other columns he has written through the years have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Toronto Star, The Washington Post, and even in some reputable papers as well.
When
he is not working, which is to say most of the time, Tim is an avid bicyclist
and mountain climber. He has climbed all 46 of the “High Peaks”
above 4,000 feet in New York’s Adirondacks, and has climbed in the
Rockies, White Mountains, in Alaska, Norway, Switzerland, Bolivia and Nepal.
Ultimately he hopes to realize his life-long dream of scaling the highest
point in Kansas.
Tim and his wife Beth live in Boonsboro, Md., on a little farm by a creek that they — after much reflection and many brainstorming sessions — named "Little Farm by the Creek." The cast of characters on their farm includes, in alphabetical order, so as not to offend anyone: Alpacas (4); Belted Galloway heifers (2); Cat (1); Chickens (too numerous to mention); Dogs (2); Donkeys (2); Geese (3); Goats (4); Horses (2); Pig (1); and they think there may be some others somewhere that they missed. Beth is owner and publisher of Half Halt Press (www.halfhaltpress.com). She puts up with Tim by working hard, tending the animals, doing needlework and trying not to think about it.